I was reflecting on where my reactivity comes from, and a lot of the time beneath the reactivity is past pain that was never grieved.
As a hypothetical example, if I feel misattuned by a friend, and in feeling misattuned I express frustration at them, beneath that frustration is a well of unfelt pain from all the times in the past others were misattuned to my needs. My reactivity is a way to avoid the discomfort reliving all that pain. In the moment of reactivity, I can’t decouple the present pain of being misattuned from the discomfort of being put in contact with that mountain of unresolved pain, and blaming my friend is a way of externalizing responsibility for the discomfort; they’re making me uncomfortable. And until the pain is grieved, in that moment of reactivity I will continue to relive it.
As an experiment, when I notice reactivity come up, I want to acknowledge and apologize for it (because people can always feel the energy of reactivity, however subtle I assume it is), and ask permission to honor it by taking a moment of silence to grieve. I have a feeling that this kind of script would reliably bring me into that grief, while also owning and (hopefully) humanizing my reactivity to others.