Are you a terminal station for emotions,
or just a transfer station?
Imagine this scenario:
A man gets yelled at by his boss at work.
He holds it in,
smiles, and says, "Okay, I'll fix it."
He gets home after work,
and his wife says,
"Why did you forget the groceries again?"
He suddenly explodes.
He throws down his chopsticks,
and shouts, "Can you just leave me alone!"
The wife is stunned.
Her eyes well up with tears.
She has no idea where this anger came from.
During dinner,
the wife has a long face.
The child says timidly,
"Mom, I got an 85 on the test."
The wife doesn't look up,
and says coldly,
"How can you even mention an 85?"
The child goes back to his room,
closes the door,
and crumples the test paper into a ball.
The next day at school,
he pushes a younger classmate.
This emotion,
started with the boss,
passed through the husband,
passed through the wife,
and finally landed on a child.
No one did it on purpose,
but emotion is like water—
it always finds an outlet.
Hello,
everyone,
I am Wang Lijie.
Today's inspiration comes from a viewer's comment.
He said something
that I re-read several times,
finding it more precise than many self-help books.
He said,
"Everyone has emotions.
If emotions aren't channeled,
they get blocked in your body.
Many people play the 'nice guy' outside,
but vent their emotions on their partners at home.
Some who can't win an argument with their partner
vent their emotions on their children.
It seems like through venting,
emotions move from your body to someone else's.
But you develop a habit of venting.
You remain good-tempered with strangers,
but become increasingly uncontrollable with family."
Then he said something that deeply moved me.
He said,
"The meaning of self-cultivation
is to let emotions stop with you."
No matter where the negative energy comes from,
when it reaches me,
it hits the terminal station.
The 'terminal station.'
These words are so accurate.
Today, I want to expand on this viewpoint:
Why do emotions need an outlet?
What is our default outlet?
How dangerous is this default mode?
And,
what are the truly effective ways to resolve emotions?
First, something you might not realize:
Emotions are energy.
This isn't a spiritual concept;
it's a basic fact of neuroscience.
When you are angry,
your sympathetic nervous system is activated.
Adrenaline and cortisol flood your system.
Your heart rate accelerates,
blood pressure rises,
and muscles tense up.
These are real physiological changes;
actual energy building up inside your body.
Once this energy is activated,
it won't just vanish on its own.
It has to go somewhere.
In the animal kingdom, it's simple.
When a lion chases an antelope,
the act of running consumes that energy.
After escaping,
it stands there shivering for a few minutes.
That's not fear;
it's the body releasing residual stress energy.
Once the shaking stops,
the antelope has fully recovered
and goes back to grazing
as if nothing ever happened.
But humans can't do that.
Social rules don't allow you to release it immediately.
If your boss yells at you,
you can't yell back.
If a client makes things difficult,
you can't flip the table.
If someone cuts you off on the road,
at most, you honk your horn.
Your body is primed for fight or flight,
but you have nowhere to go.
The energy gets trapped inside you.
Then you go home.
What is home?
It's the only place where you don't have to wear a mask.
The cost of getting angry is lowest at home.
Your partner won't quit just because you shouted;
your child won't leave because you broke a bowl.
So, family becomes your emotional outlet.
It's not because you don't love them.
On the contrary,
it's because you feel they won't leave
that you dare to drop your guard in front of them.
Psychology calls this the Kick the Cat effect.
A man is scolded by his boss,
goes home and takes it out on his wife.
The wife snaps at the child,
and the child kicks the cat.
Emotional energy doesn't disappear;
it flows down the gradient of power,
eventually hitting the one least able to fight back.
But there's something scarier than this effect,
which most people don't realize:
this pattern can become hardwired.
When you repeatedly dump emotions on your family,
your brain forms an automatic neural pathway.
Endure stress outside,
release stress at home.
This circuit becomes smoother and smoother.
It's like water carving out a trench;
the deeper the trench gets,
the harder it is for water to flow any other way.
You'll notice a bizarre phenomenon:
Outside,
you become more and more patient.
At home,
you become more and more irritable.
Colleagues say you have a great temper,
but your family feels you're a ticking time bomb.
It's not that you're two-faced;
it's that your brain made home the only release valve.
The deeper problem lies in the next layer.
Your partner absorbs your emotions,
triggering the same stress response in her.
She also needs an outlet.
If she dumps it downward in the same way,
the child becomes the ultimate recipient.
A child's brain is still developing.
His amygdala is already very active,
but his prefrontal cortex isn't fully formed.
The amygdala is the emotional alarm;
the prefrontal cortex is the emotional brake.
A system with a full alarm but no brakes—
imagine what that looks like.
When a child is constantly subjected to parental venting...
Their nervous system will be reprogrammed.
What they learn isn't a specific set of words,
but an underlying program: when stress hits,
find someone weaker and dump it on them.
This programming grows with them.
They bully younger kids at school;
as adults, they take their anger out on partners;
and once they have children of their own,
they pass the same program to the next generation.
This isn't just my speculation.
In the 1990s,
the CDC and Kaiser Permanente conducted a study of over 10,000 adults.
It was a large-scale study
called the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study.
One of the conclusions was that
those exposed to chronic family emotional abuse as children
had a probability of depression, anxiety, and chronic illness in adulthood
two to four times higher than others.
Furthermore,
once these people become parents,
they are significantly more likely to repeat the same patterns with their own children.
Emotional violence
can be hereditary.
Not through genes,
but through the replication of nervous system patterns.
At this point, you might ask,
"What should I do?"
"Should I just hold back my anger?"
No.
Holding it in
is one of the most dangerous things you can do.
What is the essence of suppression?
It is repression.
You push that energy down,
but it doesn't disappear;
it gets stuffed into some corner of your body.
Over time,
it will explode in another form.
For some, it manifests as sudden rage—
blowing up over something trivial for no apparent reason.
For others, it explodes inward,
turning into persistent depression, numbness, or insomnia,
and even physical illness.
Chinese medicine says all diseases stem from blocked 'Qi';
modern psychology says chronic emotional repression and immune decline
are highly correlated.
They are describing the same thing.
Suppressing it is not the solution;
it just hides the fuse of the time bomb.
Dumping it on others is wrong,
and suppressing it within yourself is also wrong.
So what is the answer?
It goes back to what that viewer said:
Let the emotion reach its final stop with you.
Note that
the "final stop" isn't a landfill.
It doesn't mean you just swallow everyone else's emotions.
A "final stop" means that
when the emotion reaches you,
you have the power to bring its energy down to zero.
It is no longer a force that must be passed on.
When it reaches you,
it is seen,
it is understood,
and then it quietly dissipates.
How do you do that?
That viewer used a very precise description.
He said,
"Between sensing and reacting,
pause for one second."
This one second
has a clear counterpart in neuroscience.
When external stimuli trigger an emotional response,
the amygdala sounds an alarm almost instantly—
so fast your conscious mind can't react in time.
However,
between the amygdala's alarm and your body's reaction,
there is a window of about half a second to a second.
Within this window,
the prefrontal cortex has a chance to intervene.
...to re-evaluate this signal.
The core of spiritual practice
is to widen this window.
Professor Matthew Lieberman at UCLA conducted a
classic brain-imaging experiment.
When subjects saw angry faces,
he asked them to describe their feelings in one word.
The simple act of labeling an emotion
significantly reduced activity in the amygdala.
You don't need to analyze the emotion
or trace it back to its source.
You only need to notice it
the moment it arises,
and say to yourself,
"This is anger."
This simple action alone
can greatly diminish the intensity of that energy.
Buddhism discovered this mechanism 2,500 years ago.
Mindfulness of feeling, part of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness,
is practiced specifically for this.
When a feeling arises,
don't follow it,
don't suppress it,
just observe it as it is.
"This is a painful feeling."
"This is a pleasant feeling."
"This is a neutral feeling."
The moment you observe,
you create a distance between yourself and the feeling.
With distance,
you are no longer hijacked by it.
This is what that viewer meant,
using observation and awareness
to collapse negative energy into neutral information.
The energy is not passed on to others,
nor is it suppressed within your own body.
It is seen,
and then it naturally dissipates.
You might say,
"Easier said
than done."
"When I'm fuming with rage,
there is no half-second window."
"I can't stop at all."
True.
This is why it's called 'practice,'
not 'knowledge.'
Knowledge can be understood in a second.
Practice is something you must do repeatedly
until the pause turns from a deliberate act into an instinct.
It's like learning to drive.
At first, you must think about every step.
After practice,
your hands and feet do the right thing automatically.
But before your practice is deep enough,
you might indeed find it hard to stop.
What then?
There's a physical emergency method.
If you feel your emotions are totally out of control,
go to the bathroom,
turn on the cold water,
and splash it on your face.
This isn't a folk remedy.
Cold water stimulating the facial skin
activates an ancient mechanism from our mammalian ancestors
called the Dive Reflex.
When cold water hits the forehead and cheeks,
the trigeminal nerve signals the brainstem.
The vagus nerve is activated,
and the heart rate drops by 10% to 25% within seconds.
The parasympathetic nervous system takes over.
In short,
your body is forced from 'fight mode' to 'recovery mode.'
That rush of energy to your head
is physically intercepted by a splash of cold water.
Have you ever wondered about
that classic movie trope?
A man speaks rudely to a woman,
and without a word,
she picks up a glass from the table.
...and splashes water in his face.
We used to see this just as a display of attitude,
satisfying and cathartic.
But now you know,
there is a scientific basis for this action.
When cold water hits the face,
the mammalian dive reflex is triggered.
The heart rate drops,
and the sympathetic nervous system is braked.
Splashing that cup of water
is essentially forcing the other person to cool down.
So the next time you see this scene in a movie,
you can appreciate it with a fresh perspective.
It's not just a substitute for a slap;
it's a precise neurological intervention.
But remember,
this is only an emergency brake,
not the inner work itself.
It helps you avoid dumping emotions on your family in the moment,
but it doesn't fundamentally change how you process emotions.
Real change
still requires practicing within that half-second window.
Professor Lazar's team at Harvard found that
after eight weeks of mindfulness training,
subjects showed a significant increase in gray matter density in the prefrontal cortex,
while the amygdala's gray matter density noticeably shrank.
A thicker prefrontal cortex
means your braking performance has improved.
A smaller amygdala
means your alarm system is less likely to be falsely triggered.
It's not that you've become emotionless;
it's that your way of processing emotions has fundamentally changed.
You've turned from a transit station into a terminal station.
When emotions reach you,
you have the power to safely dissolve them,
instead of packaging and forwarding them to the next person.
Have you ever thought about this?
If everyone in a family is a transit station,
emotions will circulate endlessly among family members.
The husband passes it to the wife,
the wife passes it to the child,
and the child grows up to pass it to their own partner and children.
This cycle can last for generations,
with no one ever realizing it exists.
But what if one person becomes a terminal station?
If just one person can say when emotion reaches them,
"Enough,
it stops with me,
it won't be passed on,"
that person breaks the entire cycle.
They don't need to change anyone else;
they only need to change how they process their own emotions.
I mentioned in a previous video
that the family is a resonance field of energy.
If there is unresolved anger in the parents' hearts,
it doesn't need words or violence;
its mere existence
will manifest in the child.
Children don't just grow up watching what you do;
they grow up being influenced by your energy field.
Today's viewer comment
confirms the same thing from another angle.
Negative emotions in a family
never simply vanish into thin air.
They flow between members
until they meet someone capable of stopping them.
That person can be you.
But there is a prerequisite:
You can't be a terminal station by just swallowing it down.
Swallowing is not dissolving;
it is burying.
Sooner or later, an even greater emotional outburst will occur.
A true terminal station is transparent.
Emotions pass through you,
leaving no residue behind.
You see it,
you understand its source,
and then you let it go.
Does this require practice?
Of course it does.
But the good news is,
each time you pause in that half-second window,
your neural circuits are rewired a little bit.
Every success
paves the way for the next one.
Next time you feel a surge of anger or resentment,
before you speak,
try to give yourself just one second.
Look at that emotion.
Ask it,
"Where did you come from?"
Are you really angry at this person before you,
or are you just looking for an outlet?
If you can see it in that second,
you have already won half the battle.
If you can choose not to pass it on after seeing it,
you are breaking a chain that may have lasted generations.
Spiritual practice is never a luxury meant for sitting alone on a mat;
it is the most precious gift
you can give to your family.
In your life, do you feel
you are more of a terminus for emotions,
or just a transit station?
Let's chat in the comments.
I am Wang Lijie.
See you next time.