Hot Letters Can Cool a Temper

Some of our historical elite, such as President Lincoln, wrote what he termed a “hot letter.” If he was upset with someone, rather than speak from an angry place, he would pen his feelings but never send the missive. After he vented in the letter, he found access to the strength of wisdom he needed. On the hot letters he’d write: Never sent. Never Signed. President Truman wrote them. Churchill too.

These hot letters in the annals of our world leaders make for eye-opening and sometimes funny reading. How easily the first things out of these people’s minds, their reactionary responses, could have led to major, negative impacts for our governments and, by extension, the world.

Bringing it down to scale, I personally have used the backspace key and watched a message fall apart word by word when I wisely rethought a spiky text and chose to reword my message. A box of journals sits in my closet, old, quiet and deflated, and in them I see many hot letters. In your own life, you might recall a few of these, especially when the genre is expanded to a fuller breadth. Writing the unsent letter can serve a person far more than simply cooling hot emotions. Many love notes have been written and not sent. Much grief has been facilitated on paper when a broken heart couldn’t find the strength to show up and speak words. Mark Twain, a man who also was known for his gift of humorous and wise correspondence, said these types of letters provided him “unallowable frankness and freedom.”

Our social media today is full of whip-like retorts that come not from a place of wisdom, but of anger and bravado. The norm has begun to lean toward striking first, then thinking deeply second. Our children aren’t immune to this. Adult culture, of course, gets funneled down to the playground, classroom and school hallways. These environments are at risk of becoming more volatile with pint-sized problems evoking rapid fire responses.

Ironically, this rapid response cycle is one we generally used to label as childish and immature. We see these quick-fire and often hurtful exchanges as developmentally on cue for our children, but we push them to grow beyond this kind of communication. With the adult communication world backsliding a bit, our children can use even more help up the hill.

When I heard Lincoln’s perfect metaphor of hot letters, the whole process of expressing feelings without throwing spears at actual people became really teachable for me. I had the infrastructure for hot letters in my own past; I just needed his perfect two-word branding to gussy it up for my kids. (The worthiest form of advertising is that which tugs on our need for wisdom. Thank you, Mr. President.).

As fate would have it, the very day I read of Lincoln’s term, I picked both my girls up from school and found them both in different storms of feelings (which is a lot of weather in one car, as many of you can attest). The older, 12, was upset by the actions of a friend, and the younger, 7, was upset with her teacher. I explained how hot letters work and asked whether, when we got home, they would want to write them.

My kids got the message that these letters would help them like a healing balm. They were both so on board I was stunned—but then again, wisdom is elegant, and elegance is simple, and children are simple in the best and brightest of ways. First thing after they hung up their backpacks, they wrote their letters. My younger daughter wasn't yet able to spell proficiently and was worried about not expressing exactly what she felt. I suggested she draw a picture of her feelings. I was ready for her frustration after I said this, but she went to work with her crayons.

When they finished, I didn’t ask to look at their letters. I wanted to give them the freedom to express themselves in their own words or pictures. I wanted them to know that when they reached for this type of letter again, what they said or drew could be spiky and loaded without my intervening and trying to “nice it up.” I wanted them to know these emotions were their own to herd out of their brains in the ways that resonated with them.

My want was satisfied. I wanted to help them feel better without making others or themselves feel worse. On the flipside of letting our angry emotions fly, when we roll over our emotions and stuff them down, we can walk around with an unidentified heaviness in our mental world. And as we too well know, unheard, cumulative negative emotions can turn highly combative in different ways after a period of time. However mean or angry their letters sounded, those emotions were no longer only stuffed inside their minds.

We paraded our letters out to the fire pit and burned them, which seemed totally appropriate for hot letters. I have to add that if you can include the element of letting children safely burn their letters, this adds significantly to the wow factor of the whole event—makes it more of a ceremony.

I could tell writing and burning their hot letters allowed my daughters to own and manage their feelings in a way they hadn't previously experienced. Not only did they get to more safely feel the feelings and let them go, but they stood up straighter (I think) from the authentic thrill of empowerment. This is what we want for ourselves and our children. Life is never without emotional challenge. You can read that even the sages get tripped up by their own emotions sometimes.

On the way back into the house after burning her letter, my older daughter said, “Mom you should be a psychologist.” To which I thought, thank you, Mr. President, your wisdom has been honored here today. 

Maggie Uhl lives in Waldo with her family.