Emotions in Relationships
One of the most important aspects of any relationship is understanding and managing your emotions. This is especially true in romantic relationships, where emotions can run high and significantly impact the level of connection you both feel.
Emotion is strongest when developing, maintaining, or losing our attachment bonds. Remember the joy and excitement you felt when falling in love, the sorrow and pain you felt when a loved one passed away or was no longer accessible, and the fear, frustration, and heartache you experienced while struggling to maintain meaningful relationships. These events create intense emotional responses—more intense than any other events in our lives. That is all due to the importance of attachment bonds. Fearing the loss of attachment brings anxiety. Dealing with the actual loss of attachment brings sorrow.
The Importance of Understanding Your Emotions
It’s essential first to understand what we’re feeling and why before we can effectively manage our emotions. Unfortunately, many of us were never taught how to recognize and label our emotions, making it difficult to express ourselves to our loved ones. By becoming more in tune with your emotions, you can communicate more effectively, avoid misunderstandings, and work towards constructively resolving conflicts.
The Impact of Unmanaged Emotions in Relationships
Unmanaged emotions can have a significant impact on your relationships. When you allow your emotions to control you, you may say or do things you later regret, leading to hurt feelings, damaged trust, and disconnection. Additionally, unmanaged emotions can make the relationship feel unsafe for you and your partner, leading to resentment.
Strategies for Understanding Your Emotions in Your Relationship
Recognize and Label Your Emotions
The first step in managing your emotions is to recognize and label them. Emotion exists on two levels—primary emotions and secondary emotions. Secondary emotions are the ones we are most familiar with, such as anger, jealousy, frustration, and irritation. These are our defensive “power emotions.” They are reactive and harsh. They are secondary emotions because they are not the things we feel first. We use secondary emotions to cover up our softer, more vulnerable emotions because we don’t recognize our primary emotions or feel safe showing those vulnerable emotions to others.
Take the time to reflect on what you are feeling and why. Are you angry because your partner forgot to do something you asked them to do? Are you feeling anxious because of a work deadline? Once you have identified your emotions, try to label them accurately. For example, instead of just saying you are “upset,” try to be more specific and say that you are feeling “frustrated” or “disappointed.”
Identify Where you Feel the Emotion in Your Body
When you experience strong emotions, pay attention to what you are feeling in your body. What are you feeling? Where are you feeling it? Some people describe it as a pain in their chest, a throbbing in their head, a lump in their throat, an unsettled stomach, or a tightness in their shoulders.
Recognize and Label how you Cope with Strong Emotion
Pay attention to your emotional patterns. Do you tend to get defensive when your partner criticizes you? Do you shut down when you feel overwhelmed? Throughout your life, you have learned ways to cope with and regulate your emotions. In some situations, you’ve learned to hide your emotions, like laughing off a hurtful joke rather than blushing in humiliation or maintaining a neutral expression instead of sobbing when corrected by your boss. Other times, you might try to lose your emotions along your favorite running route, in the pages of a book, at the bottom of a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream container, or in the details and distractions of work.
While these coping mechanisms are natural, suppressing our emotions do have unseen consequences.
In her dissertation, psychologist, Judith Grob, asked participants to hide their emotions when she showed them disgusting images. Like water that hits a dam, Grob found that when emotion hits a block, it is simply diverted to a different path. Immediately after the experiment, the participants who suppressed their disgust reported feeling better than those who had demonstrated disgusted facial expressions. But here’s the intriguing part. When asked to fill in the missing letters to different words like gr_ss, those who suppressed emotion were much more likely to write negative words like “gross” instead of “grass.” Grob concluded that “People who tend to suppress their [negative emotions regularly] might start to see their world in a more negative light[i].”
No matter how hard you try to contain emotion, it will eventually win. Even when you think you have it under control, your tone and facial expressions respond to those emotions more accurately than the words you might say. Even if you keep it contained, like a mountain stream, it will eventually find a different path and spill out.
Recognize Your Triggers
Identifying what triggers your strong emotions can help you better manage them. Think about situations or events that cause you to feel a particular way. Do you get angry when your needs aren’t met or when things are unpredictable? Do you feel sad when your partner appears to not be listening when you are talking to them? Recognizing your triggers can help you prepare for and respond to those situations more effectively.
Conclusion
When you recognize and accurately label your emotions, you can better regulate them and effectively communicate them to your partner.
Read this article for more information on regulating and managing your emotions.
[i] Grob, J. D. M. (2008). Dial E for emotion: Context and consequences of emotion regulation. Unpublished dissertation.
