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Registered psychologist and registered marriage & family therapist
One of the best ways to help you and your partner avoid endless fighting and have more productive talk, is to express your feelings more than opinions about your partner.
One strategy for doing this is to become aware of any ‘soft’ emotions you may feel underneath your angry feelings, and describe these feelings to your partner.
Soft emotions are the ones that tend to make us feel vulnerable, such as hurt, sadness, fear, loneliness, or unimportance. You many not even be aware of these emotions initially. Often these emotions stay hidden under the surface because they make us feel too exposed.
The danger of letting soft emotions stay hidden is that withholding them and venting hostility instead maintains the problems in the relationship, not the solutions to them. Hostile emotions simply feed the fight cycle instead of helping you both understand and work through the real problems.
These underlying emotions are also called primary emotions because they are our first emotional reaction to an event. Secondary emotions, like anger, are a natural response to our primary emotions. The ‘hardness’ of secondary emotions tends to protect us from the vulnerability of primary emotions.
Can you recall a time when this happened to you? Perhaps a time when you said things in an angry tone, when what you were really feeling underneath was sadness or insecurity? Or maybe a time when you, or your partner, lashed out in anger when you were feeling hurt emotionally?
There are several reasons why it is often better to focus on expressing primary emotions like hurt or fear, underneath the anger rather than expressing the anger.
The first reason is that these emotions give your partner eye-opening clues about what is happening for you underneath the surface. Expressing these emotions can help create closeness and intimacy in ways that expressing anger alone cannot.
The second reason is that when you express your soft emotions you are more likely to invite responsiveness and cooperation from your partner, whereas anger often invites resistance and defensiveness.
The third reason is that while expressing anger may protect you from feeling vulnerable, your partner may not realize that you are feeling hurt or lonely. Your partner ends up thinking you are just an angry person. In turn, anger usually breeds more anger. When you express these softer emotions, your partner begins to see you in a new light, which opens the door for a different kind of interaction and productive communication between you.
It should be noted that sometimes expressing anger is appropriate, if done so calmly, without blaming, accusing, criticizing or acting self-righteous. It is better to express anger and deal with a problem when it happens, than to suppress anger and seethe with resentment. However it is important to move beyond the expression of anger to these softer emotions, and not make the expression of anger the goal for its own sake.
Think of the last time when you expressed anger. What were the underlying emotions you were feeling at that time? Did you express them to your partner?
If you thought that underneath the anger was hurt that you were not expressing, what do you feel hurt by in your relationship with your partner?
Many people feel uncomfortable expressing their softer emotions. If this is you, please know that we are well trained in helping couples to work through these types of issues, and would be happy to help facilitate a discussion with your partner about this.
© 2024 Calgary Couples Counselling Centre Inc. | Web by KP Design | COVID Policies | PRIVACY POLICY