Understanding your partner’s emotions is a lot easier said than done. You might think you know what they’re feeling, but oftentimes their feelings are more complex and nuanced than we realize.
Understanding your partner’s emotions is critical to a healthy relationship. Oftentimes, people don’t even realize they are projecting their feelings onto others. This blog post will talk about three steps you can follow to help you identify and understand what your partner is feeling.
Understanding Your Partner’s Emotions
Let’s say a couple, John and Laura, go to a therapy session. When John openly communicates his uncertainty and anger about being dismissed from his work, and his partner Laura actually comprehends the felt sense of John’s experience and in that time, John “feels felt.” Through this, Laura gets to learn that her empathy and understanding of John are appropriate.
In this case, will John continue to be so open about his emotions outside of their therapy sessions? Will Laura’s empathy be as accurate as before? The answer is definite and absolute YES, according to a recent study.
The researcher requested 155 mixed-sex couples to pinpoint a persistent point of contention in their relationship. With the help of the respondents, independent observers evaluated their recorded 11-minute dispute resolution sessions. The purpose was to see if more emotional expressiveness on the part of the sharer was linked to more empathetic accuracy on the part of the listener or the perceiver.
As per the findings of the study, it doesn’t make sense to mask your feelings in couples counseling, but it does make sense to give emotional expression the recognition it needs. However, this does not just apply to the therapist’s office.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re expressing a well-thought-out thought or a spontaneous emotion, as per this study; if the feeling is unambiguous and your partner is paying attention and genuinely tuned in, how they perceive it seems accurate for both feelings and thoughts.
Understanding your partner’s emotions takes patience. Here are three steps that couples can follow to be able to truly express what is true for them and to communicate openly with each other:
1. Chunk it down
Therapists guide clients on slowing down—one thought or sensation at a time and one piece of information at a time. Multiple emotions and thoughts may be spinning around one another and have to be unpacked, recognized, and acknowledged.
Whenever a person feels heard or understood in their experience, he or she might delve deeper into their emotions. Chunking stuff down enables people to communicate more thoughts and feelings, ensuring that communication is open and empathy is precise.
2. Pause
Partners could also learn to pause and double-check their empathy as they go. This allows one partner to describe his experience precisely as it is in that moment, while the other partner empathizes appropriately with the true meaning of it. The therapist might also ask questions to help slow down the process.
Whenever couples are in a lot of dispute, pausing is necessary to keep the talk on track. Therapists might have to co-regulate the nervous system‘s reactivity in cases where the client’s nervous system has moved into survival mode. This can override the higher brain’s ability to recognize and respond to the current feelings and emotions.
Therapists may also recommend softly caressing the heart with the hand, deep breathing, feeling the ground with the feet, or making eye contact with one another or with the therapist. After these exercises that ground them to the present moment, clients may continue checking in with each other. The couple needs to practice these skills over and over again until they can make it a routine in their lives and build a happy marriage.
3. Reflect
The chunking and pausing techniques provide both partners ample time to intentionally analyze thoughts and feelings, as well as to reflect instead of reacting. The speaker gets more conscious of their very own thoughts and feelings as they evolve. Furthermore, the listener becomes more conscious of their own reactions to what they are discovering about their spouse.
These three steps (chunk it down, pause, and reflect), provide a sense of comfort and safety. This feeling of comfort helps you become more open and honest, and it helps to regulate your emotions. This goes a long way to understanding your partner’s emotions.