The Problem

The main issue presenting in couples who walk into couple’s therapy is a difficulty in managing painful emotions, according to Meredith Keller, LPC, ACS. While many well-identified common denominators factor into a marital breakdown, Meredith usually sees this other problem that is well worth exploring.

Being with our emotions is tough stuff and gets confusing. What is one’s own responsibility in mastering emotions and what is the task of a loving partner? What is another person’s role in helping us regulate our inner equilibrium? In marriages, the inability to self-manage emotions coupled with the subsequent misidentification of that as a flaw of the other person causes problems.

Emotions – the big, dark, difficult ones that push us to the edge of our capacity to cope; that jolt us into confrontation with the meaning of our own existence. Who am I now that my father died? How can I cope with “the one” leaving me? What just happened to our world on 9/11? Those are the feelings we are talking about. Feelings that rock us — throw us off-kilter — shake our center of gravity, and even question gravity itself. And in many of us, these feelings can be set off not by anything as drastic as death but by minor events, blunders, and inconveniences that trigger feelings usually aroused by bigger things.

How do we be with these feelings properly?

How do we be with them without shifting their cause or care to our partner? Good questions.

When couples come to Meredith, one or both usually struggle with troublesome emotions that get the better of them. They are ill-equipped to handle these feelings alone. There is often an automatic — and incorrect! — presumption that the feelings can be alleviated by changing partners. The faulty interpretation goes like this: “I’m so distressed because my partner does/doesn’t, is/isn’t; and if only he would do/not do, I would feel calm and free.” The issue is the paradigm itself – the false belief that the other person is the factor that needs changing. The paradigm needs shifting foremost; the partner may or may not need to change.

The problem is this: one spouse usually blames or tasks the other with the governance of his own emotions. Much can be outsourced – but not this!

How do we challenge this misconception?

Let’s start with some basic premises.

• There are problematic, unmanageable feelings.
• New ways are needed to cope with them, including help from another.
• A partner can help co-regulate so these emotions may be less likely to spin out of control and can be mitigated when they occur.
• These overblown emotions are the primary responsibility of the person experiencing them.

When one spouse has difficulty managing distressing emotions it can wreak havoc on the relationship until both parties learn better coping skills.

Until recently, we were not particularly educated on how to manage our emotions. A couple of the old ways of managing emotions were these:

Fantasy Island Style: “Smiles everyone, smiles.”

Cardio-Vascular/Clogged Artery Style: Push them down until you no longer remember what we’re even talking about. Then push some more until those feelings are stuffed down so far you will next see them in the ER. In other words, we renounce feelings and their care, leaving our bodies, unassisted, to do the best they can. Generally, disease follows.

While the above approaches are helpful in fostering inauthenticity and accelerating mortality, they are unhelpful in healing (or dealing with) hurt feelings.

So how are we supposed to help ourselves and one another with unbearable feelings that, at least from time to time, take over and run us? Our next article aims to answer this.

The Solution

Having identified the problem (inability to manage distressing emotions) we turn to solutions. Meredith Keller, LPC, ACS, marriage counselor, shares her multi-pronged approach.

 1.  Make space for two

If we have learned nothing else in this pandemic, we have learned the importance of space for both ourselves and others. In the context of healing a marital relationship, the right amount of space for (and between) spouses is critical.  Meredith addresses this therapeutically by structuring sessions so that  each person is given a full opportunity to participate in the conversation, respond to the therapist’s questions, and receive undivided attention.  Meredith asks both partners the same question, and listens to each of them in turn. This does not mean that each person speaks 50% of the time, rather that each person has a turn to fully respond as needed.

While this may seem basic, it can be an important contrast to how couples habitually communicate — interrupting, talking over the other, giving only partial or begrudging attention to what the other is expressing. Sometimes one party has inadvertently squeezed the other out of the dialogue, forcing the other into the position of audience to their monologue. This can happen when one spouse is more extraverted, or commanding of attention, or has a greater ease in verbalizing their thoughts. A more introverted spouse may naturally retreat, and if not deliberately drawn out by the other, might give up and fade away, relinquishing their voice.  When one spouse is dominating, the silent spouse is often angry, feeling (and being) communicationally disenfranchised.

By conducting the conversations in a way which creates a safe space for each spouse, Meredith models a type of respectful, attentive communication that the couple will benefit from experiencing and ultimately adopting. When emotions are inflamed in a relationship, at least one person may feel themselves to be distorted, either muted or amplified; not “right sized.”  When space is intentionally drawn for each person, the emotional inflammation can start to resolve and things return to a more workable dimension.

2.  Context and the bigger picture

Another way of bringing each spouse into the relationship is to invite more of them in — that is, more than just the issues that brought them to therapy.  Meredith will ask clients about what is working both in the relationship and in other areas of their lives. How are you being fulfilled? What is working well between you? What are you doing about growing? What are your other supports? What are your interests outside of the relationship? 

Clients might respond: “Well, my job is going really well.” And, “We are both really good parents.”

This exploration helps to enforce that the relationship is not responsible for meeting all needs.  Their partnership is one important component of their lives, but only one.

This also helps the couple contextualize their current problems from a more complete vantage point, inclusive of their wholeness and complexity.  Clients, feeling more integrated and aware of their strengths are more resourced to work with issues. By helping parties return to a more balanced way of seeing themselves, she enables their problem solving capabilities.

 3.  Educating the individuals about how to be with their own emotions

The initiation of dialogue between the client and their emotions is best explained through example.

One spouse might express themselves thusly: “I feel badly because you did this” Meredith might interject with: Hold on a second, let’s stay with “I feel badly” … what is that in you?  Where is that located in your body? How are you managing that?

In this way she encourages the client to slow down and attend to the feeling as it arises before assigning it, classifying it, determining its cause.  And importantly, before bringing in the other person.  Bringing awareness to the feeling and accompanying the client as they consider, experience and articulate it, the therapist enables the client to develop a relationship with their emotional life.

Additionally, in this therapeutic interaction, clients can spend time gathering information about their feelings.  This helps the person develop a better way of being with and ultimately expressing those feelings, in a less adversarial, inflamed, chaotic manner. The therapeutic guidance and companionship is essential to facilitate this — even to make an environment safe enough for change to be possible.

This approach enforces the concept that each individual is the first point of contact with their own emotions.

4.  Further education

The client starts to become the first responder to their feelings.  Only then can the feelings be triaged and the right kind of help requested. Clients can identify actions they can take, as well as support needed from others, including their partner.

Establishing dominion over one’s feelings is an essential first step necessary to identify appropriate remedies, before involving others. If abandonment and separation anxiety arise each time one spouse leaves for a business trip, what kind of attention do these painful feelings need from the individual experiencing them? And what other resources are needed for managing separate time including other friends and networks, enjoyable activities, self-care, and purposeful endeavors that promote passion and delight. Perhaps, too, there is something the partner can do that would help. The spouse might request, and the couple agree, that during lunch breaks and at bedtime, the traveling spouse calls to check-in.  The simple establishment and follow-through of scheduled connecting can help regulate the other spouse and enforce the object constancy of their relationship. Behavior change is only one aspect of helping the spouse to address troubling feelings requiring significant attention — with the individual being at the helm of how their feelings can be soothed and managed.

 5.  Communication

How can partners learn to communicate so their requests can be received by one another? How can communication be improved so that spouses can relay their needs and share information while simultaneously uplifting the other?  Meredith teaches couples to effectively communicate.  A cornerstone of this work is helping individuals identify what they need and which needs can be reasonably asked of the other.  How can each communicate with the other in a manner that enhances the connection instead of undermines it, as demands and repeated pleas so often do? Requests expressed in some ways are more likely to be positively responded to.  What does each person need in order to feel safe, respected and valued in communication?  This topic is vast and rich and beyond the scope of our conclusion.  A few thoughts regarding communication hygiene:

Before launching into something, ask if this is a good time to speak, or when a good time would be.

Be the intermediary, not merely a mouthpiece for your needs; speak for them, not from them; your listener need not be in direct contact with what you have not yet digested or explored; raw feelings, like most foods, need to be prepared in order to be served; they must be organized in such a way as to be recognizable and digestible.