What's gotten into you? The role of emotions in relationships.
What captions would you add to this image? Mine would read, "How dare you?" "But I didn't do it!" The story is literally written in their faces and postures.
So, what is an emotion? (This is an area of scientific debate and I’m not going to jump into the fray on that one.) For most of us, emotions are the meaningful physical experiences we have in response to situations, positive or negative. For instance, our boss or partner looks upset and in response our chest muscles tighten, our breathing becomes shallow, and we tense our belly, sometimes before we are even aware we do so. These bodily reactions may have commonality across cultures and have roots in our primate history. A Finnish study that had participants show where they felt different emotions revealed commonality between Finnish, Swedish & Taiwanese participants. (Photo below is from the study.)
Emotional responses follow a two step process. Our bodies react first to our situation, good or bad, then our minds make meaning of this experience. Another way to look at this is from the view of our animal self and our social self. The animal self is the body, and it is always tracking our interactions with others and our environment, scanning for safety and our place in our tribe. The body reacts first to situations and is fast so we can react quickly if in danger.
The socially conditioned meaning-making mind follows and tells us how we should feel in any given situation so that we will continue to belong to our tribe. This is the meaning-making part of emotion. Fear and excitement have very similar physiological responses. It is the meaning we assign to the situation that determines whether we experience this physical activation as fear or excitement. Someone who is a seasoned public speaker for instance and enjoys sharing with their audience might experience a wave of heightened activation before a speech as excitement. A new speaker might experience the same activation as knee-knocking tongue-tying fear. Same physiology, different meaning.
Both of these responses - the physical and the socially conditioned - are useful in relationships. We need to be in tune with our animal body and listen to its messages. A point made very clear in Gavin de Becker’s powerful little book, The Gift of Fear. Our animal self is focused on safety and survival (including social survival). The socially conditioned response is also useful in relationship. When we experience a rupture in a relationship with a loved one, and feel the pain and guilt from that, the social part of us can prompt us to take action to repair that rupture, to restore connection with an important other.
The problem comes when the socially conditioned part is in conflict with the animal part of us. When our meaning-making process gets skewed by our ideas of what we should feel, we can suppress important information that the body has. Both of these response processes mostly operate on automatic. When we can pause and allow ourselves a moment, a breath, to ask what is my deeper self telling me, letting the mind be quiet for a moment, and making a space for meaning to emerge rather than jumping in with our programming, then we can get useful information. For instance, let’s say a person is feeling that something is "off" with their partner. Their body is picking up subtle changes in the partner’s behavior and sending an alert. Then their social conditioning kicks in and says, “oh, but you don’t want to be one of those jealous types,” and suppresses the body’s signal. An important moment that could have saved a relationship may be missed because meaning-making suppressed feeling. At the same time, we can misinterpret feelings and not take that valuable pause before we react. This way we sometimes cause harm because we don’t stop and inquire, “what is this feeling?”
Eugene Gendlin, a philosopher, developed the method of focusing: A six step process that allows us to pause and gently inquire into our felt sense of a situation. (Highly recommended!) Broader than a simple emotion, this process allows us to get in tune with ourselves in a given situation and can produce useful knowing that enables wiser action. A lovely example is a story of a mother who paused after her baby was born, checked-in and was able to protect her newborn infant from unnecessary medical testing.
If you'd like to explore this topic further, drop in on our free webinar, Tuesday, March 11th where we explore The Gift of Anger in Relationships.
