3 powerful ideas to improve your relationships
Hello lovely people,
How are you doing today?
When someone we are with is in the depths of some emotions, what do we do? How can we navigate tricky emotional explosions? How do we support our loved ones?
I’m going to share some short and simple ideas that are important when someone we are with is in the thick of any emotions – be it anger, sadness, fear, despair etc.
What emotional brain looks like:
Let’s start with a brief overview of what emotional brain looks like. People, when they are in their emotional brain:
- Talk in a loop – repeating stories over and over again. Because the emotion is trying to be heard
- Blame people – it’s all their fault!
- Say irrational things – I am never speaking to her again!
- Find advice aggravating
- Maybe are mopey / droopy
- Has no empathy – for anyone else
- Dig up old wounds and stories – this is just like 10 years ago….
- Has a long list of grievances
- Says – what do I do????
- But get aggravated when you offer ideas
- Cry
- Are upset
Do you recognise these signs? In yourself and others?
Do you notice friends or loved ones getting into loops of stories, repeating them over and over again?
Or getting annoyed if you offer advice when they are complaining or in the middle of a big rant?
When people are upset and they are in a spiral of blaming, making it about other people being wrong?
So what do we do? Let’s look at some ideas.
1) Developing the intention to disentangle our emotions from the other person’s
A lot of the time when we are having challenges with someone else when they are angry / sad / fearful / despairing, it can start to activate our emotions.
Think about it – can you remember a time when someone you care about was angry? Do you remember how you felt about that?
Or someone is in the depths of sadness or grief? Do you remember having an emotional response?
One of the hard things about being with someone when they are emotional is that it often activates our own emotions, and then we are seeing their emotions through the lens of our emotions.
And this is because when anyone is emotional we see the whole world through the lens of this emotion.
Like when we are sad, so many things in the world feel sad.
When we feel angry, so many things in the world feel unjust, and anger-inducing.
And so our emotions feel like they are getting all tangled up in the other person’s.
So the first step is to stop and think about their emotional response as being separate from ours. Their feelings are their feelings and our feelings are our feelings.
This is not always easy, and usually takes a lot of practice, but this is where we want to start.
When we can start creating this thought in our head, that people’s feelings are separate from our own, this can help us interrupt the automatic responses we have to other people’s emotions.
2) Emotional brain doesn’t have empathy
When someone is emotional you won’t be able to get an authentic expression of empathy from them. It just doesn’t work. So don’t expect it. If you want to encounter someone else’s empathy or your own, wait until the emotions have released.
3) Emotions want to be seen, heard and felt
All emotions want to be witnessed. To receive acknowledgement that they are there. So when we are supporting someone who is emotional, the best thing we can do is give them space to pour out their feelings.
To see them and allow them.
And when I say pour I don’t mean onto us. We don’t want to give people permission to shout/blame/be aggressive to us.
I liken it to a bowl that I hold into which someone is pouring their feelings, and I am holding the bowl. I am NOT in the bowl, I am merely holding it.
So what we want to do here is to be curious about the feelings that someone is having, and that helps to bring the feelings up and out.
We can say things like:
Oh, that sounds rough, want to tell me more about it?
Yikes, that sounds hard, how did that feel?
I totally understand, did that bring up anger for you?
You didn’t like that, right?
Ooh, that sounds uncomfortable.
The aim here is to be empathic about their feelings.
To validate their feelings.
To give them space to bring them out.
To not judge their feelings. After all they are only feelings – not facts.
In doing this what we are actually helping people do is learn how to hold their own feelings safely. We are providing emotional safety for them and we are letting them take responsibility for their emotions.
We aren’t fixing them.
Or disputing their emotions
Or agreeing with their experiences
All we are doing is listening to them. And supporting them. And providing some EMPATHY for the emotions that are often so uncomfortable for them.
I like these two points as a summary:
Follow the feeling.
Validate the feeling, not the experience.
So those are some very simple ideas, top line thoughts, that I hope help you see some different ways of thinking about how we communicate and react to each other.
We all have emotions, we all have survival reactions – and learning how to both navigate your own and the people you are in relationships with can be one of the most powerful ways to transform our connections with one another.
From judging peoples emotions, to providing a safe empathic space for them to come up and be released.
How do these ideas sound? Can you think about how to put them into practice? I’d love to know. And if you loved this little tips, check out what’s coming up next below…
Have a beautiful day folks.
With love,
Diana 💗
