Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 199, “How to use your emotional intelligence for connection.” Before we get started, I wanna take a moment and center with you in the Empowered Relationship Podcast intention… And that is we take time out of our busy schedules to contemplate and build awareness and understanding of relational skills, that improve the quality of our connection, so that we can be in the co-creative process of cultivating long-lasting intimacy.
And again, we might be doing this by learning how to turn towards some of the difficulty, the upset, the threat, the pain for learning and growth, using it as curriculum… And that also we might feel triggered or even anxious or uncertain when we’re experiencing more joy, more happiness, more pleasure than we’ve known before, so increasing our capacity for more than maybe we’ve known in the past, and also showing up in the accountability of the day in and day out of cultivating security, stability, consistency, that supports secure connection.
So the tips, tools and resources that I offer on this show, as well as giving a platform for other relationship experts to share with you, is all in the interest of you feeling more prepared, better equipped in navigating long-lasting intimacy. If you would like access to today’s show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast, and you can find all the episodes listed there. Again, today’s episode is 199, “How to use your emotional intelligence for connection.”
Let’s get started in today’s episode. Today’s topic is heavily inspired by the book Love Sense, by Dr. Susan Johnson. Now, if you’ve listened to this show any length of time, you may have heard me reference Dr. Susan Johnson. I am a big fan in that she has really provided so much research-based, evidence-based skills and practices in the way of building secure connection… And in my work with couples I find at the fundamental level so much of what’s going on underneath conflict is the threat, is fear, is insecurity, fear of abandonment, fear of not being good enough…
So I wanna start today’s conversation off with an excerpt out of the chapter titled “The Emotions.” This is such a classic pattern that I see with my couples over and over and over again… So I’m gonna talk about the elements that are involved in this dynamic. I’m also gonna talk about emotions, as well as what we typically do with our emotions when we’re feeling that discomfort or pain or upset, and also how we tend to react to our significant other when it appears that they’re having emotion… And then I’m gonna offer a little more about emotional intelligence and the benefit of that.
Again, this excerpt is out of the book Love Sense by Dr. Susan Johnson, in the chapter “The Emotions.”
“Unhappy partners often are visibly angry, but the anger is usually secondary to a deeper sense of fear. Emma reminds Tim that they have a special date on the weekend to celebrate their ninth anniversary. Tim shrugs and comments that they will have to change it. He promised to attend a party with his boss. Emma explodes in anger. But if we were to freeze-frame this encounter, we would see that Emma’s first emotion when Tim announced the cancelation was fear. If she were able to slow down and pay attention to her fear, that she is becoming less important to her husband, her action might be very different. Instead of interrupting angrily, she might ask for reassurance… But Emma does not register this anxiety.
When she talks about this now in my office, she looks angry, and she accuses Tim of selfishness. Emma’s outburst in turn triggers her husband’s fear of failure and rejection. He becomes still and silent. This response unfortunately reinforces Emma’s fear. Their different ways of dealing with their emotions become part of the script, the pattern in their marriage. If the script this couple is following becomes fixed, the relationship is in trouble.”
I have countless examples where couples are in this dynamic… And typically, people reach out obviously when they’re in pain and they’ve been in a pattern of disconnect for a period of time, so by the time they’re reaching out for support, unfortunately some of these scripts are heavily ingrained… So that’s why I really encourage people to reach out for support in the earlier stages, when they start to notice some disconnect patterns, because that allows for a little more space to learn connection patterns, how to recognize the deeper emotions and send a clear queue to their significant other so that they can respond, and then this allows for more of that intimacy, more of that comfort and soothing that then lends towards more secure connection.
I was reflecting on this scenario, and just even this week I have several clients that fit into this pattern, one of which is — I have a couple, they are a beautiful family, they have two children, and they’re really intelligent, very successful in their careers, and they have been recognizing the pain of a vicious cycle like this. Their current circumstance is he’s going away on a business trip that’s gonna be extended, and she had thought that part of their preparation would include really specific agreements around how they’re gonna maintain their connection, and also they’re thinking of this extended work trip to offer a little more space for them to really get grounded in the moves that they wanna make to build connection… Because they are in a pattern of disconnect.
And so they were less than a week out of his departure and she was feeling anxious and a lot of fear around defaulting into disconnect patterns even with his distance, even with the intention of really improving their marriage and their bond… And she was really hoping for this agreement that would give her some anchor points, some things to orient herself when she feels afraid of him distancing or withdrawing, or being emotionally unavailable… And she was really requesting to have this agreement in place, but the way that she was approaching her husband was through fear, and what he was experiencing as attack and anger… And he felt really defensive.
So while her feelings are really legitimate – it’s terrifying… Again, in this excerpt, to feel as though she’s becoming less important, and that their marriage is not as much of a priority. That’s heart-breaking, and it would make sense that there would be fear that would emerge… But where this gets problematic is it’s difficult and vulnerable to send that clear queue of “I’m scared that we’re losing the priority of us.” Or in the clients that I’m mentioning, “I’m scared that we don’t have something to rely on to support us. It means a lot to me that we have some basic agreements in place that will help reassure me and help give me ground when I get anxious when you’re gone. Can we make that a priority?”
One of the things that makes this incredibly complicated is oftentimes people were raised in an environment where emotions were not validated, they weren’t attuned to, there wasn’t emotional awareness or intelligence, or being in relationship around emotion… So we don’t have a roadmap for how to be with our emotions, and we tend to develop certain strategies around how to cope with our painful emotions… Oftentimes distraction, or suppression, and largely this doesn’t work.
Many of us have a negative association with emotions. I’ve had so many clients tell me it’s a liability, it’s a weakness. And if you remember Dr. Laura Dabney, she was talking about how often we make our emotions the enemy… And again, this is largely (I believe) having come from where it’s not safe to feel. I think particularly stereotypically a lot of men get the messaging that it’s not okay to feel, right? “Suck it up. Be a man. Don’t cry”, and many other messages that reinforce emotions are not okay. Well, let’s say the more vulnerable emotions.
There are a lot of cultural implications for this. Emotions have often gotten a bad rep, that they’re not logical, they’re not rational, they’re not stable… And in Susan Johnson’s book she also says “The case against emotion seems to stem from two factors. Its unstoppable power indeed can overtake us in less than a second… And its apparent randomness and lack of logic.
Research now points to a much different view. Emotion is actually nature’s exquisitely effective information processing and signaling system, designed to rapidly reorganize behavior in the interest of survival.
Emotion apprises us that something vital to our welfare is occurring. We are bombarded by hundreds of thousands of stimuli, every second of every day. Emotion automatically and reflexively sorts through the barrage, picking out what matters, and steering us to the appropriate action. Our feelings guide us in issues large and small. They tell us what we want, what our preferences are, and what we need.”
She continues later to say “Emotion is also the great communicator. It swirls within our bodies and flows out, whether we want it to or not, as signals to others. We broadcast emotions mainly through our facial expressions and tone of voice. We apprehend and comprehend these signals instantaneously. It takes just one hundredth milliseconds for our brain to register the smallest alteration in another person’s face, and just 300 milliseconds more to feel it in our own body, what we see in that face, to mirror the change we see.”
A couple that I’ve been working with for a while has been really slowly contemplating the importance of emotional intelligence. They both respectively grew up in families where emotions were not attended to, emotions didn’t play a role, and were essentially ignored and avoided, and they had very different circumstances in their family… But the takeaway was essentially that. So they have different strategies around how they suppress their emotion. The wife typically goes into taskmaster mode. She’s more type A in her personality, she’s really successful, and accomplishes a great deal in her day… However, she describes being disconnected with what she’s feeling. At the same time, she describes longing to feel her husband’s empathy, and feeling this great desire to feel closer and more emotionally intimate.
And for him, he grew up in a family where his voice wasn’t heard, and he has learned to either on one side of the spectrum be really loud and boisterous… But that’s been alarming for his wife, and seemingly scary. He’s gotten cues that that’s not okay. So then he has resorted to clamping down, and really he uses the language of “I have to just zip it, shut it.” And I was talking to him about that not being a sustainable approach, because over time what does he do with his authentic emotion?
So they’re in this stressful phase of their life… They’ve moved to a new location, they have a house that they just purchased, and the wife has some really significant health challenges, and there’s just a lot that they’re contending with. In the last session they were processing a big conflict that they had had the night before. Now, they were having a significant upset in some logistical issues, and he was feeling upset; when I hear the story, I’m like “Yes, that sounds extremely upsetting and infuriating, in fact.”
Well, he was trying to suppress it, and his wife was recognizing these cues, that he was getting more tense and feeling more frustrated… And she went to reacting. She noticed it, could feel it, but they’re not talking about it and it’s not named. So she goes into worrying that it’s something about her, that he’s upset with her…Â And she starts to feel anxious, starts to panic, and she tries to talk about it with him. But again, this is very new territory for her, and usually when we start to initiate these conversations, it often sounds like “Here’s what you did wrong” or “Here’s what I didn’t like about what you were doing.”
It sounds like complaint, and oftentimes, again, the person hears “You did something wrong” and then they wanna get defensive, or they feel like “You didn’t recognize all the other amazing, wonderful things that I did to contribute to us and our well-being, and you’re focusing on this one thing, and this is the feedback that I’m getting.”
Anyway, it blew up, and we were processing the conflict and the interaction. Now, there’s a lot more to this story, but I wanna just bring us back to his thinking of “I need to zip it.” I wondered with him, would it be helpful for him to name his emotion, and he said “No, I don’t wanna burden her, I don’t wanna add any more to her plate. I just wanna be a positive influence, I wanna be supportive, I want it to be about her.” And I said “Yes, I get that, and that positive intention. At the same time, it sounds as though she’s picking up on your emotion anyway. She’s recognizing your tone of voice, she’s reading your facial cues, your body language… And when she doesn’t know what’s going on, she starts to get anxious.”
Now, I coached her to also name her emotion. “I’m feeling anxious when I don’t know what you’re feeling. I get scared.” That’s what I would coach her to say. But when I was talking with him, I was trying to open up the paradigm that naming emotion could actually increase their sense of connection and intimacy… Because he often worries about the disconnect as well. He worries that she’s no longer in love with him, that while they love each other, that feeling of love… And he really longs for that intimacy as well.
So when I was describing being able to share some of this emotion, I said “You know, in previous sessions she’s talked about wanting to know what your experience is…” And even if she has some discomfort health-wise, that it would actually be a nice change to be able to focus on him and to be able to offer support to him.
Without going into too much detail, we’re picking up on each other’s cues, even if we’re trying to suppress it… And there’s a great deal of intimacy that can be had when we can just share the more deeper layer… As Toby Zivon mention in this episode, the deep under-belly. I love that description, because it is such a vulnerable place to access… And most of us, when we’re not in touch with it, it’s hard to offer that clarity to our significant other. So if our strategy is to clamp down and zip it and suppress it, largely we don’t even wanna come into contact with it, so it takes building awareness around “What am I feeling?”, so that we can send a very clear cue to our significant other. Just knowing that there are basic emotions we all feel, and recognize, can make a huge difference in our everyday lives.
Psychologist Matthew Lieberman, of the University of California, Los Angeles has demonstrated that the simple act of naming an emotion calms the emotional center of the brain. In an FMRI study, Lieberman showed people images of faces with negative expressions, for example grimacing and anger…When the subjects were asked to identify the sex of the person in the image, the emotional area remained highly activated. But when they were asked to label the feeling they saw by choosing between two words written under the image, their brains calmed down.
Naming an emotion begins the process of regulating it, and reflecting on it. This is a widely used saying, “You have to name it to tame it.” And this comes out of neuroscience, looking at the brain activity, the emotional center calms down. So what happens is when you can name the emotion, it decreases the intensity of the emotion. Now, this can happen when we are journaling… I can tell you this has happened to me so many times, where I am really upset, I feel angry, or I feel just enthralled with emotion and I don’t even know exactly what I’m feeling, and I put pen to paper, stream of consciousness, no editing, no grammar, and I just let it flow… The more that I start identifying and then I get a little clearer as I am unpacking it all, and once I get to that deeper underbelly, I feel myself calm.
Now, nothing changes, but that recognition, that awareness and that understanding, again, the processing and the organizing it helps me feel a sense of reduction in that intense emotion.
Now, this becomes particularly handy when we are communicating with our significant other, because if I don’t have that clarity, I can start spouting off, I can start attacking my husband and complaining to him, and telling him all the things he did wrong, and likely he will have no idea of my deep underbelly and what I need in support of that. He’s too busy defending what he feels like is unfair characterization, and so we’re off and in a disconnect pattern.
Speaking of naming emotion, my husband and I within the last six months have clearly identified a practice that we want to develop, and have been in the learning curve of that… And we recognized this more organically in that if I was in a bad mood, or I was tired, he was noticing those facial expressions, the non-verbals, and he didn’t know what I was feeling, but he would feel some discomfort, and start to query me and ask me “What’s going on? Are you okay?”, and sometimes I wouldn’t even know what I was feeling, but he was already feeling the discomfort of observing me and not knowing what was going on.
This is a newer thing, where I am upset, or I’m having a hard time, and he’s feeling the reaction of that. Typically, in the past, the pattern has been that he’s been upset or unhappy about something, and I’m reacting to him… And usually, what happens for me is I notice his upset, I don’t know what’s going on, I have a thought – did I do something wrong, or is he upset about something with me? And as soon as he can articulate and name what’s going on for him, I relax. And I love that we are both bought into the importance of this, because we were recognizing that it’s so easy to react in those initial moments, and that we could create a lot more safety if we can name what we’re feeling… And we also pondered “Well, what if the other person notices first?”, and he was like “Well, I would be totally open to you saying ‘Are you open to naming what you’re feeling right now?”
We’ve done that a few times, and sometimes when he asks me, I might say “I don’t know… I feel irritable, and I feel a little stressed, and it might be about this, or it might be about that.” So sometimes we don’t even have the full clarity, but just to be in the practice of naming it does help calm the system.
And sometimes when we are attentive and attuned, we can read our partner well. We might have a pretty good guess as to “They’re feeling scared, or they’re feeling sad, or disappointed.” Dr. Susan Johnson writes “As Bernice tells me “Well, I guess if I pay attention instead of going off in my head, I can see that my husband is sad right now. Usually, I just freak out, get all confused and dithery. It’s silly, but it feels better to recognize that he is sad. It’s kind of like pinning everything down. The cues he is sending and my inner responses make sense then. Everything seems clearer, more manageable.
Last time I didn’t just clam up. I was able to tell him, “When you get so sad, I don’t know what to do and it scares me. I think you’re getting depressed again.”
What we name, we can tame. When we give meaning to something, we can tolerate it, and even change its impact. So often we are afraid of what our partner might be feeling, and we are already spinning and defending and feeling anxious and threatened and scared, and this all makes perfect sense… But what gets complicated here is that we’re often running in our projections. So when we can actually have these dialogues of accessing that deep underbelly, this is where the connection and the understanding lie. Even when it is painful, I have seen so many couples name deep, deep pain that they’re terrified to name, that might be unlovable, or threatening… And when their partner can hear it – again, that deep underbelly.
It’s not about them being wrong or bad, but that their partner is in pain… I see them lean in. And again, it might feel hard, but it’s manageable. We’re dealing with what the crux is. It’s hard to address… It’s like — I imagine businesses that are trying to put out fires, but they’re doing all the symptoms of “This isn’t effective, or this isn’t a really great tactic/system that we have, but there’s a deeper layer of inefficiency.” If that’s not addressed, they’re gonna be continually spinning and putting out fires.
In today’s episode we are looking at the importance of emotion, and turning towards it. Perhaps recognizing the blocks that get in the way of honoring the intelligence of emotion. Also, recognizing the disconnect patterns that exist in couplehood when we are reacting to our emotion. It’s those secondary emotions that push people away. If we are to pause and slow down, access the deep underbelly, those are the primary emotions that bring people close, that cultivate understanding, emotional intimacy and connection that we genuinely care about supporting and comforting and soothing one another… But if we’re feeling attacked, criticized, blamed, it’s likely that we’re gonna get defensive in that.
Also, the importance of naming emotion begins the process of regulating it and taming it. Stay tuned for part two of “How to use your emotional intelligence for connection”, as I’m gonna offer more structure around how to develop ways of sharing that cultivate this emotional empathy and intimacy. If you’re listening to the title of this show thinking “I don’t have emotional intelligence”, this is something that can be learned. And yes, there’s a learning curve, yes, there’s a practice of undoing perhaps old tendencies, old coping strategies and really taking some enormous risks to access the deep underbelly and be able to be in connection with your significant other, and yet this is the very thing that’s gonna offer you the experience of emotional intimacy and bond and connection that we long for.
If you would like access to today’s show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast, and find all of the episodes there. Again, today’s episode is 199, “How to use your emotional intelligence for connection.”
If you’re listening and recognizing a pattern that you have of perhaps approaching your significant other with criticism or complaint, I wanna invite you to access a free guide that really helps develop language in addressing your partner with more of this vulnerability or more of the deeper need that your partner will respond to.
You can go to the website, DrJessicaHiggins.com and just search for “criticism” and you will find articles, podcasts around the topic of criticism, and within those you’ll also find a “Shifting Criticism Into Connected Communication Guide.” I will also put that link to the guide in today’s show notes for your easy access. Until next time, I hope you take great care.
0 Comments