Archives for emotions

Get A Grip: How to Keep Emotional Reactions from Hurting Your Marriage

Your emotions have a huge impact on your marriage.  Whether your reaction to these emotions is to show them on the outside OR to keep outside of your awareness, your reaction might be driving your partner away.  After many times of reacting similarly, a pattern sets in.  This pattern may be a big contributor to the difficulties in your marriage.

People react differently when they have an emotion inside. S ome people are overreactors and some are underreactors.  An overreactor is very obvious.  When they’re emotionally triggered by something, they can react with their body.  They might clench their fists or jaw, stomp around, point, or stand up to appear bigger.  You can see their emotions in their face: anger, sadness and crying, or disappointment.  They can also react with their voice by yelling, raging, cursing, using sarcasm, bemoaning, complaining, or non-stop talking. Read More

Containing Our Emotions: When It’s Helpful To Hold Back

I usually write about allowing our feelings to be felt, to be talked about, and to be shown. Today, I’ve been thinking about the opposite: containing them – and how to know when to do what!

Containing our emotions means to hold back how we’re feeling from someone else.  It’s what we do when we know something’s going on inside of us because we have a strong emotion(s) about something, but we choose not to let it show on the outside.  We deliberately decide not to say anything.  We choose to stay quiet.  We limit what our face expresses by refraining from rolling our eyes or frowning.  We still our body and do not shrug our shoulders, cross our arms, or tap our feet. Read More