Great lovers read and respond to each other at a very high level—their feelings, motivations, values, desires, and much more. They flow from intense challenge to tender embrace with ease, reading each other and expressing themselves effectively. They may be masters of the emotional vocabulary but they are always learning new subtleties of expression and understanding. Ablaze with anger or humming with hurt, they mute intensity when needed and explode into expression when desirable.
Their inner awareness comes from self-knowledge and vigilance while their understanding of their beloved stems from attentive sensing and genuine interest. These lovers breathe the breath of sweetness and radiate adoration. They never stop learning the language of love and seeking to express and understand more each day. They continually develop their emotional awareness, facility, expression, and maturity.
They never abandon the basics, expanding their expression and understanding with attention to the building blocks that help them learn from pain and enhance pleasure. They hold themselves accountable to speak love clearly, be it in joy, hurt, or anger. They seek clarity and deepening contact.
They develop fluency in the language of emotions—the language of the heart—and increase their intimate intelligence with practice and expression.
To learn a language means that we learn the basics, consistently build our vocabulary, and practice communicating and expressing to develop greater facility. Learning the language of love means that we continually develop our emotional intelligence to deepen our intimacy.
We all have the primary emotions of fear, hurt, anger, sadness, and joy, but we need to become more conscious of them and feel them more deeply if we want to battle to bliss.
Secondary emotions combine primary feelings. Guilt is one example: it combines hurt, fear, and often anger. Your guilt may not look like fear, hurt, or anger at first glance, but it usually contains these three in some proportion. Secondary emotions are experienced differently by different people because they are based on our personal internal experience base, which combines primary emotions in unique ways (Damasio 2005). The primary emotions are like the alphabet, and the secondary emotions are like words combining these. For our purposes, we’ll work to master the alphabet.
Most people have some level of mistaken, negative beliefs about emotions—that there are “good” ones like joy and “bad” ones like fear, anger, hurt, and sadness. Joy is even suspect in some dour families. Properly deployed for their natural, intended function, all feelings are good—they are powerful aspects of the human experience, each encoded to anticipate our needs and prepare us to act to diminish hurt or danger and experience greater pleasure. It’s not our feelings that are bad; it’s our lack of skill in being with them and expressing them responsibly that causes problems.
Notice your emotions during the day. You are having them all the time, but most of us are in the habit of noticing only the more extreme ones. What judgments do you have about emotions or feelings? Which emotions do you feel okay expressing, and which do you judge as bad, and suppress? With which ones are you most comfortable? Do you judge fear to the point that you don’t even recognize it when you are holding back, nervous, or hesitant? Do you suppress hurt because it is not “adult” or manly? Do you sit on anger because you believe it only makes messes? Are you good at embracing sadness? Is joy dangerous? Learning to recognize and negotiate emotions effectively will help you realize there is no such thing as a bad emotion, just the ones we are afraid of and have not learned to use.
My Attitude Toward My Feelings
Primary emotions have a basic purpose: to lead us from pain to pleasure. For example, fear leads us to safety, hurt causes us to seek healing affirmation, and anger gets us away from hurtful or fearful situations and toward desired outcomes. Sadness results from lost pleasure or love, and it facilitates mourning. Joy is pure pleasure; it fuels expression, interaction, and enthusiasm for possibilities. When these emotion-specific resources are unlocked, we experience a sense of energy and vitality, broader awareness, openness, and a sense of well-being (Fosha 2000).
When we share emotional experiences with our partner and “feel felt” (Siegel 2010, 189), we fulfill our yearning to be understood and known. We don’t just feel better through sharing and connecting this way; we are becoming better. Jamie discovered that while she yearned for Eric’s approval and enjoyed feeling felt, she was able to self-validate and maintain an equilibrium that was formerly unavailable to her. She began to express her feelings even in the face of disapproval.
Developing emotional maturity enhances self-validated intimacy, and the deepening intimacy matures us emotionally. Being able to effectively deal with regulating and expressing your emotions in the face of conflict, anger, shaming, or disapproval indicates self-validated intimacy. In mature relationships, you can have different opinions and values from your family members and your partner, and you can still stay emotionally connected to them. In an intimate, committed relationship, this allows you to be known and to fully know and love another.
Assess the emotional skills and capacities you’ll need to develop emotional maturity and self-validated intimacy.
Assess Your Emotional Facility and Intimacy Skills
Are you able to stay in a conversation with your parents and family—or your partner—when they disapprove? Can you disagree with them and stay even-keeled or at least engaged without withdrawing or blowing up? How do you handle their guilt trips: Do you comply, shrink away, or feel the need to blame or guilt trip back? Do you cave in to relationship pressures or others’ desires? Or are you reactive against others’ wishes? Can you reject others’ opinions or desires without being hostile or passively disconnected? Can you belong and still be fully yourself?
What exactly are emotional skills? Too often, couples think emotional facility is only toning feelings down, numbing them, or making them go away. This is, perhaps, a useful tactic if you’re in a business meeting or approaching a total meltdown, but emotional skills should also include the ability to rev up—increase your emotional idle so you can engage more quickly, intensify your joy, or activate your anger to make the changes you yearn for. The more you are open to your emotions, the easier you can express and regulate them appropriately (Cozolino 2010).
Jamie knew she was afraid of displeasing Eric and her parents, but she did not know how to recognize her hurt or anger, and expressing these feelings took even more practice. Shy as Jamie was, she was more emotionally aware than Eric. He found it difficult to recognize any emotions.
These emotional abilities include being aware of how an emotion affects your body, naming what you are feeling, expressing your emotions fully and responsibly, and allowing the emotion to fulfill its function. We refer to this last ability as completing the emotion. This includes being able to comfort yourself, using anger to get rid of pain, grieving loss, facing fears, releasing sadness, and taking the risk of reaching out to share pain and joy with partners and others.
Because developing emotional facility is essential for intimate relationships, we’d like to share a framework that will help you achieve this goal. Eric and Jamie were identifying emotions when they learned to understand how to up- and down-regulate, to express what they felt, and to take in objectively what the other felt. They found our model of the four directions of emotional facility—in, out, up, down (Wright and Wright 2013)—to be very helpful as they developed emotional facility.
Remember, no one has the perfect mix of all four elements—we can always develop more facility no matter how good our emotional intelligence (EI) is to begin with. If you’re like Jamie, you are good at in and down but need to develop more up and out. Eric worked to become good at out and up and now is working on down.
Assess the Four Directions
Not sure what’s going on with you or what you are feeling, or even if you are having some emotions? Pay attention to sensations in your body. Notice your moods, thoughts, and behaviors. These give you important clues to unrecognized or repressed feelings. You are learning to look inward. When you learn to pay attention to these sensations in your body and become more aware of your moods, thoughts, and behavior, you’re more likely to recognize the related emotions.
Become an Emotional Detective
Body Sensations: Do you have a tense jaw, sweaty palms, rapid heartbeat, butterflies in your stomach, heavy chest, knot in your throat, shallow breathing, clutched gut, tense sphincter, or clenched fists?
Moods and Thoughts: Are you tense, defensive, critical, shy, sarcastic, aggressive, judgmental, cranky, moody, or in the grips of “poor me”?
Behaviors: Are you overeating, lost in Facebook, procrastinating, or indulging in other soft addictions?
These are indications that you’re covering up and numbing feelings. Name your primary feeling—fear, hurt, anger, sadness, joy—to help break the spell.
Monitor a Feeling an Hour
Suppressing feelings comes at a great cost. By trying to keep your feelings under wraps, you drain critical cognitive resources—it degrades your memory and your ability to think and make decisions (Gross 2002). Inhibiting your feelings doesn’t make you feel better; it interferes with your ability to cope and use your emotions effectively. To the extent that you block one feeling, you block them all—your joy and your love are suppressed. Neuroscience research finds that is far better to acknowledge and express your feelings and to use the other bliss skills to integrate them.
Lieberman and colleagues’ studies (2007) show that naming what you’re feeling calms your amygdala and brings the conscious, visionary thinking of your frontal lobe—your prefrontal cortex—back online. You still are in touch with the feeling, but now you can apply the bliss skills, think more clearly, and act more effectively on the feeling.
Share your feelings with your partner as well as with others you trust. This engages the speech centers of your brain too, which adds to the effect. These emotional expressions may feel awkward until you build the words or synonyms into your active vocabulary. You can also write your feelings in a journal or compose a poem, especially longhand, to help tame your feelings and bring more resources to your prefrontal cortex.
Express, Don’t Suppress
Play the Feelings Game
Up-regulate to experience your feelings more deeply, amplify your emotional experience, and rev up your engine to engage in life more fully. Intensify your joy. This keeps you from ruminating, or dwelling in negative thinking. It is not indulgence or getting an ungrounded “high.” It’s fully feeling your emotions so they can guide you to right action. When you are having joyous feelings, you savor them and strengthen their impact. And when you are “blah,” low-energy, or disengaged, you spur yourself into action.
“Get It Up”
When you’re furiously angry and loaded for bear, scared and ready to head to the hills, or agitated and crawling out of your skin, chances are your fight-flight-freeze response is triggered. You are in a high physiological arousal state and need to bring some higher-level functioning online. It’s time for the down skills of emotional facility. We’re not talking about shutting down, numbing, or suppressing your feelings. Down-regulating means that you are able to focus and act consciously.
We all need a certain amount of stress and arousal to activate our neuroplasticity, which is one of the many reasons that fighting is good for us. Too little stress or arousal and our brain isn’t triggered to wake up and rewire. We need states of moderate arousal—combined with the balancing power of nurture—to maximize the ability of our networks to process and integrate information (Cozolino 2006).
Yet, too much arousal and our brains are flooded; we’re in an amygdala hijack, and we’ve flipped our lid and lost our higher-level functioning. We’re in fight-flight-freeze mode, and either emotional extreme isn’t good for relationship conflict.
In order to diminish these immediate reactions of fight, flight, or freeze, you need to learn how to deal with this rapid onset of arousal and choose another path. Remember, in these situations you are likely to start seeing your partner as an enemy or predator, rather than as your lover and best friend. This state is responsible for a lot of those destructive behaviors on the left side of the engagement continuum and the ruptures that occur when you fight openly or punish each other with withdrawal.
We’re not letting you off the hook here—you can’t escape the costly relationship repercussions by claiming “My amygdala made me do it.” But you do need to develop strategies that deal with your arousal and bring your higher-level functioning back online, activating your frontal lobe’s executive thinking center to process the emotions and sort through how to handle these situations or impulses from the amygdala. The point isn’t to just “calm down”—it’s to spotlight what’s really going on with you, so this is a moment of discovery, revealing, and understanding. For the passive-aggressives among us, this means recognizing when we withdraw and owning that this is what we do when stressed. Whether you shut down or escalate, these are prime moments for rematrixing. But first, we need to down-regulate and mine the data.
Name that you are hijacked and in fight-flight-freeze mode. Your frontal lobe will come back online to help you make sense of what’s happening, and you will be able to harness it for desirable outcomes. Use your bliss skills to deal with the arousal. Identify your yearning underneath the upset. Use the rules of engagement to get responsible, acknowledge, and tell the truth, and redirect your energy toward what you want to fight for. Reveal your unfinished business that just flared up. That means that you dig to understand as well as to share what you learn with your partner. As you understand and share, you liberate from that old pattern. You use the moment to get closer to yourself and your partner. These open moments are the best times for rematrixing—and the moments that will create emotional bonds and deep connection for the two of you.
If your heart rate is over 100 beats per minute—and you’re not in the middle of a workout—you’re hijacked! Many of the nasty behaviors on the left side of the engagement continuum accelerate your heart rate, raise cortisol and stress hormones, and increase negativity. Stonewalling, criticism, defensiveness, and contempt are all likely to activate your and your partner’s arousal. Use the rules of engagement. Now!
Check Your Pulse
A hint for men from Bob: Are you stonewalling? Are you shutting down, mumbling, giving the silent treatment, muttering in a monotone, changing the subject, walking away, or zoning out? Stonewalling and withdrawing is a fight-flight-freeze mechanism. You may think you are calm, but numb is not calm. It is unconscious—you’re under the influence and hijacked. Your physiology probably reached arousal prior to stonewalling—you’re tuning out in an unconscious attempt to lower your arousal rate. The problem is that it not only doesn’t solve anything or help you cope, but your partner’s heart rate skyrockets when you stonewall! She’s affected psychologically and physiologically and is likely to escalate until you explode (Gottman 1999). Studies show that when her heart rate escalates, she’s likely to criticize—and, yup, you got it, you withdraw more—and you’re both caught in a vicious cycle. Get out of the circle. Or call a time-out.
There are instances when you are fighting and one or both of you is no longer rational, saying things you’ll really regret later, or when you’re consumed in an emotional flood and can’t think straight. This is a good time to trigger a break in the action—fightus interruptus! Have a prearranged signal that stops the fight or encounter just for the time being so you can go cool off, get your head on straight, get responsible about your part of the fight, apply the rules of engagement, and work the bliss skills. Use the break to get ready to reengage, taking at least 50 percent responsibility. Think of it like the bell ringing at the end of a boxing round where you can cool down, tend to your wounds, and prepare to reengage.
Early in our relationship, Bob was a much better fighter than I was. I felt as though he had a verbal black belt and I was in the beginner’s class. His words came at me rapid-fire, and I couldn’t process what he was saying fast enough. I scrambled to absorb and respond. I would say our prearranged statement, “This is one of those times I need some space,” and we’d stop the fight (most of the time). I’d go to another room or outside and mutter to myself how it was all his fault, he didn’t understand, he’s self-centered…but then, as I brought my frontal lobe back online, I’d start to see what was really going on with me, what I wanted, what I truly yearned for, and what I was feeling vulnerable about and didn’t want to admit. I’d use the bliss skills and then return to the fight, much more responsible and productive, able to use the rules of engagement.
Time-outs need to have a time limit. You must reengage in the conversation within a specified time period, whether it is an hour or somewhat longer, whatever you predecide. We made twenty-four hours an outside limit. A time-out isn’t an excuse to withdraw, disengage, and act like the fight didn’t happen or walk away, punishing the other. It’s a chance to cool down so you can have a straighter, more responsible engagement and resolve the conflict, understand each other better, and get closer.
Using Time-Outs Well
Alarm! STOP and note the sensations: My heart is racing. I’m losing it. Yikes, I’m frozen… I can’t breathe. Now, take responsibility: I gotta calm myself down. I need to practice my bliss skills. Then say what you’re going to do about it: I’m calling a time-out. I’m going outside for an hour… gonna look at what the heck I am really yearning for. Why am I so triggered? Now do it! And use the bliss skills to get underneath what’s happening and lead you to new liberating patterns.
Early Warning—Down-Regulating with Body Signals
It takes a minimum of twenty minutes to calm down when you or your partner flip your lid—a perfect time to call a time-out before you return to the fight or the upsetting situation. You are attuning to yourself as you do this.
Down-regulating is a management move to allow greater connection. Once you are in touch with your yearning and the triggers of the fight, it is time to reengage and resolve. Be sure to reconnect, but, as you reengage, remember to watch for reacceleration—when the calmed-down fight picks up steam again. This often happens because you feel hurt and want affirmation, but the bliss process should help you affirm yourself. This is a time to understand your partner’s point of view. When you make this effort, your partner is much more likely to listen to and affirm your point of view. Some couples apologize prematurely; this just leads to recycling the fights. Make it a point to acknowledge honestly and don’t just manage your partner.
Another way in which you can engage in intimate conflict involves touching. Never underestimate the power of the human touch to help get you through the fights in ways that are productive and growth oriented. By touching, you trigger the feel-good hormone of oxytocin. It increases the sense of well-being, trust, and being calm and connected (Graham 2013).
Your body and brain read supportive touch as, “I’m here with you. I’ll share the load.” Touching helps the prefrontal areas of your brain that regulate emotions to relax, which frees these areas for another one of their primary purposes: problem solving (Greene and Goodrich-Dunn 2014, 14).
Keep touching, but don’t stop there. Asking questions, making observations, telling the truth, being curious, and remaining open to tough conversations all activate the release of oxytocin, spreading feel-good chemicals throughout your system.
Risk a PDA (Public Display of Affection)
As both of you develop your emotional facility and maturity, you deepen your dance of intimacy. You become two mature individuals, touching each other deeply, helping each other learn and grow. You both become more secure as you empower each other. Dedicating leads to the consistent emotional support and mutual emotional regulation for each of you that shifts your matrix.
As you deepen your bond, you provide emotional regulation for one another—soothing each other’s upset, enhancing the joys as you celebrate each other’s successes. You will deepen each other’s experience of blissful moments. Not only does this feel good and bring you closer; it actually changes the structures of your brain, helping you each build new neural pathways of emotional regulation. You are helping rematrix one another, building circuits of care, compassion, and a sense of well-being.
It’s not just the words you share, but your touch, tone of voice, and eye contact that help you each build the circuitry of up-down-in-out emotional facility. Repeated often enough, you can influence each other’s rematrixing nonverbally. Hugs and touch comfort you. Interactions such as gentle voices or stroking hair and warm glances soothe you when you are upset and activate nonlinear, right-brain-to-right-brain circuits that help rematrix you. Just as these kinds of interactions wired your emotional circuitry as a child, you can now be rewired or rematrixed through the power of your loving relationship (Siegel 2012a).
Soothing each other—down-regulating—helps you integrate your experience. When you are happy and excited and your partner celebrates with you and shares your joy, it builds your circuits of up-regulating and you experience your shared delight more fully. And when you share joyous news with your partner, you capitalize on its effects (Langston 1994)—sharing helps you savor the experience and adds to your intimacy and joy. When you are blah, nonengaged, or listless and your partner stimulates you and activates your circuitry with encouragement or challenge, it sparks you into action, up-regulating you.
As you experience these states together, your shared resonance creates greater coherence in the mind of both you and your partner. You both experience neural integration (Siegel 2006), connecting aspects of your brain that lead to well-being, empathic relatedness, and deep intimacy. The warmth and security pave the way for self-discovery; your neural nets integrate and are bathed in comfort. The dyadic emotional regulation you provide for one another flowers into the capacity for self-regulation. As you enhance each other’s emotional experiences and soothe each other, it builds your ability to soothe and down-regulate yourself and to up-regulate and intensify your joy and emotional experiences. Shared resonance provides the beautiful combination of nurturance, stimulation, and challenge for optimal growth (Cozolino 2010).
This is the dance of intimacy—you experience the neural magic of deep rapport, resonance, rematrixing, and relating. Life together is a rich, stimulating, nurturing adventure. Your relationship becomes a vessel for transformation—a crucible for burning away your impurities and a womb for developing your best self—as you engage in the quest for intimacy.