What would you do if you were irritated that your partner forgot about an important commitment, yet again? Maybe you’d tell yourself, “It’s not a big deal, don’t bring it up.” But when it happens for the third time, you explode, and your partner hears about everything you’ve held back for the past year. Or, you never put words to your frustrations; instead, they accumulate inside, fueling a resentment that grows so strong that you end up asking yourself why you no longer want to touch your partner.
Talking about your feelings is hard. Especially if you’ve had experiences that have left you feeling it isn’t safe to express your emotions or needs. These experiences often come from our childhood relationships with caregivers but can also happen in previous adult relationships. You may have learned not to express your feelings at all if your feelings were continually responded to with dismissiveness, criticism, or anger. This could have sounded like:
“You shouldn’t feel that way. Look on the bright side.”
“Oh there you go complaining again, why can’t you just be happy?”
“You are so sensitive.”
“Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about!”
“What about me, I’m sad too!”
If someone responded to you in these ways when you expressed your feelings, you likely learned that holding things in would keep you safer from the threat of rejection. When our feelings aren’t accepted, it is deeply painful and can activate the nervous system. If your nervous system has learned that expressing yourself is dangerous, you may find yourself avoiding threats by keeping your feelings inside.
While you can’t go back in time and validate your childhood self, you can be there for yourself now. When you notice yourself feeling upset, practice self-validation and healthy emotional expression. If you experienced negative reactions to your emotions in the past, you may experience shame for feeling your emotions or a feeling that you shouldn’t have them. This leads to hiding your feelings rather than expressing them, which makes resolution impossible.
The truth is all feelings are valid and worthy of compassion. Practice healthy emotional regulation by following these steps:
- Identify your emotions.
Ask yourself, “What am I feeling?” Labeling emotions has a powerful effect on reducing their distress (Levy-Gigi and Shamay-Tsoory, 2022). The first step is telling yourself, “I feel [sadness/fear/anger].”
For some people, it can be hard to identify emotions. When feeling certain feelings has led to the threat of rejection, the nervous system can learn to shut them down, making it hard to access these disowned emotions. The support of a therapist can be especially helpful for these folks, as the experience of therapy can start to rewire the nervous system and safer to feel and express feelings.
- Validate your emotions.
Given all of your experiences and the current triggering experience, your feelings make sense. Your nervous system has learned ways of reacting and feeling; understandably, certain situations affect you the way that they do. Practice accepting and self-validating your feelings.
For example, you could say to yourself, “It makes sense that I feel irritated that my partner forgot about our dinner plans given that I feel cared about when our plans are prioritized. These feelings might be even stronger for me given what I’ve been through in life.”
- Listen to the message your emotion is giving you.
If your emotion could speak, what would it say? Sadness would likely tell you that you have lost something important and you need to grieve it. Anger would say that your boundaries have been crossed and you need to assert them. Anxiety perceives danger, it wants you to stay hypervigilant to stay safe.
This could sound like, “My irritation is telling me that when my partner doesn’t prioritize our plans, it feels like our time together isn’t being prioritized, and I need to express that to my partner.”
- Express yourself gently and directly.
Use the information that you’ve learned to express your feelings and needs in a way that will lead to resolution.
You could say to your partner, “Hey, can I talk to you about something? This morning when you forgot about our dinner plans, it hit a nerve for me. Could you help me by prioritizing our plans? It would make me feel cared about.”
There are times when expressing yourself might mean communicating with yourself and meeting your own needs instead of communicating with another person. While a pattern of holding things in is not healthy for a relationship, there are indeed times when self-regulation and meeting our own emotional needs can be helpful. Never underestimate the power of giving yourself the validation, comfort, and compassion that you need, first and foremost.