In Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy, we help both individual and couple to uncover and share
the more vulnerable emotions each experiences.
When partners express
more vulnerable emotions (for example «hurt»), as opposed to the secondary reactive emotions (for example, «anger»), it evokes empathy between them.
It's not possible to «force» your way to
more vulnerable emotions.
3) Each partner owns and shares their feelings while caught in the cycle, including their surface emotions (e.g., anger, frustration, anxiety, hopelessness, feeling bad) and deeper,
more vulnerable emotions (e.g, sadness, loneliness, fear, shame, despair).
Anger is almost always a cover for deeper
more vulnerable emotions.
In summary, anger has long been known to be a destructive secondary emotion that hides
more vulnerable emotions.
Help partners access
the more vulnerable emotions underlying repetitive destructive cycles
In order to do this, both you and your partner, need to understand that underneath anger or indifference, often lie needs, longings, and
more vulnerable emotions.
Instead of the softer,
more vulnerable emotions, we instead communicate our frustrations and our anger, our jealousy and our self - righteousness.
While it is true that angry leaders are perceived by others to wield more power, followers warm more easily to those showing
more vulnerable emotions, says Tanja Schwarzmüller of the Technical University of Munich in Germany.
Once you feel
those more vulnerable emotions, they evaporate — and so does the anger.
Once you let yourself feel
the more vulnerable emotions under your anger, they'll evaporate — and so will your anger.
Although anger at someone, can sometimes serve as the original response to an event, it is more often a way of protecting yourself from
a more vulnerable emotion.
Exposing and communicating
the more vulnerable emotion is what most couples therapist recommend to create and maintain successful relationships.
Not exact matches
If you're an empathic person, research shows you are
more vulnerable to emotional contagion; you'll pick up on a partner, friend or coworker's
emotions or physical ailments and experience them as though they are your own.
Our idea was that, if we could finally prove our hunch that women are
more attracted to a man who is comfortable showing his
emotions, then we could finally help to bury the belief that society is against men being emotionally
vulnerable.
This isn't a bad thing, and it doesn't mean that someone like this is desperate or needy, simply that they are
more vulnerable to falling for people who don't reciprocate their feelings or who are scared off by the strength of their
emotions.
It's very easy to lose the story of Batman in the midst of
more interesting villains, and that certainly seemed the case with The Dark Knight, but Rises puts Wayne right back under the microscope, and Bale finds new depths of
emotion with the character, making him
more vulnerable and ultimately human than before.
Final Fantasy XIII is that dog your parents» bought you as a kid, only to be taken away a few weeks later because your crotchety neighbors kept complaining, and your parents» decided that their social status in the neighborhood was
more important than your
vulnerable, eight - year - old
emotions.
They then need help accessing those
more vulnerable feelings underneath it all and speaking to each other about the deeper
emotions at play.
Partners who have grown accustomed to feeling criticized or shut out by each other are mostly in touch with their
more reactive secondary
emotions, and not with the
more vulnerable primary
emotions and their underlying unmet needs.
Once partners become
more aware of their underlying needs, fears, and longings, they are helped to communicate with each other on the basis of these
more tender and
vulnerable emotions.
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I'll often flag this for them in stage two by asking, for example, a re-engaged withdrawer to remind the pursuing partner what it meant and how it felt to hear the
more vulnerable primary
emotions.
In psychodynamic therapy approaches, people who resort to violence in order to hide deeper
emotions are encouraged to become conscious of the
more vulnerable feelings that may underlie their aggression.
They discover and enable the sharing of
vulnerable emotions as well as attachment fears and longings all in the service of creating enough safety to re-shape the bond and create a
more secure attachment between partners.
Take a few minutes and review the steps in your cycle to see if you can 1) identify the secondary
emotions (anger, for example) that mask the
more vulnerable, primary
emotions (insecurity or loneliness, for example) underneath; 2) identify the ideas you come up with about your partner and the relationship; and, 3) identify the associated behaviors you engage in.
To learn
more about your
vulnerable emotions, you must feel comfortable enough to focus on them with genuine curiosity and openness.
If Tim and Becky were in our office for Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy, we would help Tim talk about his fears and hurt from a
more vulnerable place, in tune with his
emotions.
Skill Class:
Emotion - Focused Work with
Vulnerable - Narcissistic Patients - Focus on «Covert» Overcompensatory Modes by David Hoehn and Samy Egli — READ
MORE
In a related vein, consistent with theories on emotional contagion according to which intimate partners are highly
vulnerable to each other's
emotions (Goodman and Shippy 2002), it is conceivable that mothers are biased toward negative
emotions due to their partners» psychological difficulties, leading mothers to talk
more about these
emotions with their children.