How to Use Your Emotions to Build Relationships that Work

Knowing your attachment style and how it leads you to perceive (or not perceive) social threats, interact with others, and process emotions is half of the battle when it comes to establishing and maintaining healthy relationships. The other half of the battle involves using emotions effectively to solve interpersonal problems instead of allowing your emotions to use you and hijack your thought processes (i.e., having emotional intelligence).

Emotionally based solutions will often be impractical...in other words, they just won’t work.

Consider this example: your in-laws don’t respect your boundaries, continually shame you by pointing out your home-decorating and parenting deficiencies, and expect you to jump to their service any time they need something. Your husband or wife refuses to take sides and you don’t think that he/she stands up for you enough. Most of your interactions with your in-laws leave you feeling rejected, hurt, or angry. Your strong emotions are intolerable and “tell” you that you have to fix the situation…and fix it now! But how?

Your emotions, particularly your anger, tell you that they (the emotions) need to be lowered. And how better to discharge and lower an emotion than by expressing it, right? Anger wants you to lash out and yell “back off and take your shaming and boundary violating selves back where they came from. And, don’t ever disrespect me like that again!”

Feels good, doesn’t it?

Well, maybe for a few minutes or even hours, but then what? Now your in-laws really have proof that they’re right…and how can such an “angry” person be a good parent? And they go on to think that you wouldn’t have gotten that angry unless you realized that your decorating and/or parenting skills really are deficient. Not only that, but you are rude, disrespectful, and totally fail to appreciate all of the helpful advice and assistance they have given you over the years. So, what is the net outcome? The next time they see you, they seem to look down on you even more….and back you go to feeling furious again.

So, how did that anger-expression intervention work for you? ...Probably not too well.

But you can learn to do it differently. Here’s how:

Step One:

Realize the difference between a thought and an emotion. I typically start therapy sessions by asking my client what his/her “mood” is. For some people this is quite a challenging activity. I get answers like “fine,” “I’m having a good day,” or “things are falling apart.” But, as I point out to my clients, these exemplar statements are thoughts. Emotions involve a physical sensation in your body combined with your explanation for that sensation (corresponding with the Cannon/Bard theory of emotions). When you take a test, for example, you may be nervous or excited. But the difference in emotional experience relates more to how you are explaining your muscle tension and pounding heart than any significant difference in the physiological response. So, learn to read your body cues and to label (name) your own emotional experiences. This will help you with the next step.

Step Two

You are not your emotions

Realize that you are not your emotions. Your emotions are physiological experiences and explanatory thoughts that are usually triggered by some external, or imagined, event. And you absolutely have a right to your feelings. Your feelings can never be wrong…they are based on the thoughts that are running through your mind. But your perceptions and thoughts (e.g., the explanations you make up for why things happen) may be inaccurate, and acting on your emotions will often not get you what you want. A better way is to look at emotions as data.

View Your Emotions as Data

Your emotions are not absolute truths about a situation. Just because you feel angry after someone says something to you in the hallway does not “automatically” mean that this person is attacking you or deserves retaliation. The key word here is automatically. If you view your emotions as data, you might first realize “I’m having a strong anger feeling in my body.” Then you might look at how intense the feeling is (e.g., mild irritation to rage). At this point, you would benefit from asking yourself what you were thinking right before you started feeling angry and what words are running through your mind in the present.

In this case, your emotional experience suggests that you perceived a threat.

Step Three

Being able to separate your thoughts and emotions should enable you to get enough distance from the emotions so that you can think clearly.

Ask yourself: What is the threat?

It is important to be aware of whether your emotions are providing data about a real threat versus an imagined threat. Most of us have, at some time, had strong emotional reactions to situations that we later realized did not exist. Similarly, we need to be aware of the timing of our emotional data. Does the data relate to a future threat or a present threat? Many people will imagine a negative outcome two weeks in the future, for example. They will imagine that negative outcome to the point that they start having a negative emotional reaction right now, in the present. In this case, your emotions are responding to an imagined threat. Who knows? Maybe when two weeks pass the situation won’t even arise. In this case, we would have experienced negative emotions needlessly. The emotional data was not reflecting the reality of the situation, but, rather, what we were thinking about the situation. So, try to stay in the present with your emotional experiences.

If you use your emotions as data sources, you are, by definition, assuming that the data is reliable and valid (e.g., consistent and accurate, respectively).

So, here is where attachment styles come back into the picture. Each style is associated with a different level of reliability and validity of emotional data. If you have a secure style, your emotional responses are probably well calibrated (not too weak or too strong) and your thoughts most likely reflect the reality of the situation quite well. In this case, it is safe to use emotions as good data on which to (at least partially) base decisions.

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If you have a preoccupied attachment style, however, your physiological emotional experiences are likely to be too strong. In this case, your emotional data is likely to exaggerate the threat (or love, for that matter). If you don’t know this about yourself then you are likely to accept your emotions as reflecting the truth of a situation. Accepting your emotions as accurate truths may lead you to act on them without adequate forethought. So, if you have the preoccupied style, you always need to watch for your emotions giving you false positives and exaggerating the threat. Realizing that your emotional system is overly sensitive should enable you to ‘recalibrate’ and use your emotions as pieces of data…that you will not take as unquestioned truths.

I love this clip from the movie “Swingers.” I incorporated it in an earlier post, but watch it again, and this time pay attention to what is driving Mike’s decision to keep picking up the telephone.

Mike’s emotions are accurate in that there is a threat in the situation (he looks weird and might get rejected) but his emotions are too strong and he doesn’t question their accuracy…he just acts on them.

If you have a dismissing attachment style, your emotional experiences are likely to be muted. Not having an emotional experience in many situations will lead you to miss important data (especially about social interactions). If you are missing an important piece of data, then the decisions you make are likely to be flawed and under informed. For this reason, the dismissing person should pay extra attention to even small emotional experiences (particularly sadness and anxiety) and realize that they may not “have the full picture.”

If you have a fearful/disorganized style, your emotions may fluctuate rapidly and intensely and, thus, be unreliable as sources of data about a situation. If you are going to use emotions to help your relationships and solve problems, you will probably need a “reality checker.” Such a person could be a close confidant, coach, or therapist. The key thing is for that person to be “safe” enough that you can share both your emotional experiences and the thoughts that underlie them without fear of disclosure. You also will need to be able to tolerate feedback indicating that your emotions are responding more to your thoughts than to the truth of any given situation.

Most people’s emotions and behaviors make perfect sense if you know what they are thinking.

In conclusion, know your attachment style so that you can calibrate your emotional data and ascertain its reliability. Then, realize that your emotions will not hurt you…it’s what you think about a situation that actually causes pain. Also realize that all of the other people you deal with also use emotional data in making their decisions. So, when you have an unsavory experience with someone, just remind yourself that the other person may have been acting on unreliable data and may not yet have learned his or her attachment style or how he or she is “emotionally calibrated.” Knowing this can allow you to gain some psychological distance from both your own and other people’s emotions. Then you can discuss your thoughts and feelings openly without minimizing or giving them undue weight, which, in turn, should enable you to have more intimacy and health in your relationships.