🚟While I Feel Angry on the Outside, I’m Actually Feeling Disappointment on the Inside
Outside VS Inside
In an Emotional Focused couple therapy that I’ve seen, one of the technique that’s common is expressing what’s on the inside (the feelings underneath a surface feeling).
For example, on the surface a person could appear to be angry, yet on the inside it could be disappointment, loneliness - just that it shows up as anger on the surface.
Inside Is Easier to Empathize
Hence, getting the couple to be trained on:
When I was appearing as on the outside, what I was really feeling is on the inside
is very helpful since it’s typically easier for us to empathise with a person who’s sad and hurt instead of someone who’s angry and judging everything we do as wrong.
Emotions Came from an Earlier Memory
Eventually too, it’s seeing that the inside isn’t just what’s on the surface.
When you didn’t throw out the trash, I appeared to be blaming and nagging you on the outside, but inside I feel I’m no longer important.
While a person could say such a thing, if a therapy could guide the person a little further to the emotion, we find that it typically traces back to an earlier memory.
It could be as a child they didn’t feel heard or seen, so they don’t feel important. It could be the father who’s hardly around and present when they were younger, so they feel like they’re just not important to people close to them - and that got projected into this relationship.
Hence, it stop becoming… “I’m making you feel not important again” but “what’s showing up was a past memory in my childhood that makes me feel important”. It becomes a lot less personal to the other couple, and it’s also the truth of what the emotions area.
Doing the Work
Of course then, while having the awareness supports in facilitating understanding and acceptance for both party, it takes the person to integrate and work on themselves so that they can eventually stop having the same trigger given the same circumstances.
In the example above, it’d be working on rooting in a belief that “I matter” so actions that the partner take will no longer bring out the same emotion.
Conclusion
Therefore, a simple practice could just be: Whenever we feel angry or having some reactive emotions on the outside that we want to scold, blame and complain at our partner - we could pause and check in: “What’s really going on for me on the inside?”
Then communicate that towards our partner instead.