442 - Do You Trust Your Partner With Your Emotions?
Emotional safety is vital in relationships
Feeling unable to express emotion honestly to a partner can have a bit impact on relationships. Emotional expressiveness and regulation are crucial for relationship development and maintenance. Interpersonal emotional regulation (IER), or the regulation of emotions through interactions with one's partner, is particularly important.
Sharing emotions openly with each other can help foster intimacy and deepen bonds, and suppressing emotion can lead to resentment, confusion, and distance between partners. Additionally, being able to rely on a partner for emotional support can help reduce stress and anxiety, and while emotional clashes are inevitable, being able to honestly share your emotions and feel as though they are received fully is critical to the health of a relationship.
The Interpersonal Emotional Regulation Questionnaire, adapted from its original set of questions in a 2023 paper by Schodt, K. B., & Mickelson, K. D. from Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, contains four factors to take into consideration when deciding in fa relationship is emotionally safe or not. Use a 1-5 point scale (1 for ‘not true for me at all’ and 5 for ‘extremely true for me’) for each item:
Enhancing positive affect:
I like being around my partner when I’m excited to share my joy.
Being in the presence of my partner feels good when I’m elated.
When I feel elated, I seek out my partner to make them happy.
Perspective-taking:
It helps me to deal with my depressed mood when my partner points out that things aren’t as bad as they seem.
When I am annoyed, my partner can soothe me by telling me not to worry.
When I'm sad, it helps me to hear how my partner has dealt with similar feelings.
Soothing:
I look for my partner to offer me compassion when I'm upset.
Feeling upset often causes me to seek out my partner who will express sympathy.
I look to my partner when I feel depressed just to know that I am loved.
Social modeling:
It makes me feel better to learn how my partner dealt with their emotions.
Seeing how my partner would handle the same situation helps me when I am frustrated.
When I'm sad, it helps me to hear how my partner has dealt with similar feelings.
When you figure out your IERQ scores, take the following into consideration when discussing with your partner:
Frame the conversation as working together to build a stronger relationship, not pointing fingers. Use "we" language.
We don’t know how much of our scores come from our own history and baggage and how much is based on our partner.
Highlight areas you appreciate about your partner's support to cushion any difficult feedback.
When identifying weaknesses, use "I" statements to focus on your experience versus critiquing your partner.
Ask curious questions to understand your partner's perspective before making assumptions.
Discuss one area of desired change at a time rather than overwhelming your partner.
When receiving difficult feedback, reflect back what you heard before reacting. Don't get defensive.
Agree on small, realistic goals for providing better support and check back in regularly.
Focus on changing behaviors rather than judging character or motives.
If emotions run high, take a break and resume when calm.
Consider involving a counselor if you get stuck or keep having the same fights.
Celebrate successes and express appreciation when changes occur.
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're talking about how our close relationships can provide a safe and comforting way to enhance our positive emotions and regulate our negative ones. Unfortunately, many relationships are lacking the feelings of safety and support that are necessary to facilitate honest emotional expression. Today, we're going to be looking at a couple recent research questionnaires that set out to measure these qualities of our relationships and see how we can use them to actually improve our own romantic and platonic relationships.
If you're interested in learning about our fundamental communication tools that we reference a lot on this show, you can check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers some of our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. You can find links to buy it at multiamory.com/book, or wherever fine books are sold. Alternatively, the first nine episodes of this podcast also cover some of our most widely used and shared communication tools.
Today, I wanted to talk about expressing our emotions. This episode started out being specifically about expressing our emotions and sharing them with our partners, but as always, when looking into this, you realize there's really not a lot of difference between sharing with romantic partners, or sexual partners, or platonic friends as long as it's someone that you have a caring, and I would say, intentional relationship with, like a relationship that both of you feel like, "Yes, putting some work and effort into this relationship is rewarding, and I want to do that."
I would say that that's the distinguishing factor, so that could be a best friend, that could be a really close family member, or a romantic partner, or multiple romantic partners. To start this off, to set the scene for what we're talking about, can you think of a time when you felt like you couldn't fully express an emotion to a partner? Emily raised her hand right away. Yes, go ahead.
Emily: Dedeker and I have talked about this quite a bit together, maybe on and off the show, but those of us who were socialized as women, being angry towards a partner sometimes is not taken particularly well, or just being angry, in general, is sometimes seen as a big surprise, or maybe even the emotions or intensity that occurs on the other side with our partner may be more heightened just because they see that anger coming from us as, "Well, okay, if you're getting angry, then something really bad must be happening," or, "You must be really upset about this," or, "I'm in really big trouble," or it just is seen as really not okay.
I think that emotion tends to be the one that is the most challenging to express and maybe get out of it what I want, if that makes sense, like elicit the emotional response from the other person that I want, or just being able to fully express that. I don't think that I've been socialized to do that very well and I don't know if my male partners have been socialized to experience that emotion from women very well.
Dedeker: There have been entire books written about this, about the dynamics of women in straight relationships really not being able to express anger or be listened to while they're visibly angry. That's a whole thing we could go on a rant for for several hours. I think actually my experiences in relationship, in addition to that, most of my negative experiences, I actually associate with not really being able to fully express sadness to a partner.
Like sometimes feeling like there's an upper limit of how much sadness one can express before a partner is going to turn cold-hearted or unsympathetic. That hasn't been my experience in all of my relationships, but there's a certain handful of relationships where that's been the case.
Emily: I do often worry that in friendships or relationships where I'm pretty close but maybe I don't see these people that often, that expressing real true sadness or just feelings of maybe depression or something that goes in the more darker realm, being able to do that really fully with people that I'm not associated with on a regular basis, friends that I only see a few times a year, that, to me, seems challenging to do at times. Because it's like you want to keep up the facade of, "Things are okay generally, and I don't want to worry you," or maybe something's happening in a person's life that seems really challenging and you don't want to add to that pile, for example. I've definitely had those moments.
It's difficult, especially for people I think like me, who are people pleasers, my first thought is, "I don't want to burden this person with my shit." If I'm going to do that, then it's got to be really bad, or that I have to be really close to them and feel really safe with them.
Jase: Right. I think that's the core of what we're getting at in this episode today is what makes it so we do feel safe. I'm not speaking just generally and abstractly but in a specific relationship. We'll get into that when we look at the different ways people have tried to measure this, but I guess I'm curious, do you think that also shows up on the positive side too, where you feel like, "Well, I'm feeling really excited, but I don't know that I want to share it with this person because I don't know that they're really going to-- Maybe they'll get jealous and shoot it down, or they'll be a jerk about it"?
Dedeker: Ooh, okay. I'm sure I've had that experience that you're talking about, Jase, but the first thing that comes top of mind is more being excited about something or having an interest in something, or, I don't know, having some kind of success in a career pursuit, or even a hobby pursuit or something, and feeling like my partner, just they're not going to ask questions about it, they're not going to show curiosity. Maybe not necessarily that they're going to be antagonistic, but they're not going to turn towards that excitement and share it with me, if that makes sense.
Jase: Yes.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: I've certainly had close friends where their reaction is to almost change the subject to something else about them. I don't know if it comes from they're jealous about it, or they're in a grumpy mood and so they don't want to hear it or something, but that like, "Oh, I'm, really excited about this new thing that I figured out." It's sort of this, "I'm going to talk about something related," but not quite of, "Oh, I was reading something about this other slightly related thing." Rather than asking, or congratulating, or being excited for me, it's that sort of, "Okay, I'm acknowledging what you're saying, but I'm focused on just whatever my mind went to and not you at all."
Dedeker: Just like not-
Jase: I've definitely had that experience.
Dedeker: -yes, not picking up the ball and running with it.
Jase: Yes, not engaging, not celebrating with me, where I'm just like, "Okay." I've learned with that particular relationship to downplay things-
Emily: Interesting.
Jase: -and just not expect that from that person. I think that's a little bit of what we're getting at today is, what are those patterns that lead to us making those decisions to withhold our emotions? Emotional expressiveness is a term for that feeling like we can share what we're feeling with somebody. Then emotional regulation, we've talked about on this show before, is the idea of, if I'm having a really intense emotion, how do I get it under control enough that I'm able to experience it in a healthy way and not just spiral out of control?
These two things, emotional expressiveness and emotional regulation are really crucial to relationship development and maintenance. There's this term called interpersonal emotional regulation, or IER, which is specifically about how we regulate our emotions with other people, in relation to other people, having them support us in that. Like sharing when we're excited or confiding in someone when we're struggling or we're upset, as opposed to the emotional regulation that's just the like, "Okay, I'm going to count to 10," or, "I'm going to take deep breaths," or, "I'm going to go for a walk," or something that's very self-focused.
That there's this somewhat new field of research that's looking at how do we do this with other people because we are social beings after all. Let's just talk a little bit about how important this is. I think we all get it, but it's worth driving home why the ability to emotionally express and regulate with people we care about is so important.
Dedeker: I don't think we do all get it, Jase. I think that's part of the problem, at least, sometimes what I've seen-
Jase: Yes, fair.
Dedeker: -working with clients, and this is reminding me of the spiritual bypassing episode that we just did, where sometimes, there can be this dominating narrative carried by one person, or sometimes both people in the relationship that no emotions aren't that important to share, or if we feel any kind of emotion, we should just roll with it and we should really let our rationality neurological sides dominate everything.
Which again, it's not like the opposite of that means, "Oh, it's just emotional chaos all the time and we're just blubbering all over each other necessarily," but I do think this is the source of a lot of conflict. The Gottman Institute does talk about meta-emotion mismatch with couples in particular where if someone really highly values being able to talk through feelings and the other person does not value that, that that can be a source of a lot of discord in the relationship.
Emily: Like chewers and spewers, a little bit is what that made me think of. Although I understand that we also talk about the fact that chewers and spewers can totally be in relationships together. I'm sure there is a possibility that people who are really interested in speaking through their emotions and those who are not, can also be in relationship together, but it's really beneficial to be aware of those differences and figure out how the two of you can still get what you need from the relationship, even if your tendencies are different from one another.
Dedeker: Yes, but the difference with chewers and spewers is I think you can be a chewer or an internal processor and you can say, "Oh, okay, I'm getting overwhelmed right now. I need 20 minutes by myself to just get my thoughts together and then I can come back to you". Then the chewer can come back and say, "Okay, these are my feelings, this is what was going on for me," or the chewer can come back and be like, "Let's talk about something else. I don't want to talk about it."
You know even if you have a different processing style, that can still be separate from how much you value being able to share your emotions or not, but as far as talking about general assumptions here being able to share our emotions openly with someone that we care about fosters intimacy it helps deepen bonds. Then on the opposite end, suppressing emotions can sometimes breed resentment or confusion in the sense that maybe your partner's getting weird mixed messages from you because you're not really being honest about what you're actually feeling. It can also contribute to an overall sense of distance, emotional distance in the relationship.
Jase: Yes. I think the confusion too of that maybe when an emotion does finally boil up to a certain point, it's that like, "What, that came out of nowhere."
Emily: It's a whiplash, yes.
Jase: Yes. It feels like it came out of nowhere because all along the way, it's being suppressed, maybe because it doesn't feel like something that they can share.
Dedeker: Then, of course, if you're in a relationship where you know that you can rely on a partner for emotional support, that really can help reduce a sense of stress and anxiety. This literally happened to me this week where I had, I don't even remember what happened, but I just know that I had an upsetting thought or had an upsetting moment during the day and I automatically knew, "Oh, I know that later today I can turn to Jase and talk about what was going on for me and that'll be received and, and that'll be heard." Even knowing that, helped to reduce the distress of that emotion.
Emily: I think it's so important to be able to differentiate the fact that some emotions are occurring because of a partner and some emotions are occurring that are completely unrelated to anything that your partner said to you at any given time. I think the important part that so many of us should strive for is the idea that we can come to our partner even if an emotion is about them and that's the really hard thing to be able to do and to receive that, if your partner does come to you and says, "Hey, I'm having a really hard time and it is because of something that was said between us or something that you did, and I want to be able to work through it". I guess the question is like, "Is the partner the best one to do that with or not?"
Jase: That's such a nuance.
Dedeker: It's always the tricky question.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Such a nuance thing when it comes to sharing emotions where, 'Yes, it's harder if it's about you, if it's a negative emotion," but then also that question of, "Is it something that does need to be talked about with this person, or is this more of an internal thing I need to work out somewhere else?" Yes. Gosh, that's a tough, it's a tough question to answer sometimes.
Dedeker: I think I've seen disasters happen and have experienced disasters myself. When you make the wrong call on either side that sometimes, you can turn to a partner to work out something that maybe your emotions at that state are too big to take to your partner or maybe this is something where you really need to be talking to a friend or a therapist first before bringing it to a partner, and it can backfire pretty badly. Then I've also seen it go wrong on the other side that sometimes you can spend too much time either just chewing on by yourself or again, taking to a friend or a therapist, things that you really should be talking to a partner about and you're not.
Jase: Yes. That whole complaining rather than just confronting, "This is the problem that's going on, let's fix it." Yes.
Dedeker: Something we haven't talked about yet is emotional attunement, which is the ability to pick up on your partner's emotions and to be able to actually receive them, connect with them, join with them. I don't mean this in a sense of like you're telepathically picking up what your partner is feeling without talking to them, although you may experience that, but it's literally being able to, I don't know, so like if you had a freaking great day and you're having a wonderful time and your partner comes home from work and something horrible happened at work, that you're not just completely oblivious to that.
They come in really sad and needing comfort and you're not just like, "Well, whatever, like I'm having a great time, sorry, sorry that happened to you, la-la-la." That you're able to connect with where they're feeling. The more that you can attune, the more sense of empathy and compassion and all-around feelings of being understood are going to be present in the relationship.
Emily: I often think the most successful relationships out there are ones that have both parties giving and receiving emotional support. This, whether it's a friendship, or a romantic relationship, or a parent-child relationship, for example, sometimes that can be skewed in one direction or the other. I think we do have relationships in our life where maybe we are a little bit more the parent to a friend, for example-
Dedeker: Oh, yes.
Emily: -or maybe we end up being the one that our friend comes to, to tell us all of the things that are occurring in their life that suck, or we end up being the emotional support person for them. This happens in relationships too. Ideally, you want that to be as balanced as possible so that both of you can feel like, "I can come to you and you can come to me if you are in need," whatever it is.
Jase: This one's worth thinking about when it comes to relationships where maybe this is not the person that I regularly go to, to process my emotions, but sometimes, maybe they actually would be the best person to help me with this. Either because of an experience I know that they had or because we're in a certain circumstance, maybe we're on a trip together and I do need to process this with this person, but feeling like that option is available is a really great indicator of that being a strong and healthy relationship.
Emily: Ideally, you're not bottling up your emotions because if you do, that bottling up of emotions can really manifest in other ways in your life like for instance, yesterday when I came home and cracked into a bottle of wine because I had to work in the middle of a hurricane and I was really upset about it, and so, yes, I had to bottle up my emotions all day at work and try to put on a happy face to my customers even though I really didn't want be there.
Jase: You came home and bottled it up, if you know what I mean.
Emily: Correct. I unbottled it.
Dedeker: You uncorked the bottle and then drank it.
Emily: I drank my emotions to wine-
Dedeker: No.
Emily: -but, yes, I mean, you know.
Dedeker: Did that work out so great for you?
Emily: A little column A, a little column B.
Dedeker: Oof.
Emily: I felt a little deadened but-
Dedeker: Oh.
Emily: -I woke up this morning and I was still a little perturbed. I will say on the other end, even just getting to hang out with the two of you and have a fun time doing this show, made me feel a lot better, and that-
Jase: Oh.
Emily: -was at least, an emotional release in a way that just coming home and having a bottle of wine, or a good glass of wine rather, it was not as much of an emotional release, it didn't really help out in the way that I wanted it to. Now, emotional clashes with a significant other, or with a friend, or a family member, those are inevitable. They are going to happen but if you are able to work through them in a positive way or just be able to talk about them, be able to be real with your partner, that can be an indicator of the longevity of your relationship with that person.
If you're able to do that, then probably that means that your relationship is going to last in some way. I think something that we're going to talk about a lot today is how emotional regulation from a partner can help sue "the us" when we are having a really difficult time self-regulating. As we discussed before, so many things out there are about how to help yourself calm down, rather than thinking about the ways in which we, as partners, can help each other regulate, and what kind of compassion we can give to our partners to enable that regulation to occur.
Jase: Yes. Let's look at how we can go about measuring this, or at least, how psychologists have set out to try to answer this question. Back in 2016, there were some researchers Hofmann, Carpenter, and Curtis, sounds like a band. Hofmann-
Emily: You think it's a band?
Jase: -Carpenter, and Curtis, an Indie band, for sure. I listen, I go to their show. They created what they called the interpersonal emotion regulation questionnaire, or the IERQ, which is a set of questions designed to measure how people regulate their emotions through connecting to other people. Basically, they set out to do this, because they saw that most of the research out there about emotional regulation, like Emily said, is focused on how do we do it ourselves, like deep breathing, or counting to 10, or going for a walk, or whatever sort of self-soothing things.
They said, "Well, we're humans, and we're social, so how do we use our relationships with other people to help us regulate our emotions, and help us increase our positive emotions as well?" They wanted to figure out a way to measure that so that they can do research on it. You need a good, reliable scale that's validated through other metrics, in order to be able to do research with it. They set out to do that.
What's worth noting about this one is that it's about how you as a person, so whoever is filling out the questionnaire, it's about how you regulate your emotions with other people in general. It's not about with a particular person, it's just about how you do this in general, like do you regulate your emotions with other people. They broke this down into four categories. Basically, the way the test works is, I think there's 16 questions or maybe 25 questions, I forget right now, on the test. It's pretty short. Each one you just answer from a scale of one to five in terms of, I definitely don't relate to this, or I definitely do relate to this.
The four categories they have are enhancing positive affect, which means, "I'm feeling good, and I want to share it with someone else, so they help me feel more good." That's like, "I want to celebrate something with other people or help them improve my mood to increase my happiness that I already have." The next category is perspective taking, which is talking to someone else to help you realize the perspective of it. "Oh," like realize, "Oh, some people have it worse, or this could have been worse," or, "You know actually, this wasn't so bad," or, "Maybe I actually don't need to worry about this, because they've gone through it as well, and they made it through fine, so I don't need to worry as much," to give you some perspective on how much I need to actually worry about something.
The third category is soothing so that seeking out comfort or sympathy or as we say on this show, some poor baby in, if I'm just having a hard time, and I just want someone to help me feel a little better, soothe me. Then the fourth one is social modeling is what they call it. This is basically, "I will try to regulate my emotions by trying to understand how someone else would react in this situation." It's kind of that, "Hey, this is what happened. What would you do in this situation, or how would you feel about this?" Getting that sense of, "Okay, yes, you'd be upset, too. I don't feel so bad about the fact that I'm upset."
I know that sounds ironic but it makes sense. It's that thing of like, "I'm upset, but I feel like maybe I shouldn't be upset, and so now I'm extra upset about the fact that I don't think that I should be upset about this thing." That even if the person is like, "Yes, yes, that sucks. What happened? You shouldn't be upset." That can, in a way, be comforting and be regulating.
Emily: I feel like therapists do that a lot. I don't know, Dedeker maybe you can speak to this a little bit more, but sometimes I feel like coaches or therapists are there to be that person to bounce that idea off of that social modeling off of, "I feel like this is a thing that I should have gotten upset about, even though I got reflected back to me that it wasn't but I felt justified in my upsetness. Am I the asshole here or not," for example?
Dedeker: Yes. Something that I know can be really helpful for people, this comes from specifically The Healing Shame training that I've done is something that can happen when we're looking back at past experiences, especially past experiences of our younger selves, whether that was ourselves 10 years ago or ourselves when we were quite young, when we were teens or tweens, or a toddler or whatever, that we still have an adult mind that can look back and find ways to justify which that, in itself, I think is fine.
We can justify, "Oh, yes, my mom did that, because she was really struggling." You know, "I can have compassion for my mom for treating me in that particular way," or, "Oh, yes, when I look back on this experience I had in a relationship when I was a teenager, I can look back and my adult mind can be like, okay, yes, we were silly, ignorant teenagers, that's why this happened."
That's a good perspective to have but I have found that something that a therapist or someone who's coaching you therapeutically can help with is reaffirming that sense of like, "No, that was fucked up." Like, "No, no," we can spend some time with essentially, almost like with that younger self, letting you actually feel that, maybe in a way that you weren't-
Emily: Interesting.
Dedeker: -allowed to feel it when you were little, or when you were a teenager or in that situation. This is me starting to project some of my own approach with working with people into this episode. I think there is something valuable to letting an emotion be felt that maybe wasn't allowed to be felt. I do think that's where some of that social modeling comes into play of sometimes something that I do with my clients is like, "Okay, great, let's set that wise adult mind on the shelf for a second, and let's actually just hang out with the emotions that teenager felt, for instance, and really justify those emotions."
Jase: Of these four different sections, and I did look it up. There's five questions per category, so there's 20 questions in total for these four categories. Of these, they had a bunch of people take this and in their results, looked at what the average scores were in the different categories. There's two things I'll bring up now that'll come up again a little bit later. The first is that the average score across all the categories for the people they tested was around three.
Remember that the scale goes one to five, where one is, "No, I definitely don't feel this way," and five, "I definitely do feel like I could go to people and help regulate my emotions," then a three would be average. The average of everyone is average, I guess. That means it's a well-structured test, if the average ends up around average, so you can measure based off of that.
Of the four different categories, they did give different averages for those. For example, for the first one, which is the increasing positive affect of reaching out to others when you're excited and feeling good, and want to feel even better, that was the one that had the highest average out of the four, whereas on the other hand, the one that had the lowest average of the four, was the perspective taking. The, "Let me know if is this really as bad as it could have been, or do other people have it worse, or have you been through something like this?" That that was the one that on average was lowest?" Store that away in your brain, we'll come back to it later.
Now what got me interested in talking about this today is that a paper that came out in 2023, just earlier this year, by Schodt and Mickelson that was published in Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, that's called Emotional Expressivity and Regulation in Romantic Relationships: The Role of Social Anxiety, which is an intriguing title. Basically what they did is they said, "We think this IERQ questionnaire is interesting but it's general. What if we tried to adapt it, change some of the wordings, adapt the way that this is done to focus instead on a particular person?"
It's that like thinking about, in their case, they did it all with romantic partners. I think this would apply equally well to a lot of different types of relationships we have and again, people are a little narrow-minded and how they look at these things. Schodt and Mickelson, if you're listening, love what you did, keep going, you can do better. Basically, what they did is they took this 20 questionnaire, and they actually reduced it down to just three questions per category so theirs is only 12 questions total, so it's also a little bit of a smaller one.
Looking at how can we try to measure how we share these with our romantic partners and how we use our romantic partners as a way to help amplify or regulate our emotions, and that's what we're going to get into talking about next. We're actually going to go through the questions so you can evaluate for yourself and look at, based on the answers that you give, how can you actually apply that to improve your relationships rather than just taking a Cosmo quiz and being like, "Oh, my relationship is an ox. Cool." That's not useful. We're actually going to talk about how can we apply this.
Dedeker: Wait, is it ox you mean like an oxen? Like some oxen?
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: What does that even mean, my relationship is an ox?
Jase: That's the whole joke I was making.
Emily: What animal Dedeker would your relationship most resemble?
Jase: Exactly. That’s what I’m going for.
Emily: Jase said that apparently, your relationship is an ox.
Dedeker: Stubborn and smelly.
Jase: Maybe just in summer. We're going to take a quick break to talk about how you can help keep this show going, keep this content available to everybody out there for free. That is to join our community at multiamory.com/join, as well as taking a moment to check out our sponsors for this show. They are a big part of the reason why we're able to keep this going and to put this out there to everyone out there for free every single week. Take a moment, check them out. If any seem interesting to you, go use our promo codes. It does directly help support our show. If not, we will see you on the other side of this ad break.
Dedeker: All right, listeners, we're back. We're going to dive into the IERQ. We're actually going to be going through the statements that they would have participants evaluate in order to determine how emotionally healthy their relationship was as far as being able to turn to their partner to co-regulate their emotions. If you want to take this assessment yourself and score yourself, we're going to include all of the assessment statements in the episode description for this episode. You don't need to pull over your car and try to write all this down right now to score yourself because we're going to be discussing them as we go along.
If you want to come back later and try to get a sense of how this shakes out in your relationship, check the show notes for this episode. As a reminder, the original IERQ contained these four factors, enhancing positive affect, perspective-taking, soothing, and social modeling. Basically, the way that you would go through this is with each statement, you would give a rating scale of one to five, one being low. One indicating "the statement isn't true for me at all", up to five indicating "the statement is extremely true for me".
It seems really helpful to dive into these actual statements because I know it's helpful for me for understanding like when we talk about enhancing positive affect, how does that look in real life? I can understand a textbook definition of what that may mean but I do think that these statements give a more clear concrete sense of what we might tangibly be looking at with each of these factors.
Emily: Remember, again, we are trying to answer on a scale from one to five, and one is not true for me at all and then five is extremely true for me. Each of these questions are going to be answered using that scale.
Jase: One other thing to note is that when this is presented, normally, these questions would be randomly shuffled around together, rather than being grouped by category. I think the point for us here, we'll talk about this later, the scores are not the most important thing as much as what we can learn from these questions like Dedeker was saying. Just realize that if you want to do this for realsies, you just take these questions, shuffle them up, and just remember which one is which so that you can total the scores back up at the end.
Dedeker: The first section is enhancing positive affect. These are the statements that you're going to be rating on that scale of one to five. The first is, I like being around my partner when I'm excited to share my joy. Number two, being in the presence of my partner feels good when I'm elated. Number three, when I feel elated, I seek out my partner to make them happy. I like this, that it's like some of them are about you and some of them are about your partner. That's interesting.
Jase: It's almost like one's about wanting to reach out to share with my partner for my sake. One is about, I want to reach out to them for their sake, and then the middle one, the second one is a little more neutral of like I just like being around them when I'm feeling happy. They're not going to harsh my buzz or something like that.
Emily: Yes, exactly.
Dedeker: Well maybe it is something that maybe people don't think about very often. I don't mean necessarily on the receiving side. I think that this is something we don't tend to think about on the giving side. What I mean by that is sometimes, we don't really understand the importance of sharing joy with a partner when they're experiencing something joyful. I think that sure, you could harsh their buzz as Jase said, you could really take the wind out of their sails if they're experiencing a victory, and of course, that seems obvious that it would create some kind of damage but I think that there's a real opportunity lost even if we respond to a partner's joy more neutrally.
I think that sometimes the way our brains can take it is thinking like, "Oh, whatever, sure, they're having a good time so that's a reward enough in and of itself. I don't necessarily need to come along with them for that ride." Not that that's going to destroy your relationship or anything, but I just think that there's an opportunity there for richness, injecting some richness into the relationship.
Emily: Yes, and that relates specifically to that second statement, and questioning, do you enjoy being around them when you're in an elated mood? Are they going to continue to bring your buzz up or are they going to harsh it, or even not even respond to it because that also is a turning away from as opposed to turning towards.
Jase: This all can be a little bit situational too where maybe you're celebrating something that they're not as supportive of or just not as into. Maybe it's you got a promotion that means you're going to have to move far away or something. Obviously, there's going to be some conflict for them there. I think when answering this, trying to think a little bit more generally of, "Yes, there's some things where it's just, I would never share an excitement about this area of my life because they're not as supportive there but maybe this one, I would, taking all that into account."
With all these sorts of self-assessments, they can really depend on what's the most recent interaction I had. Maybe come back to this a few times and evaluate it over time too to see how it might change.
Emily: The second section is perspective-taking and these are all the statements that we're rating. The first is, it helps me to deal with my depressed mood when my partner points out that things aren't as bad as they seem. Two, when I am annoyed, my partner can soothe me by telling me not to worry. Three, "when I'm sad, it helps me to hear how my partner has dealt with similar feelings. These are situational too. I'm just thinking about T one and two and three and how some of these will relate to that and some of them are not going to be taken as well, in certain situations, perhaps.
Jase: I actually think that's part of what this is measuring so with-
Emily: Interesting.
Jase: -question number one especially where it says it helps me to deal with my depressed mood when my partner points out that things aren't as bad as they seem. Now, what I would say is, if you have a relationship where your partner does a good job of understanding which triforce you're going for, you're going to be more likely to rate this question higher and say, "Yes, when they do point that out, it's generally because I'm looking for that kind of perspective and that's helpful and I feel positive."
If you have a partner who's always telling you that when that's not the response you're wanting, you're actually just wanting some support, and for them to be like, "Yes, oh my gosh, that does really suck," then you're probably going to score that one a lot lower. I think that's actually some of what's cool about this and got me interested in this questionnaire is that it's not just evaluating an interaction, but what's the culture of these interactions that's been created in your relationship.
Dedeker: I think it's smart to point out that context-dependent what triforce is being asked for here. I think another missing piece that these statements don't really highlight is that for any of these things, any of these tactics, whether it's your partner trying to brighten your mood by pointing out how maybe things are not as bad as they seem, or whether they're telling you not to worry, or whether they're sharing, oh, this is how they've dealt with similar feelings in the past, I don't think any of those tactics will be effective unless you feel like your partner actually understands what you're going through and can actually empathize with it.
I think that is foundational because if I think my partner doesn't understand or they're not making an effort to understand and they go to these tactics, I think, to me, that's going to land as just trying to dismiss my feelings or brush them under the rug. Maybe in a different conversation, my partner has expressed empathy or understanding like, "Yes, I can see how this can be really challenging for you," or, "I can see how this has been a struggle for you for a long time," then I think I'm more open to having these tactics used on me for helping me get through a bad mood or a rough time. I just think if the understanding isn't there, then these are going to land negatively.
Jase: Right. For sure, for sure. The next section is soothing. Here are the three statements to disagree or agree with. One, I look for my partner to offer me compassion when I'm upset. Two, feeling upset often causes me to seek out my partner who will express sympathy. Three, I look to my partner when I feel depressed just to know that I am loved.
Emily: Triforce again, if you want number two, then you're going to be looking at these questions and scoring them accordingly. That is really interesting.
Jase: It's almost like the last category was a little more triforce three-focused, and this one's a little more triforce two-focused.
Emily: Totally.
Jase: This goes back to what Dedeker was talking about of feeling like she knew that, "Okay, I'm going to be able to talk to Jase about this thing and get some sympathy for that," and that that's good, that's comforting, that feels nice and can help regulate those emotions. The fourth category is social modeling. The first one is, it makes me feel better to learn how my partner dealt with their emotions. Two, seeing how my partner would handle the same situation helps me when I'm frustrated. Three, when I'm sad, it helps me to hear how my partner has dealt with similar feelings.
Dedeker: They're all variations on a similar theme.
Jase: I feel like the number two one for me was the one that jumped out as like, "Whoa." Seeing how my partner would handle the same situation helps me when I'm frustrated in a relationship where again, you feel heard and feel like they first seek to understand you and comfort you, you'd be like, "Yes, that is helpful." If it's that relationship where they always jump to, "Well, what you should have done is this," I could see you being one, "Absolutely not."
Jase: It's just, "I do not agree with this question at all." I do think it's another one of those ones where it might be situational, but depending on what the pattern is you've developed in your relationship, that one might be like, "Oof, yuck. I feel yucky even thinking about that question." I think that's true with a lot of these.
Dedeker: This could be hard if you, I think if you don't necessarily respect or admire the way that your partner deals with their emotions-
Emily: Huh.
Dedeker: Possibly.
Jase: Yes, that has to be part of it.
Emily: Well, and if you just automatically jump to unsolicited advice as the way in which you deal with your partner's emotions in most capacities, I guess, if they do come to you and say like, "I'm having this really hard time, I'm feeling really bad about this thing." You say, "Well, this is how I would deal with it. Why aren't you dealing with it like this?" Then that's not gonna feel very good.
Jase: Again, as we talk about all the time with the triforce, even coming from a place of they do legitimately want to help you, but if they're not giving what you're actually looking for or having that sense of really understanding you, then that's going to fall flat. Those are the 12 questions to evaluate. Now remember that I said before that the average for the general one, so not this relationship-specific one, was around three, and that the category people tended to score a little bit higher than average on was the enhancing positive affect of going to their friends or other people to help feel better when they're feeling good.
The one that was the lowest was the perspective taking, which is the one that Emily was like, "Whoa," about those questions, which is my partner pointing out things aren't as bad as they seem. They can soothe me by telling me not to worry, that kind of stuff. In general, that was where people scored lowest. Now on this one, that's specifically been tailored to romantic relationships. Unfortunately, in their initial research, what they were looking at was just trying to validate their metric in general rather than looking as much at the four different categories.
They didn't give their own, you know, "These are the different averages," but they did find that overall, the average for this was around four for the people that took this in their testing. Again, this is not to say four is for sure what everyone needs to be, we don't know if these people were happy in their relationships or not, we don't know a lot of context about it.
What was interesting was to see that this test based on another test where the average is around three, that the number is higher when you customize the test to be for our romantic relationships. I think that makes sense. This would probably be a person who we're more likely to feel like we can go to with these things than something else. It makes sense that would be a little bit higher. I do think we can look at our previous example to say, "Okay, yes, they might not all be the same, we might be a little higher or lower in certain categories."
Emily: I think it's a really cool idea to take this test either by yourself or with a partner, and then use these scores to determine what is it specifically in the relationship that could use some working on, what things that we are doing really well. I think if you take it alone and if you do it in the way that we spoke about it, where you look at the statements enhancing positive affects and then perspective taking, soothing, and social modeling and rate those statements on that one to five scale, and then look back and say, "Okay, where did we rate really well versus what could be better here?"
If you go and talk to your partner about it, it's not a conversation to point fingers at someone or blame someone or say, "These are things that you're really doing poorly," but rather just try to cultivate a stronger relationship and work together to question and look at ways that maybe you can enhance or make those things that aren't going very well, better.
Dedeker: Always with these things, it's good to preemptively repair or cushion whatever feedback you're giving. Easy ways to do that can be highlighting the areas that you do appreciate in the ways that your partner is able to hold your emotions or receive your emotions in order to cushion any critique that you may be giving. Another way to go about this is to actually be real about evaluating yourself.
You can talk about how, "Yes, I think that in our relationship we're really good at holding each other's negative emotions, and I realize that I actually am not the greatest when it comes to you being happy about something, that sometimes I ignore it or I don't pick up on it," so that can be an entry as well. Again, to make this into a we conversation, a team-based conversation instead of a you versus me conversation.
Jase: We also don't know how much of our scores on this come from our own history and baggage. Maybe this is something that I would've also scored low in this category, in that general test because maybe this is just a thing I have a hard time sharing or getting perspective from other people because of my own baggage, my own history. Take that into account as well that even though this one is focused on your romantic relationship, none of that exists in a vacuum, that you both have histories coming into this.
The idea is to look at what can we learn, where can we see, "Oh, you know what? I didn't even realize that was a thing that people could get from their partner. I didn't even realize that's an area that could feel good, because, to me, that's always felt bad because that's been my history. Let's look at that. Let's see if there's something we can learn here or discover here together."
Emily: Speaking of your own history or baggage, we use the repair shop framework a lot when speaking about things like that. It's also really critical to ask clarifying questions and question your partner's perspective and experience before making assumptions about why it is that they potentially scored lower on something than you, or why they said that maybe you weren't as good on the perspectives as you could be, for example, things like that. Get curious and ask questions, learn about their history, and take ownership may be where you realize, "Hey, you're right, I don't do this that well."
Dedeker: It's also good to keep the focus of this and the scale of this small. As in like pick one area of desired change and focus on that rather than overwhelming your partner. This is pretty good advice just across the board that it's good to not just completely unload on someone all of the things that you want them to change at once.
Jase: Yes, or to try to change everything about yourself all at once is also, I'm afraid, not a very realistic goal. I just need to give a plug to RADAR, which is our framework for doing regular check-ins, going along with repair shop, being able to have regular check-ins every month, for example, where this could be one of the things you talk about is, "How's it been the last month? Does this category that we identified like this where we've struggled more? Has it felt better? Did we come up with some concrete things we can do in the next month?"
Then when we check back in, say, "Did that help? Did that change things?" Also, It allows you to get perspective over time, because some of it might just be, "I've been having a rough time lately, I'm overworked and so I know I just haven't been as receptive," or, "I've just been less receptive to your comforting or whatever it is," that doing something where you check in regularly can help you get that perspective over time as well.
Emily: A really good tactic when receiving difficult feedback is to reflect back what you heard from your partner before reacting. That's done without judgment, that's done without getting defensive, for example. Ideally, it's just saying, "Okay, what I think I heard you say was X, am I correct in that? I'm reflecting this back to you so that I understand this is what you meant. It doesn't mean you're saying this thing about me because you think that I suck in some way." Special shout out again to HALT, which we love. If you are hungry, angry, lonely, tired or drunk or horny, or any number of things, focus on that first.
Maybe take a break from the conversation and deal with that thing, and then come back to the conversation so that you're at your best and maybe a little bit more emotionally regulated which is what we're talking about this entire episode. If you try to have that conversation and you just can't get past the hurt feelings and defensiveness, then seeking someone outside your relationship to help like a counselor or a coach or a therapist, can be really helpful.
I would also say, if you listened to this episode, and took this test yourself, or even just hearing the questions, you thought, "Oh boy, my answers are pretty low for all of these right now in my current relationship," that might be a sign that you should seek out a counselor or a therapist on your own as well to really evaluate what's going on here, "How much of this is me? Do I need to re-evaluate being in this relationship," and getting that outside perspective can be incredibly useful there.
Dedeker: Lastly, celebrate your successes especially if you go through this assessment and you're like, "Oh, we're doing great," share that with your partner. Be specific about what you appreciate about the ways that they're able to receive your emotions or help you soothe or regulate when you're having difficult, difficult times. Also, if this is something that you're working on with a partner, be sure to be proactive about expressing appreciation when changes do occur and when you're both making an effort.