The Happiest Lives Podcast

E41: Regulate Your Emotions

• Jill M. Lillard, MA LPC • Season 2024 • Episode 41

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This is part two of the series How To Get Your Relationship Back On Track. Learn the importance of being emotionally aware and regulating your emotions in your relationship. You can validate and make your emotions work for you as you deepen intimacy in your relationship. Let me show you how in today's episode. 

If you are ready to become the woman God says you already are, you have to join me in Clarity+Courage, my cost-effective coaching group for Christian women. Learn more and enroll at www.myhappyvault.com/clarityandcourage

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Questions? Email Jill directly at Jill@thehappiestlives.com

Speaker 1:

You are listening to the Happiest Lives podcast with Jill Lillard, episode number 41. Welcome to the Happiest Lives podcast, where you'll learn to think better, feel better and become the woman God says you already are. Here's your host, jill Lillard. Hey, hey, everybody, welcome back to the podcast. We are going to continue our series this week on how to get your relationship back on track, and I wanted to start us with a vision. So I looked to scripture to be reminded of what it looks like when we are living right in relationship to other people, and so I'm going to share some of those verses with you.

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Philippians 2.3. 1 Peter 5.5. All of you, clothe yourself with humility toward one another, because God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble. Ephesians 4.2. Be completely humble and gentle. Be patient, bearing with one another in love. Galatians 3.12. Therefore, as God's chosen people wholly and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.

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Romans 12.16. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. Romans 12.17-18. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone, if it is possible, as far as it depends on you. Live at peace with everyone. In Matthew 23.11,. The greatest among you will be your servant. Okay, so that's a lot. This is a tall order To show up in your life. Manifesting these attributes feels like something that is impossible, because we all see how short we fall in being able to always offer compassion and kindness, to be gentle and to have patience. We don't always want to bear with one another's burdens. We don't like to be inconvenienced. We don't like to be interrupted At least I know I don't and so I need the Lord's help to bear the fruit of His Spirit, that I need to stay connected to the vine and allow His Spirit to flow through me so I can bear the fruit that only he can produce in me.

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Very recently, our dog Lulu died, and it was a shock to us. She just didn't wake up one morning. She was just eight years old and it was very heartbreaking, very sad, and I did not imagine ever that I would even consider getting another dog. But with her gone, everything just felt so quiet and empty, and when we considered start to have conversations about getting another dog, we all just seemed excited about it. It gave us something to shift our energy toward, and I think we weren't ready to be done with the role that Lulu played in our life, that we all just got to come together and love on her and the role each one of us individually had with her. And so, as we made the decision to get a puppy, I was very excited. And I surprised myself that I was so excited, because I will remember the first few years of her life, which were very difficult.

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Huppies have a lot of energy. Huppies need a lot of discipline and consistency and training so they can grow up into dogs that you love being around. And that's where Lulu was. She was easy to be around, she didn't need much, and when she did become a little needy, I would tell her hey, you're becoming a little needy. You're not supposed to be needy. I just want you to be here so I can just love you.

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But part of loving someone else is allowing them to be a little needy, sometimes allowing yourself to be a little inconvenienced. And so, while I'm excited to get this puppy, I also have to reminding myself okay, you have to remember the reality so that you're not shocked as your life starts to change a little bit that she's going to be a lot of work and that you will be interrupted, you will be inconvenienced. And so I began to pray Lord, let this puppy make us better people, let her make me a more patient person, let her make me more selfless, because this is what puppies and children parenting does right. Young children are the same way. They require a lot from us. But I know I have a better person because I've been a mom, because I've raised my children and I've toward my life and to someone outside of me, and that has required some selflessness, and I'm so grateful for that.

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Now, secretly, I'm praying that the dog will make me more patient and more selfless, and yet my hope is that she won't make me more patient, that she won't require a lot of patients, that she'll just be easy. I'm praying that she won't make me more selfless because maybe it won't require any sacrifice on my part. So I guess I got two prayers going there One I don't want to be inconvenienced, but two, which I believe she will do, that that I will become a developer, more attributes, more fruit of the spirit in my life. So I am willing and I am open and I'm asking the Lord to do that in me and so you can apply this not just to your parenting or to happy parenting, but you can apply this to your marriage as well, because your husband will challenge you. And, husband, if your wife has asked you to listen to this podcast with you, then she will challenge you as well. And we will have to be compassionate and kind when we don't always feel it. We have to open ourselves to be gentle and patient, and that requires some humility.

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So last week on the podcast, we talked about creating a healing separation, and this was step one in getting your relationship back on track. And so, in review, when we view ourselves as an essential cog in the wheel, part of the greater hole where Christ is the head, we can take on a role in our relationships of submission, humility and power. Now, the power comes when we recognize the significance of our role within the body, that it's not all about us, but we are an essential part, put there to serve and love others and to fulfill and carry out the directions from our father. And to create a healing separation, we must make space in our mind for different perspectives. Instead of overlaying our perspective, our thoughts, our feelings on the other person, god has made them their own individual person and he has given them their own directions and commands, and they are responsible for that. And so we want to be able to let them be them, take responsibility for themselves and also recognize the way they view the world. The way they experience life is not the same way that I experience life, that you experience life, and so we want to open ourselves up to different perspectives, because God has created so much variety in His creation, and I love that he has done that. But that means other brains aren't going to see things the same way we do.

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We also want to yield to the one who is in control, and we can love from a place of having. We have all we need when we are connected. When the branch is connected to the vine, it has all that it needs to produce fruit, and so when we stay connected to the Lord, we have all the love, all the provision, all of our needs are provided for, and so we can show up in our relationships from a place of having. When we yield to the one who is in control and we can ask the Lord to search our hearts, we can actively engage with our own life, our own wants and desires. So you have wants, you have desires, and you may have certain hopes for your relationship that are not being met. You can bring all of those things to the Lord, bring those to Him and ask that he would create change in areas where you cannot change. But you also want to be open, that the Lord would change you, give you ways to see things in a different way, that you might feel more joy and satisfaction and peace in your current situation, just as they are. But you can also relinquish all your desires to Him and trust that he has good things. And so that's what prayer is it's bringing our desires and our wants to the Lord, and it's also interceding on the behalf of others.

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So today we're going to talk about regulating your emotions. This is such an important part of our relationship because when things go south in your relationship, when you get off the rails, it is because of your emotions. It is because you have become emotionally flooded or your partner has become emotionally flooded and you get in a reactive state and you don't always respond in the way that you want. And so to be able to regulate your emotions, you, number one, have to be aware of what is going on with you emotionally, what your triggers are. There are probably some common thoughts that your brain goes to some familiar feelings that you experience, that you react from, and so you want to turn on the lights and become aware of that. And then you want to create some sort of flood plan. What do I do when I become emotionally flooded so that I can hit pause and I can move into that place of feeling of whatever it is I'm experiencing and pause that and invite the Lord into that space, so I'm not just reacting from it, and then I can turn toward my partner and have a more productive, a more effective conversation, I can listen better, and so we can learn to commit to supporting our partner and ourselves and being able to regulate our emotions in this way.

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And so I wanted to share a story about a client I saw recently, and we will just call them Sarah and Alex, and they came in for therapy and they were sharing a story with me about their weekend and they had been enjoying. They had had a great weekend and they were enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon together. But as they started to discuss their plans for the upcoming week, alex decided to share something that had been bothering him and he let Sarah know that he had been feeling like they hadn't been spending enough quality time together lately and he wanted to be able to have more time together. Well, sarah had been completely caught off guard by this and she felt a surge of defensiveness. She was like what are you talking about? We spend plenty of time together, and she was kind of listing all the ways, and she became unintentionally sharp in her tone, and so the atmosphere and the room shifted instantly. Alex was feeling hurt and misunderstood and he started to respond with a list of other grievances. The conversation just quickly escalated into a heated exchange of accusations and the emotional floodgates were open. They both said things that they regretted, things they didn't really mean, and they were fueling this conversation with frustration and long buried resentments. And as the argument intensified, the living room, which had been so cozy and relaxing that Sunday afternoon, it became a battleground when there were hurtful words and wounded emotions. And so in the aftermath, each one of them kind of went to their separate corners to nurse their wounds inflicted by that emotional storm and the distance between them grew and they went to bed that night never really resolving anything.

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So if you can relate to this situation you may have experienced some version of this for yourself where things have gone south and you feel like man, we've really gotten off the rails. You can see that there was some underlying emotion that went unchecked, and so the first thing that you must do when you've gotten to this place is remind yourself that nothing is ever beyond repair. When you feel things have gone south, the next step is to repair things, to be able to take ownership of how you may have contributed to that situation, to be able to apologize, to be able to come back together and figure out how can we move forward, which requires us to see the best in the other person and also not to see ourself. Is so perfect, and the only way to move into the new and to keep moving forward is to be able to release the old, and so with Alex and Sarah. Fortunately, the next morning they had their therapy appointment, and so we were able to process in there, and we had to process through the conversation that they had Sunday, so, before we could even talk about the, the topic that Alex was, alex was bringing up his desire to spend more time together. We had to repair what had gone wrong when they tried to have this conversation, and so I took them through a structured exercise to be able to process that regrettable incident and find a way to move forward. And then we were able to talk about the original complaint to redo the conversation.

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But one thing we wanted to learn from the conversation that had gone south was the need for a flood plan. When they became emotionally triggered in conversation, how could they implement a plan that would hit pause on the conversation to prevent further damage, giving themselves a chance to process through their emotions and come back together? And so a flood plan would be an important thing for you to have in your relationship. Now, whether your spouse is listening to this episode with you and this is something that you guys discuss and put in place or maybe you are seeing a counselor or a therapist and you guys talk about creating some sort of flood plan, you you probably on some level, need to have a conversation Because, just because you recognize, ok, I need to hit pause and remove myself from the conversation and not continue it when it's emotionally flooded, if you just exit the conversation, the other person may feel disrespected or offended. They may continue to pursue you and not allow you to create that space to calm down.

Speaker 1:

Ok, so in your flood plan, there are four things you should include. The first thing is a pause signal, and so that may be a hand gesture. You know, some people just kind of put their palm up in a way of like, hey, when my hand goes up, that means I need to, that I'm feeling emotionally flooded, my cortisol, my heart rate is going up and the conversation is probably not going to go well right. And so you're communicating, let's have a gesture, let's have a word that lets us identify that we need a break. And then you want to agree to support one another in calming down. And this is how you can honor the relationship. You want the conversations to honor the relationship and be productive and helpful, not hurtful. So talk to your partner, see if they could agree to use some sort of signal when they're feeling flooded or when you are feeling flooded, and if your partner, if that's something that does not seem to be working with your partner, you can even just excuse yourself and go to the restroom to get away from the situation If that's what needs to happen. But ideally you want to create some sort of pause signal inviting your partner to participate in this flood plan.

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The second thing, the second step on your flood plan is to separate and support one another. So you've given the signal. Then you want to separate where you're not hearing the other person or seeing the other person, if that is possible, so that you can give each other the space to calm down. The goal is that you're going to come back within five minutes to 24 hours, and then the third part of the flood plan is feel, and so you have. This is the part where you're actually processing through the emotion and sorting through it so that you can come back to the conversation in a different way. So to feel is an acronym, which is to find experience, explain and let go.

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So find the emotion, identify what am I feeling, put a name to it. If you have a feelings list, that can help and you could recognize. I'm feeling vulnerable, I'm feeling scared, I'm feeling hurt. Oftentimes, underneath the anger and the frustration is some vulnerable feelings. So identify what the feeling is, and I like to sit down, put my body weight on my bottom, lean back into a chair so that I can just relax into the emotion, and then I like to set the timer for 10 minutes so I can just be present with what I'm feeling Now. As you just sit there with your eyes closed and you just allow yourself to relax into the feeling, your brain is gonna offer all sorts of thoughts.

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Right, without this plan to experience your emotion, you would probably walk away from this situation and maybe, rather than calming down, you would just be adding more fuel to the fire, because you're finding all the evidence of the way the other person is wrong, other things they've done in the past, ways that you're right. Your mind may just stay stuck in this pattern. Just because you're not conversing and saying it all, your mind may still be fueling all this. So you wanna notice the thoughts that are offering themselves and just allow them to be there. You don't have to fight them away, but you're not gonna engage with them either. You just let them kind of drift like clouds and bring your attention to your body.

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Where do you feel this emotion in your body? Is it in your chest, your stomach, your throat, your hands, your legs? Ask yourself where you feel it. What doesn't it feel like? Is it static or is it more dynamic? Do you feel it moving around? Does it feel sharp and racy or does it feel heavy and tight, notice how it changes, notice that it eventually starts to dissipate as you just allow it to be there without reacting to it. And so that's what it looks like to experience the emotion. You could also go on a walk and allow yourself to just tune into what you're feeling in your body. I like to invite the Lord into that space, to imagine that he is there, present with me. He is witnessing me, having the feeling that he sees me and that he cares and that he loves me.

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Once you experience the feeling, you can go to the second E, which is to explain the feeling. And this is where you can do the models that we use in the heart scan process. And so, if you've listened to any of my other podcasts, if you've been in any of my coaching programs, you know this is the tool that we use to process through our thoughts and feelings, to create new results in our life and figure out what actions we need to take. And so you could sit down and do a heart scan where you're simply gonna separate the fact what happened? What happened? Husband said words, what was your thought about it? What did you make it mean? So just write down one sentence, one sentence that you made it mean. Now, at first you may just need to kind of do a thought dump where you just free write, get it all out, and then you could just pull one fact and one thought from that and put it into your model. Then you'd wanna identify when I have this thought, what is the feeling that comes up for me. So, when I am thinking the worst of him, when I'm thinking that he is being inconsiderate in this case with Sarah, the example I gave you earlier.

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Maybe the circumstance was Alex shared that he wanted to spend more time together, that he said words, that he didn't think they spent enough time together, her feeling was defensiveness, and so the thought that was making her feel defensive was I did something wrong. She maybe felt he's blaming me, and so she felt defensive. Then she can identify what were her actions. When she was feeling defensive, because she was thinking that she did something wrong, she started to defend herself. She became defensive, she started to make accusations of him. She wasn't listening to what he was saying, she wasn't trying to deepen understanding of where he was coming from or what he was wanting, and the result was that she wasn't showing up in the relationship, that in a way that she really wanted. She was doing something wrong, and so that could give her insight. When she could turn the light on in that way, constrain and focus, she would have insight into what had happened there.

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Yeah, why did I get so upset, why did I react that way? And in a sense it would validate her feelings. It would validate that she was feeling defensive and why she was feeling defensive, because she was having this thought. But it would also take the energy and put it back in her court, rather than putting it all on Alex of how wrong he was for saying what he said. It would actually expand her view of everything, and so it would help her explain her model of where the feeling was coming from. It was coming from the thought, and then it would help her understand and take ownership for her actions, and then she could create a new model and see well, what result would I want if I was showing up in a way that I wanted in this conversation? What are the different actions I would have taken? Maybe I would have listened more, maybe I wouldn't have made it all about me and defended myself, but I would be curious of what he was thinking and ask him questions of what would that look like and tell me more about that, so that I could understand why he thought this was a problem when I didn't think it was a problem.

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And then she could figure out. Well, how would I have to feel to show up in that way? Maybe she needed to feel more curious, more relaxed, and what would she have to think about the words Alex said that was going to make her feel that way? And maybe it was just the thought that, okay, alex legitimately wants more time with me. Maybe that would make her feel more relaxed, or maybe it might even make her feel good that he wanted to spend time with her. And so then she has explained what's going on emotionally for her and she's looked at what she would actually desire.

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And then she can move into the fourth part of how to feel, find it, experience it, explain it and let go, being able to let go and release her defensiveness. And so for you, it may be releasing bitterness or hurt or anger, and we can do that when we invite the Lord into that space and ask him to help us let go and release the things that our flesh wants to hold on to so that the spirit can flow through us. And so this is a very important part of your flood plan, of what you do after you create that separation. And then the fourth part of your flood plan is to commit, to come back. So, hey, can we maybe after dinner, after the kids go to bed, let's sit down and try to have this conversation again, and then, when you come back together, you might share the models. If you both are trained in this process, you could share your models that you did with one another so you can have a deeper understanding of where the other person was going, coming from, and so each one of you can own your actions in that regrettable situation. And so you may want to do to either share your models, or you may want to do what I did with Alex and Sarah, where we do the exercise after Math, of a Fight, a Regrettable Incident, and then you're able to move into the conversation that Alex originally wanted to have, which was about spending time together, so a time that I remember becoming emotionally flooded.

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I don't even know what the situation was anymore and how much is that. The same way for you, you may have had a situation that it's been resolved. You moved past it. It was such a big deal. It seems so significant and now you don't even know what it was, because you've moved past it and you resolved it. But maybe some of you are still holding on to a situation which, in the bigger picture, seems trivial and you can't let it go because you haven't sorted through a process, that you haven't validated your own feelings and figured out how you want to show up in this relationship. But this situation I don't know.

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My husband said some words and I felt upset and so I thought I'm going to go on a walk. I'm going to go on a walk and I'm going to sort through how I'm feeling. I'm going to allow myself to have this feeling and I just imagined the Lord was there with me on my walk, that he would understand. He would understand what I was feeling and how right I was and how wrong Rich was, and he would validate me. And I did feel that I felt the Lord's comfort. I felt his presence, but then it was followed by feeling his redirection, his correction that I did not need to hold on to bitterness and I felt that me going in the direction of seeing myself as superior as myself is right and him is wrong. That was not helpful for me. That is not what God wanted me to do. So he did want to cover me and say, hey, I see you. And he wanted me to move in the direction of releasing and letting that go so I could move forward in a loving way with my husband.

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Now I resisted a little bit but ultimately, at the end of the day, I trust the Lord, I know that his ways are good, and so I said I really don't want to let this go, but I trust you, lord, and I'm willing. I'm willing to release and let it go, and I was able to move into a space of openness and love. A place of humility is where I think I needed to go there, so that I didn't think I was better than him somehow and just recognize you know, we both are two centers who are trying our best to love each other that Rich loves me, I love him. He has good intent. We're on the same page, and so I could lovingly go, return for my walk and stay open, be open to Rich's bids to connect and also make some bids to connect myself, and then even have a conversation, if I needed to, about what had happened. I don't think he was aware of what he had said or how he had hurt me, and so when I could turn toward him from a loving place, our conversation would go a lot differently, and so that was a way that I implemented that flood plan.

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So if you want to apply this work and you want some help in implementing these tools and learning about all of the aspects of what we talked about today, then you might consider joining me in relationship reinvention. So typically I do coaching groups for Christian women who want to have better relationships, better lives, and we have some amazing groups Clarity and Courage. Once a year I do the happiest lives Academy, but last year I did my very first group aimed at couples, called Relationship Reinvention. It's a 12-week program. It went really well, and so we are offering it again this year. You get workbooks and interventions, things that you get to do as a couple. You get to schedule your time at home when you're going to do this, but we also have coaching calls with other couples who are going through things in their relationship just like you. So it's a great reminder that you are never alone in your relationship. So if you're interested, go to myhappyvaultcom where you can get more information and you can sign up to join us next month.

Speaker 1:

So, in summary, if you want to emotionally regulate your relationship number one, you have to be willing to repair things. If things have gone off the rails, you need to set your pride aside and be willing to figure out how you're going to turn toward your partner in a healthy way and then being able to create a flood plan which includes a pause signal, separating and supporting one another, learning how to feel and then committing to coming back together. So that concludes this week's episode. Next week we're going to continue the series. As we talk about making deposits in your love, think I hope that you come back. I hope to see you. Then I'm not going to see you, so I guess I won't hope for that. You're not going to see me, but you can hear me. So I hope that you come back and we can continue this work together.