The Past’s Impact on the Present Marriage: Emotion Podcast

His experience of her in that moment is partly influenced by other times in his life and the messages or the meaning he made out of that. And so, at that moment when she’s saying this. It’s not just the wife’s message. It is, okay, what were these building blocks back here that formed this moment? 

Welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. Wonderful to have you along. Kaleb Beyer’s with me today and we’re going to continue with our series on matters of the past that make a difference in the present marriage. 

Yeah. Looking forward to the discussion. And so today it’s emotion. And these have really come out of your experience working with couples. There’s been times where you’re like, man, the past is really speaking today and we’re reacting to the past in a variety of different themes. And the theme we’re looking at today is emotion. 

So, emotion is one of those. And so, let’s start with emotion. Emotion is really abstract. Yeah. It’s an abstract concept, and so I want you to help bring it down to us. So, emotions are really the meaning, the cognitive construct of feeling and body sensation. So, when I feel, for example, fear, when I experience the emotion of fear, I feel body sensations. 

Maybe there’s a charge or I feel something in my stomach or right across my chest. There’s an increase in heart rate, and I feel it pulsing, so those are the sensations in my body. The feelings that I have in the emotion is the cognitive construct of that experience. Okay. So, I mentioned that emotion is abstract, right? 

And so, certainly words are clear, audible sounds and we know what these words mean, right? And feelings at some levels are common in the way that our body reacts. And they’re very practical, very physical. And this emotion is the ascribed meaning to these things. Is that true? Okay. Am I understanding that right? 

And so that emotion is really a huge part of how we make sense of the world. Yes. Is that true? It is. Let’s now go to that place of the past. Kaleb, how is it that emotion is formed in the past and how we make meaning of it? Yeah. Can you bring that down to us? Yeah. So, if you think about us as children and infants, even as infants, what do they do? Even without words, they’re starting to convey certain needs through emotions. They’re in distress. And what do they do? They cry. And how is it that the mother or the father responds to them? Well, that begins to make meaning out of what happens. And what do I do with this uncomfortable feeling? 

You know, obviously early on it is cry and get fed, but then as they grow older to a two year old and they start throwing fit, well, underneath there, sometimes there are feelings in their body that they don’t like. And how do we, as parents or caregivers, come alongside and soothe and comfort and notice that underneath that temper tantrum, perhaps is sadness or anger or whatever emotion. 

I think that’s fascinating to think that perhaps the first meaning of the world that an individual has is through the lens of emotion, isn’t it? Early on, that script is greatly influenced by how parents care, right? You and I learn meaning of emotion and how we relate to emotion by how we’ve been cared for when we’re in and experiencing those emotions. 

Wow. You’ve made a huge case for the importance of infant care, right? Yeah. All right. So, let’s, let’s move beyond that. Now, sketch out a scenario where a person, might be a young teen or something to that nature. Yeah. So, in some ways there are unwritten rules that we have. Okay. Whether it’s not okay to have anger, maybe the teenager’s angry and when they’re angry, they are still trying to figure out what’s a healthy way to experience anger in my body and to express it. A normal emotion or fear, the peer pressure that happens in the fear to fit into this group. But as parents, we see it sometimes not as fear. We see it as critical or maybe they’re nonresponsive, right? Or rebellious.  

So, Kaleb, now reflecting on my own parenting, I very often parent according to behavior without addressing the emotion that lies beneath the behavior and that’s really what you’re calling us to. Am I right? Yes, I think that’s really challenging for parents. I’m a parent myself and I get it wrong too often. But when we do that well and bring them to the place where we’re able to hear the fear underneath the behavior or the sadness for what happened. Now we’re creating an experience of seeing and comforting and soothing and releasing the negative emotion in a healthy way. Yes. And I want you to say more about negative emotions. What does healthy emotional intelligence look like as it regards negative emotions? 

Good question. Healthy emotional intelligence related to negative emotions is, first of all, acknowledging that there is purpose and meaning in negative emotions. In other words, there’s a message and it’s not a bad message. It’s uncomfortable, right? In the sense that it doesn’t feel good. So, the first thing is there’s no moral meaning behind negative emotions and positive emotions. 

They alerting me to something that’s happening. Now, they may be true or not true. Let me give you an example. So, if I’m going on a hike with Ang, and we’re going through the woods, and I see something out of the side of my vision move in the grass. Right, there’s the cue. Our initial appraisal after something like that happens is negative, and it’s global. 

Because the way our brain works is, it’s quickly assessing, is this dangerous or not? Yes, it’s dangerous, it’s moving, and I don’t know what it is. So, what happens to my body? I start feeling an increase in my heart rate. And then I have another appraisal that comes back and looks and sees. Okay, it’s not a snake, it was just a squirrel that wandered off into the woods, and okay, I’m okay, right? 

I’m alright. And so, in that sense, immediately, it’s showing up, it’s influencing my system, and it has a purpose behind it, whether that’s to step on the snake or run or investigate the situation, in which case you realized the reality. Yes. Yeah. So, I think with negative emotions, it’s okay to just notice and understand what this is saying. So not too quickly, just minimizing, dismissing, stuffing, or on the flip side, just saying this is absolute truth.  

Okay, so I think there you’ve just given us some important cues. I think you have told us what it looks like when we might not process the meaning of negative emotions well. We stuff them. We might ignore them, or we might wholesale believe them. All of these might be ditches that have been formed from life. Right. And I want to say just something, Matt, about believing them, because I’d like to pull apart a couple things there, because we use that term. Like, either don’t believe your emotions or do believe your emotions. 

Or maybe you haven’t heard that term. Absolutely. And I think we have to separate. It’s like this way. When I’m feeling sad, I am feeling sad. And so, it would be good not to say I’m not feeling sad, right? That’s truth in this moment, in the sense that I’m experiencing these feelings, sensations in my body. 

Now the meaning I make out of that isn’t necessarily truth. So, it’s almost how I feel about my feelings. Is that what we’re talking about here? Now, I think that kind of brings us now to the present marriage, okay? What does this look like in marriage, whereby we have a present moment, a struggle, a strain on the marriage that actually finds its roots in a past construct. 

The way that we pick up emotions in the present is movement that’s made, one between the others. So, as we think about relationally, so if, for example, a wife is protesting in the sense of really complaining, wanting more time with a husband, and the husband looks down and doesn’t respond, that’s what we call a cue, a present day. 

Oh, you know what? Something happened between the wife saying something and the husband hearing it, that he looked down. So, what’s happening in his body and his mind when she just said that? Where does his mind go? Right? Because something is happening. So, for him, it may be, and again, I’m just talking out loud. 

It could be for him. He may be feeling in that moment. He may be feeling fear, actually, that’s just overwhelming to him, that he’s never going to get it right. And maybe that’s a message, Matt, that he’s heard somewhere in his life, that even though he tried and tried, that the message back was you’re not good enough. Or you’re a failure. And maybe that couldn’t be further from the reality of what the wife is trying to communicate. Yes, that’s what’s so hard. Yes, exactly. She just desires to actually be with him. Maybe she doesn’t even know. His experience of her in that moment is partly influenced by other times in his life where he’s felt shame or fear and the messages or the meaning he made out of that. 

Yes. And so, at that moment when she’s, you know, wife is saying this, it’s not just the wife’s message. Yes. It is, okay, what were these building blocks back here that formed this moment? And it really is, this really comes down to a communication issue, doesn’t it? This could all fall under the category of miscommunication in marriage. 

He’s saying something to his wife that he has no intention of saying, like, I don’t care about you. I mean, that couldn’t be further from the truth, but his actions are saying that to her. Oh, very much. Yes. And she has no intentions of pushing him away, right, by her actions. In fact, she’s trying to say, you know, I love you and want to connect. 

Yes, I want to be with you. Yeah. And so, you can see how much of a heartache this is. Oh, it’s painful. That they keep telling each other the thing that the other one doesn’t want to hear. Yeah. Which is keeping the cycle going. Right. We can work really hard to get the words right, but you’re really bringing to bear something here in this conversation. 

That there’s more to get right than just the words. Right. When we understand the emotion behind it and make sense of where that’s triggered and where that’s coming from, we begin to, I don’t know if decode is the right word, but decode that message in a way that we’re able to hear it as a cry for help. 

We also begin to, back to this emotion, we begin to make sense of my experience, right, in this moment and where it’s coming from. Oh, there’s more happening here than just when my wife comes talk to me that way or my husband looks down. And what’s going on for me, because one of the things that we do is our emotions tell us about ourselves, but they don’t tell us anything about you. 

Like if I’m afraid it doesn’t tell me about you, Matt, it tells me about me. And so, one of the things that happens in a relationship is when I feel negative emotion, If I can change you and that helps my negative emotion, that’s much easier than me walking through this. All right, so I see two paths forward that need to really work together, and you correct me, but it sounds to me to move forward with this is two pronged. 

One is for a person to understand their emotional experience and the messages that they are giving off. To their spouse, and if they’re saying the opposite thing that they want to say, then they need to work on how to say the right thing. And then for the spouse to have some sort of meaning in their spouse’s emotional experience to understand what they’re not saying in that moment. 

Does that make sense? So, there’s, I think, something to learn for both spouses in this space, right? Yes. We learn to live in our own bodies. And we also learn to live with another body. Right. And I think the beautiful thing, Matt, is you think about this. In marriage, and I would say in relationships, is that we get to walk alongside each other to help each other to deeper insights and understanding. 

Not just about each other, but ourselves. Part of the beauty of safe relationship is me being able to process through and move through what was that reaction I had to you and in this moment and for her being there with me as not a reactive presence, but as a safe presence that wants to hear me and understand me. That helps me work through that emotion. And I would have to imagine that’s partly what you do in the counseling room. You are able to hit pause on a moment. And then have everybody come outside and look at the picture and process that and that’s really what’s required, isn’t it? 

Well, you almost have to be objective with how something is playing out in the moment for you to think clearly about the other one and that just as you explained it with you and Ang, right? I mean, it’s got to be a huge skill set to work on, but is that part of the answer? It is. So, I want you to walk us through, let’s go back to that example where you’re in the room there with a couple and he looks down. 

Okay. She processes that very differently. He’s processing that moment very differently. They’re both saying the wrong message to one another. How do you step in as a therapist and how do you start to untangle this in a helpful way? Yeah. So, the first thing that I look at is noticing shifts. So, noticing the shift and, oh, he looked down. 

What just happened there? She’s seen that before, but she’s made meaning out of that. And the meaning hasn’t been necessarily about his experiences back here. The meaning is he’s not paying attention to me in the present and she’s made her own meaning of it. So, part of what I’m seeking to do as a therapist is what if there’s other meaning behind here that actually leads to empathy and connection and compassion for that experience and not a sense of, wow, he really didn’t want to be with me. 

Okay. So now did you just give away a really key component healing here? Yes. Coming to a point of connection. That’s a goal. Yeah. I think that is the goal, Matt. In that interaction, one of the things we have to do is to slow it down and begin to untangle kind of those micro movements, right, that happen for the husband when he looks down. 

Now, what was it about? What she said or how she said it? So, we should be more observant. Would that be one takeaway? Be very observant with one another. Now, I’m sure we could go off the rails with this and be really annoying. Honey, I noticed you just looked up at the corner of the room. 

I noticed you’re blinking in this moment, honey. I’m starting to make meaning out of that right now. Okay, so where’s the happy medium at? At some level, is it appropriate to say, honey, I noticed you responded in this way. Can you help me understand what that means? Yeah. And I would take it maybe even a step further back, Matt, and that is noticing within myself. 

So, what sets me off internally to experience negative emotion or intense negative emotion? Right? So, what is it? So, my wife, Ang, right? What are the times she’s communicating to me and I just notice, wow, something happened and I can’t, I mean, they’re overwhelmed, I’m afraid, I just freeze up. Okay, what was the moment that happened? 

Was it what she said? Was it the intense emotion? Okay. Now, I really like that because that’s something that I can do. I mean, that’s very much internal. I was positing an idea of what we might do with the other person. Right. But you’re saying step one is looking at yourself. Yes, it is because I’m glad you’re here guiding this car, this advice. 

Look at yourself. Yeah. Be curious and notice when emotion starts to talk. Yeah. And it may be, you know, we say emotion like sadness. It may start with, oh, I notice my thoughts start racing. Right. So, it may not be. Oh, in the moment I’m experiencing sadness, or it may start with a body sensation. You know, I feel tightness. 

Any cue that says, when my wife or my husband said this, something shifted inside of me. Okay. That, and you want to place your finger on when that shift happens, right? And what the impetus for that shift was in perhaps the relationship. Is that something else like when you start with that phrase? Right?  When you say, why did you do something, you know, that why did you do something phrase triggers me. Hypothetical example here. Sure. Does that work? Yeah. And to be able to place it and say that phrase sets me off. Yes. I think that’s a good example. I think we have to be careful, Matt, that that situation is not blamed on the wife or the spouse. 

Maybe it’s the husband that’s saying the, why did you do this? But rather the, why am I responding like this? Exactly. Help me understand that. Making a notice. This is the impetus that makes this shift happen in my body. Yes. Whereby this script gets told to me. Exactly. All right. About me and about my relationship. 

Okay. Because the script that we tell is not just about us. Oh, for the husband that looks down and is like, oh, I’m failing again. He’s saying something about the relationship. Right. She’s never satisfied or whatever it is. Right. So, there’s a script both ways that is helpful for us to unpack and make sense of. 

Good. So, at that point, when we begin to understand the script, oftentimes, and again, it’s a safe environment, and we’re able to share that with our spouse, the ideal situation is like, oh, that’s what you tell yourself in this moment. So, if I identify the phrase, why did you do, okay, that phrase sets me off. 

I’m contemplative about it. And I recognize that I feel like I’ve been criticized a lot in my life. My teachers would say, why did you do this? And my boss, why did you do this? And I always feel like I’m making the wrong decision every time. Why did you do this? Always defending my stupid thing. 

And so, to share that with my wife, to say those words just set me off because I’ve got this script running in my head, right? Is that the constructive type of conversation? Yes, it is because then it takes that off of the wife on to me and I realize I’m bringing this and I know that’s not helpful to you, and that’s what this is about the past speaking into the present. 

So, at that moment we say you didn’t say this. Yes. But my past said this. Right. And that’s what I’m hearing. Yes. Exactly. So now we have a different interaction in the midst of that negative emotion. Which is really powerful, because now we’re starting to change the script, and think about that, Matt, that is the beauty of healthy relationship, is that scripts begin to change that lead to connection and that lead to soothing of negative hurts and pains and, in a way, create deep intimacy. 

But there’s even help being done without the script being rewritten. Because of simply the understanding. Yes. That spouse is going to walk with a renewed wisdom towards you because they know these words set him off. Yes. Right? Yeah. So, I think there are some levels of repair. Yes, even research would say, Matt, that it takes somewhere near 90 percent more glucose for me to regulate my own emotion versus experiencing relationship to be able to help regulate and soothe. 

Whoa. So, what you said, it requires more energy for us to regulate our own emotions by ourselves than to have somebody step in and help us. Yes. And what we call co regulate, meaning we have a safe other person that in the midst of fear, that’s a really heavy and weighty emotion, that they’re actually with us bearing one another’s wounds. 

Wow. So that’s huge, Kaleb. Why didn’t you tell me this before? If only it was that easy. All right. But really, what I love about that, Kaleb, is part of the answer is in the together. Yes, absolutely. It is. And, in fact, a huge answer is in the together. How do we be in the midst of negative emotions together? 

Kaleb, we married folks split with these types of things. We go into silence, right? Oh, yeah. We go into corners. Yeah. We go, you know what I’m saying? Yeah. When so much of the answer is together. Yes, it is. So anyway, you just see the evil one in that. Oh yeah, for sure. And then there’s just so much energy I need to use. 

Think of all the energy you could use elsewhere. Cookies? Do cookies, that gives you glucose, doesn’t it? Yeah. Isn’t that sugar? Less cookies, yes. 

We’ve gone adrift. Well, Kaleb, I mentioned off the front that emotion is abstract in this conversation. I felt like it was very abstract there towards the beginning and the middle and it even towards the end. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to apprehend everything, but you landed the plane nicely 

I think, with those examples. And I think, really, have provided a great deal of hope for marriages. That’s my prayer. You know, it’s a beautiful thing to be able to make sense of an interaction between us as married couples and say, oh, here’s what’s going on. And there’s understanding and really being able to experience the love that we know in our heads to be true. 

But sometimes we wrestle when there are certain interactions that happen in a relationship. Yeah. Thanks Kaleb. Thanks for this help. Thanks for just sharing what you’re learning with us. Thank you for that. And to our listeners, thanks for being with us. I trust and pray you are able to follow this conversation to the point where some of these ideas have settled in in a real way in your mind and your heart and in your experience to bring health and hope. Thanks for being here. 

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