The following lesson is from our Certified Relationship Coaching Program.
It will support you to make any relationship better by managing your reactive emotions.
I hope you enjoy it!

Manage Your Emotionally Reactive State

By Dr. Joe Rubino
http://www.certifiedrelationshipcoaching.com/

There are few things that can destroy a relationship as rapidly as when partners get into the habit of reacting emotionally with anger, sadness, or fear to what the other partner says or does.

Allow me to provide you with a bit of background information. Every human being is wired from an early age to react in an emotional manner to life’s unending series of upsets. For the most part, this automatic knee-jerk habit of reacting to what others’ say or do with an emotional charge began before the age of 6, and has been reinforced with each upsetting event ever since. The way we are triggered to react to these life upsets is largely invisible to most people. In short, someone says or does something that brings up for us an early misinterpretation regarding something we can’t own about who we think we are, an upsetting interpretation about who other people are for us, or some dysfunctional view of the world that keeps us limited and suffering.

Our misinterpretations are thoughts we make up or negative assumptions given to us by others that we buy into and assume to be true. These interpretations upset us and we live our entire lives trying to avoid them. They are the source of most upsets and arguments that occur and can destroy our relationships if left unchecked. Our emotionally reactive mood states are the glue that keeps the misinterpretation habit in place in relationships. One partner observes a factual situation. They immediately apply some meaning to what was said or done. This interpretation sends them into their most familiar mood (usually anger, but it could be sadness or fear.) For most partners in a close relationship, this mood gets triggered as anger. The anger is typically first directed at your partner when you blame them for treating you unfairly in some way or saying something that triggers you but it can also be directed inwardly at yourself, devastating your concept of self-worth.

The anger also will have a flavor to it that is influenced by the judgment you make about what your partner said or did. It might be indignant anger (How dare you!) if you judge that your partner has wronged you unjustly. Perhaps your anger may be marked by righteousness (I can’t believe you could do something so terrible to me...). It might span the gamut from irritated or disgusted anger to full-blown rage, depending upon how dramatically the episode triggers your sense of right and wrong. This feeling of anger is often accompanied by a physical response in your body. Some people become hot or red in the face. Others feel a tension or pain in their jaws as they clench their teeth. Still others may feel the hairs rise up on the back of their necks. Some may be stricken with pain in their head or stomach. It is helpful to become aware of your own physical reaction to any situation that triggers an angry response. This physical cue is a warning sign that it is time to stop, drop and feel. Stop the action and take a minute to analyze exactly what is going on.

Drop the negative energy and release the anger that has you react negatively toward your partner who you feel is triggering your emotional reaction. Feel the opportunity to reinterpret the situation and exit the destructive cycle that would lead to further erosion of your relationship and loss of self-esteem.

For most partners in a relationship, the mood of anger is the predominant emotion. Some rapidly transform the anger into sadness or fear. This can be such a familiar and speedy transition that these people will only be primarily aware of being sad or fearful, rather than angry. Often, this is due to their ability to immediately suppress anger, locating themselves in the more acceptable emotions of sadness or fear. People who have a tendency toward sadness will unconsciously scan for interpretations that will “make them” sad. If your tendency is toward sadness, recognize how often you take what your partner says or does and interpret it so that it “makes you sad.” The reality is that YOU made YOU sad, not your partner!

The same applies to fear. If being afraid is your prevalent mood, you will use every opportunity to become frightened. You will interpret situations or what your partner says or does to be dangerous or scary while the same events would not trigger fear for those with a different mood. Learning to reinterpret what your partner says and does so you have no reactive emotional state attached to your new interpretation is the secret to breaking the cycle that sabotages your relationship, happiness and self-esteem.

Avoid those gestures, words, and triggers that you know drive your partner crazy. Some people drive their partners away with nit-picking, fault-finding or constant nagging. No matter what they do, it never appears to be good enough. The superior partner would always have done it better, faster, more profitably, or somehow more efficiently. Others may be guilty of speaking in a degrading tone or condescending manner, mocking, belittling or making their partner feel small, stupid, incompetent, unworthy, or otherwise deficient. Others retreat into their caves or give their partners the silent treatment or cold shoulder for extended periods of time. Everyone who has ever been in a long-term relationship has been guilty of one of these behaviors at some time.

After a while, each partner becomes very familiar with their partner’s hot buttons and areas of vulnerability. In an effort to irritate them, get them back for something you perceived they did to you, to exert control over them or to try to avoid being dominated by them, you say or do the very thing that you know will send them through the roof! Of course, this sort of behavior “causes” your partner to react negatively in a manner that provides them with their emotional fix. They react with anger, retreat with sadness, or recoil in fear to the provocations that are so often intended to garner a reaction. You can do your part to enhance the harmony of your relationship by both avoiding those words and deeds that provoke your partner to react negatively and when your partner does those things that irk you, control your emotionally reactive nature.

Give up your right to react with anger, sadness, or fear. Release the negative mood that has you ready to lunge at your partner and further add fuel to the fire. Create an empowering interpretation that strengthens your relationship, and take positive action to build the bond in that moment, rather than get your partner back! Your ability to both restrain from provocative behavior that will drive your partner to react poorly and your ability to restrain yourself from reacting to their behavior will combine to create stability, harmony, and respect that will strengthen your relationship daily.

Exercise: Reflect upon a few recent upsets with your partner. Identify your most prevalent reactive emotional state. It will likely be some form of anger, fear or sadness. In each instance, distinguish the facts of what your partner said or did from any interpretations you created that caused you to react in a negative way.

Create a new and empowering interpretation about what your partner said or did in each upsetting instance that will be result in you strengthening your relationship, taking full responsibility for your own emotions, and developing the habit of not reacting or allowing your partner to trigger you in a negative emotional manner.

Catch yourself before becoming upset with your partner. Ask yourself...

1. What happened, that is, what are the facts about what my partner said or did?

2. What negative meaning did I apply to these facts?

3. What empowering interpretation can I create about this situation that will support the relationship?

4. Am I willing to give up my right to be chronically angry, sad, or afraid with regard to my partner?

5. Identify how each upset is more about you rather than your partner.

6. Identify the ways that you provoke your partner to react negatively.

7. Manage your communication with the intention of honoring your partner at all times with your words and deeds. Know that your partner does NOT have the power to provoke you to react negatively or violently… unless you give that power to them.

8. Journal your progress daily. Note when you fall short of your intentional communication and commit to cleaning up any mess and doing better next time.

9. Catch yourself before you react and work on developing the habit of non-attachment and non-reaction. Remember, it’s NOT that you don’t have a right to be angry, sad, or afraid. It is rather that being chronically in these emotional moods does not serve your posture, your attractiveness, your relationship, your happiness, or your personal power. This ability to trust yourself to be nonreactive will increase your self-esteem, self-confidence, attractiveness to your partner and allow you to exit the drama cycle of dysfunction that characterizes the dance you and your partner are accustomed to doing.

Note: The above is just one of 24 powerful lessons that will support your relationships to thrive.

To learn more about our Certified Relationship Coaching Program, visit 
Certified Relationship Coaching
 

To Your Best Life,
Joe

Dr. Joe Rubino

Please note: For those who may be unaware of my story, our commitment to others and the reason behind the personal development work we do, I have decided to share it below in all the emails we send out. If you are already familiar with this, please feel free to ignore it or forward it to someone you love.   To Your Best Life, Joe Rubino The Center for Personal Reinvention -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is Joe Rubino. Thank you for being a valued member of our online community. We at The Center for Personal Reinvention are committed to supporting you with a wide range of personal development, health and other gifts and programs to assist you in living your very best life. I have personally been involved in championing people to elevate their self-esteem, be happy, fulfilled, and empowered to believe in themselves and achieve their fullest potential since 1991. My vision is to impact the lives of 20 million adults and 20 million children to live their best lives by following the same  life-impacting principles that I, myself, followed to reinvent myself at the age of 35. Many have asked me to share my story with you in the hope that it may inspire you to realize that if I was able to embrace personal development and change my own life which was far from rewarding as you will soon lean, then you can as well. So, please allow me to share a bit about my story with this intention… My earliest memory of an upsetting event happened at the age of 5 when I was playing at the house of a teen-aged neighbor. My parents trusted this group of teen-agers who had a long history of playing football with us little kids. Well, on this particular day, perhaps, they forgot their football at home so they decided to use me as their football. One kid tossed me to another who tossed me to another who dropped me. I hit my head on a rock and went home crying at the age of 5 with a big egg on my head and likely a concussion. As a result of this episode, I decided that I was small, insignificant, and too weak to defend myself. I further made up that there was something significantly defective about me that would cause a group of much older kids that I admired and looked up to, to want to treat me with such rough disrespect. I further interpreted that these teenagers and people in general were careless, heartless, mean and cruel. And this is when I decided that the world was a dangerous place and that if I were to survive in such a place, I would need to find a strategy to protect myself from further harm. The survival formula that I created involved avoiding people whenever possible. I became an extremely introverted kid, having few friends and avoiding most events and interactions with others. For example, if I was walking down the street on my way home from school and I saw someone I knew approaching, I’d put my head down, make off I did not see them and cross the street. As you can guess, I soon worsened my situation and became know as a big snob and a target for bullies. The greater the number of bad experiences I encountered, the more my self-talk reinforced the need to hide and protect myself. And, of course, the worse my experiences became. This vicious cycle continued throughout my high-school and college years. My addictive background emotional mood or reactive state was “indignant anger.” I unconsciously looked for reasons to be angry with the mantra that guided my life being “How dare you!” It took very little to tick me off. If someone might cut in front of me while driving, I would react with anger and indignation – swearing at them and gesturing to them to show my upset. If I smelled smoke in a restaurant or public place, it would likewise tick me off and I would react thinking “How dare they! Don’t they know that second hand smoke kills!” In short, I was a walking upset waiting to happen. While living in this perpetual state of anger and indignation allowed me to justify my bad behavior, dominate others and avoid being controlled by them, it cost me my happiness, my personal effectiveness with people, destroyed many relationships and diminished the quality of my life. While contemplating which path to take regarding my career, I decided to pursue a career in dentistry. I unconsciously choose a profession where people would be unable to talk back to me and I could dominate them. Now, there is nothing wrong with being a dentist – it is an honorable and noble profession. But I had chosen it unconsciously for the wrong reasons. Again, I was unaware of the many ways that I sought both consciously and unconsciously to protect myself from getting hurt. So, at the age of 35, I had been in practice for 11 years. Although I was successful by many of society’s standards – I owned two large practices that employed 7 full time doctors and 8 additional employees, made a significant income, had the respect of my piers and patients, I intuitively felt that I was playing small but like the proverbial frog who sits in a pan on the stove and fails to jump out of the pot as the heat under it is slowly increased, my life was mired in deep resignation. I incorrectly assumed that I was who I was and there was little I could do about my unhappiness and disappointments in life. Well, there are no accidents as I was soon to learn. The Universe presents us all with unending opportunities for growth and expansion. We always have the choice of seizing any of these opportunities or we can maintain the status quo and continue along our familiar paths of convenience, protection, and resignation… or we can decide to risk boldly and take a new path that better honors our values and supports our inherent greatness.   When I was 35 years old, my dental business partner who was also an extreme introvert like me, was invited to attend a personal development weekend seminar.  Although neither of us felt comfortable attending an event that was way outside our comfort zones, we both took comfort in going with someone else. So reluctantly we booked a spot at the course, knowing that we sorely needed to break free from the many limitations and negative self-talk that had ruled our lives. To make a long story shorter, that 4-day course changed my life! I learned that my life was being run by decisions made by a 5-year-old and that I possessed the ability to break out of the self-imposed prison that I had created for myself. I discovered that I could identify my life purpose and step into that purpose while developing the many gifts that lay dormant inside me. I learned that I had the power to transform into a person that I could be proud of by taking my focus off of the many petty concerns that had run my life to this day and focus instead on something that would make life an exciting adventure by committing to devote my life to contributing to others! By the end of the seminar, I decided to take the plunge and enroll in a 1-year rigorous program that involved being coached for 30 minutes daily, 5 days each week for a year and attending four 4-day intensives over that time span. During that year, not only did I learn the principles that would transform my life in every area but I decided that to fully honor my core values, to fully develop and share my gifts with others and to live my best life would require that I totally reinvent myself… So I committed to another 10 years of immersing myself into personal development. That 10-year commitment would soon be replaced with a lifelong commitment to learning daily the distinctions that would empower my own life and allow me to best serve others. With this commitment to playing what I now recognize as “The Master Game” of impacting the lives of others by transferring “the power to succeed” I founded The Center for Personal Reinvention and began the process of creating structures to champion people to live their very best lives. Over the course of the past three decades, I have created courses in self-esteem elevation for adults and children, life-optimization coaching and advanced life-optimization coaching, relationship coaching, self-confidence coaching, business coaching and abundance coaching – all with the intention to support anyone willing to see life differently by accessing the areas of what they don’t know that they don’t know, and learn the tools that have the awesome power to transform lives. Although I have personally paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn and develop these principles, my commitment has always been to make them ultra-affordable so that anyone willing to move their lives forward would have the knowledge of exactly how to do so. As part of this commitment to champion people to be their best, we are now in the process of turning the three personal development fables that I wrote (The Magic Lantern, The Legend of the Light-Bearers and The Seven Blessings) into feature films that will share love, self-esteem and empowerment with the world thereby changing the state of our world which I fear is filled with hatred, violence, scarcity thinking, and despair. As I approach my seventh decade on this planet, I decided to include my story in every email that I send out in hopes of inspiring like-minded people interested in either transforming their own lives or in sharing my vision of impacting the lives of at least 20 million adults and 20 million children with others. It is only with your support that I will have the ability to impact the lives of this many people by sharing the principles that champion people to believe in themselves. The future of our world can indeed be marked by the soaring self-esteem principles that spread love to others, help them realize that scarcity is an illusion, and that the more we do to contribute to others, the more we will receive in return. Thank you for allowing me to share my story with you. I wish you peace, love, happiness and every blessing! Joe Rubino CenterForPersonalReinvention.com