Day: January 9, 2023

Think of a kid throwing a temper tantrum for no apparent reason, or at least not one significant enough to cause such a reaction. The feelings of most adults can be just as overwhelming, and some adults’ use coping mechanisms that can boil down to “sweeping it under the rug.” These folks might’ve outgrown temper tantrums, yet the storms inside them can seem just as overwhelming.

Unlike most children, adults are capable of identifying and managing their emotions. This doesn’t mean merely controlling, suppressing, or hiding them. It means understanding our triggers or the underlying causes of our fears and other distressing feelings. It also means learning what vulnerability management is and then changing our behavior and thought patterns to create optimal conditions for learning to recognize and identify our emotions. That way, we can address the reasons behind them, and change our response and behavior accordingly.

What Is Emotional Regulation?

Emotional regulation encompasses various actions we undertake to control the expression of our feelings. This ability may involve analyzing or rethinking certain challenging situations to influence the intensity of distressing emotions like anxiety or anger. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we succeed in changing our feelings; we simply learn to hide some or all visible signs. And, hiding our emotions can be incredibly unhealthy.  

By learning to actually mitigate emotions that are hardest to control, like anger, anxiety, resentment, or deep sadness, we could prevent them from turning into more severe mental health issues. Instead of bottling them up, we can learn how to deal with them in healthier ways that will contribute to our personal well-being and more stable relationships with others.

How Can I Regulate My Emotions?

With a certain amount of practice, we can learn to influence our emotional state or regulate our feelings. Experts in this field use two terms to explain this process: down-regulation and up-regulation. Down-regulation means reducing the intensity of emotions, while up-regulation means amplifying them.

Each of these two ways is used in different circumstances. For example, people usually try to downregulate distressing emotions like sadness, anger, and fear by recalling pleasurable or amusing memories or ideas – thinking about something that makes them calm or happy. This method is used to distract oneself from anxiety or sadness.

In other types of situations, people need to upregulate their emotions or make them more intense. This is more common in situations of imminent danger or other kinds of challenging experiences that require a dose of adrenaline.

The main issue with this type of emotion control is that it’s usually done unconsciously to cope with demanding situations. And all of us do it many times a day. We use various emotion regulation strategies, some of which are harmless, while others can cause damage to our well-being and mental health. To adapt to the environment we live in, the stress we’re exposed to, and the countless emotions we feel throughout the day, we need to approach the situation more strategically.

Which Skills Are Essential For Emotional Management?

To be able to practice emotional management, we have to set up the conditions that allow us to apply positive coping skills and practice emotional and vulnerability management. This task will get easier over time if you make sure to set up the environment by:

• Taking care of your physical needs and paying attention to your physical symptoms. This includes getting enough sleep, eating healthy food, being physically active, and exercising. As a result, you will feel better and healthier, and regulating your mood will become less challenging.
• Understand your developmental parts so you can understand where the deregulating emotions come from. This is helpful so you can be aware of why the feelings are so intense.  Let’s say in your childhood you had a father who left you. This will most likely activate the abandonment button that was installed inside of you whenever your partner leaves or threatens to leave.  Your reaction can be heightened as a result. 
• Including activities that build a sense of achievement into your life. This can be any type of hobby or simply doing one single thing each day that makes you feel content. Sometimes our days are filled with multiple small moments we fail to notice or disregard as irrelevant. Pay attention to things that bring you joy, no matter how small they seem. If you start noticing them, their cumulative effect can increase your positivity.
• Focusing on changing thought patterns instead of changing feelings themselves. This could be a more challenging task. Most of us don’t realize that we can change the way we think about things. The truth is that we can change how we experience certain situations by deconstructing our feelings. That means analyzing what happened and how it led to us feeling a certain way.

For example, think about what made you feel that way when you’re upset. What did you think when the distressing event happened? Try to notice the correlation between your thinking and how those thoughts make you feel.

How Can I Manage My Vulnerability?

The best way to manage your emotions and, by extension, your vulnerability is by acknowledging what the meaning of vulnerability is and adopting certain behaviors that can help you identify your emotions and change the way you think about them and act on them. The essential skills to work on are:

• Making yourself slow down for a moment and take a breath. This creates a space between the trigger and your reaction.
• Taking a moment to notice what you’re feeling. Try to catch your physical reactions and locate the body parts that were ‘woken up’ by the activation. For example, do you feel like you can’t breathe? Is your heart racing? Is your stomach upset? Do you feel a sudden headache or tension in your neck? Are you clenching your fists or grinding your teeth? Our bodies react instinctively and by noticing what you feel and where you feel it you’ll be able to identify the type of emotion you’re experiencing.
• Naming the feeling. After taking the time to notice what you’re feeling, you can now identify it. What would you call the emotion you’re experiencing? Is it sadness, fear, anger, or disappointment? Is it a mixture of feelings? If you’re scared, what are you afraid of? If you can identify your emotions, you’ll also be better equipped to share them with others.
• Accepting it. All the emotions we feel are human and natural. Don’t be ashamed of them or try to resist them. It’s important to accept what you’re feeling and to know it’s perfectly valid. Try to have the same compassion for yourself as you would for others.
• Practicing mindfulness. This might sound confusing, however what it actually means is being aware of the moment and yourself within it. Try to pay attention to what’s happening inside and around you, and to be aware of it as an impartial observer, without judgment.

In time, you’ll be able to keep your composure in distressing situations and respond to them calmly without falling into the trap of overwhelming negative emotions and thought patterns.

Emotion Regulation And Change Behavior Patterns

Learning to understand your emotions and respond to them in a healthy manner is not an impossible task. However overwhelming it may feel in certain moments, emotion regulation and vulnerability management help us identify and understand our feelings, leading to well-being and personal growth. This also allows us to open up to others and share our authentic selves with them, helping us achieve mutual understanding, deeper connections, and solid, healthy relationships.

If you’re struggling to achieve meaningful connection and trust with your friends, family, or partner, allow yourself to escape the overwhelming stress of daily life and devote a few days to self-discovery in one of the intimate Glass House retreats. If you prefer to deal with your vulnerability and emotional management issues in private individual sessions, our experienced relationship advocates will guide you in the right direction and remain at your disposal whenever you need them.

We usually think we protect ourselves by not showing vulnerability. People can’t hurt us if they don’t know our weaknesses is a phrase many have expressed. However, to truly understand what vulnerability is and its impact on our emotional well-being and relationships, we must first explore why so many people are afraid of it.

Despite the persistent cliché that the fear of intimacy is typically a male issue, the truth is that women fear intimacy just as much as men. Even though both men and women may initially seem more attractive when they present themselves as mysterious and enigmatic, that usually doesn’t work in the long run. Reality eventually sets in. Healthy relationships require honesty and openness. Without them, all the challenges of lasting romantic partnerships or marriages can become unsurpassable obstacles.

This doesn’t mean you need to completely forget about having any boundaries. The types of relationships we have with people in our lives are significantly different. Setting healthy boundaries is equally important as being open and vulnerable as it protects us from getting into abusive or otherwise unhealthy relationships. Vulnerability doesn’t mean allowing ourselves to be manipulated by people who know precisely how to hurt us. So, all the more reason to understand what vulnerability means.

Is Vulnerability Bad?

Why do so many people feel instant unease at the very thought of vulnerability? Does it mean it’s bad if it feels scary and uncomfortable? There certainly are situations and people that would prove this point. Maybe bad experiences have already happened too many times to be able to expect anything else. Meaning, you opened up and shared how you really felt with a partner and it was weaponized against you.  Or you shared how you felt about a friend who hurt you directly to them and they ghosted you for it.  Many examples show how for some, being vulnerable and then hurt by it makes the concept of vulnerability confusing to many. At PIVOT we talk about transparency with discernment.  

It’s not uncommon for vulnerability to be marked as a weakness, even in early childhood, and those feelings become so deeply rooted in our subconsciousness that we feel such a strong urge to resist revealing our fragile emotions to anyone, even the people we’re closest with.

Ask yourself this: Who knows your deepest fears and what hurts you the most? How many people truly know you? You can even have great friends, long-term relationships, and even let people in up to a certain point. Still, your bare, most genuine selves remain buried deep, causing challenges you might not be aware of.

Can Vulnerability Improve My Relationship?

Allowing yourself to be completely truthful with important people in your life, like your family, close friends, and particularly your romantic partner, may feel like exposing all your weaknesses and giving them a chance to hurt you. However, think about all the times you wished someone was more open about their emotions. So many conflicts can be solved more easily if both sides share their true thoughts and feelings.

If you allow yourself to be open to this type of change, you might find that people in your life feel more confident to do the same. For example, in partner relationships, sharing your feelings, needs, and pain, and having your partner do the same might help you understand new perspectives and turn miscommunication and quarrels into seeing each other’s point of view and doing your best not to cause them any unnecessary heartache.

What Are The Positive Effects Of Vulnerability On Relationships?

One of the most apparent benefits of vulnerability in relationships begins by releasing the burden of all the hidden emotions and unspoken words you’ve been pushing down for years. This can make us deeply unhappy and resentful toward others. However, if you liberate your vulnerability, you liberate yourself to be a better friend, partner, or parent.

Romantic relationships particularly benefit from the intimacy and closeness that vulnerability can create. This is, of course, a two-way street. If your partner doesn’t seem ready to open up just yet, you can lead by example. Your openness may give them the initial feeling of control and allow them to show their own vulnerability.

Letting someone genuinely know you can deepen your relationship. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of your relationship and makes communication more accessible and straightforward. You will be able to understand why your partner acts in a certain way, what drives their reactions, and, more importantly, you will know how to be there for them when they truly need you. Hopefully, you’ll experience these positive effects too. The big question for you is, do you know yourself well enough to share all of what makes you, you? 

How Can I Be More Vulnerable In My Relationship?

You might be thinking that all this sounds great in theory, yet real life doesn’t work that way. Like many other complex tasks, this one also requires determination, persistence, and maybe even a leap of faith. The truth is that being vulnerable carries the risk of getting hurt. However, so do many other things you couldn’t imagine your life without.

Let’s look at steps you could take to slowly start building this habit, step by step, in a way that won’t overwhelm you. If building vulnerability in your relationship is a goal you strive for, this is how you could begin by:

• Being introspective. Getting to know yourself first is essential if you wish to let another person in. Explore your feelings and the reasons behind them. Many childhood or past life experiences could be the underlying issues affecting your current behavior towards your partner. Look for your emotional triggers and the way you respond to them. You might realize that you’ve been blaming your partner for things they have no control over. 
• Taking your time. Sharing your deepest feelings requires trust. Take it one step at a time and feel out the responses you get from your partner. Begin with revealing one thing you’d like to share.  Try not to emotionally bomb your partner with all that you have to say in one setting! As you start feeling safe and understood, you will be able to share more, and your partner will too. 
• Speaking up. Give your partner insight into significant moments while they’re happening. If they do or say something you’re uncomfortable with, let them know. If you’re the only one who knows that you’re hurt, how can you work on changing the behavior patterns that bother you? Be respectful when you speak-up.  Criticizing your partner won’t help.  
• Sharing fears. However scary it may feel to bare yourself like this, remember that shutting down can make you feel insecure and influence your reactions and behaviors in unhealthy ways that could send a wrong message to your partner.
• Expressing your needs. If you let your partner know what you need, you will allow them to decide how to respond and meet those needs. And, realistic expectations matter. 
• Not running from conflict. Instead, allow yourself to feel some discomfort. This will enable you to practice healthy communication and behavior patterns. Stand strong with an open heart and stay in the uncomfortableness of it all.  You WILL get through it the more you practice.

How To Achieve True Intimacy In Your Relationship By Learning To Show Vulnerability

If you’re not sure what actual vulnerability in your relationship is or how to influence it in a way that will improve your communication and intimacy, you’re not alone. This issue is a tough one for many people and learning to share your feelings, even the difficult or painful ones, does require courage. If you’re prepared to take this risk, know that it can bring incredible benefits to your relationship, PIVOT’s relationship advocates are there to guide you through this process. It’s important to remember that you’re not the only one feeling reluctant or even terrified of the prospect of showing your true self to other people. You’ll realize how many people battle these same issues by attending one of our small group workshops guided by experienced Glass House coaches. The first steps might be hard but deepening the connection with your partner is worth it.