Marriage Counseling Helps Cope With Emotional Triggers

Marriage counseling can help you to manage emotional triggers that affect your relationship. Experiences from our past can make us oversensitive in our current relationships. A simple word or action from a partner can open up old wounds that have nothing to do with them. These emotional triggers often elicit out-of-proportion or inappropriate responses that strain the relationship. Healing those old wounds in therapy might just save your marriage.

 

 

Emotional Triggers In Relationships

When we are carrying around pain from being ignored, criticized, or betrayed, we become overly vigilant in watching for those behaviors in others. This causes us to see things that aren’t there and make mountains out of molehills, which we justify with the perspective that our partner is hurting us knowingly if not intentionally. The problem is compounded when our reactions are perceived as unreasonable by our partner and make them feel defensive.

 

Simple misunderstandings turn into painful arguments because while we are feeling the pain of past experiences, our partner has only this moment to understand where we’re coming from. It is confusing and frustrating to be accused of hurtful behavior you have not engaged in, so our partner reacts to our reactions. The key to changing these patterns is understanding the source of the trigger, communicating it to your partner, and doing the emotional processing work necessary to heal.

 

Coping With Triggers In Your Marriage

Your partner is not responsible for easing or healing your triggers. Only you can work through the old trauma that caused them, but if you don’t, it is bound to affect your present relationship. It is important to be aware of your reactions to your partner and the stories you tell yourself about them. Your partner’s role is to acknowledge what is true about those stories and what isn’t.

 

Take the time to talk to your partner and try to understand their point of view. Ask them why they did or said what they did before drawing conclusions, and resist the urge to think in absolutes like ‘always’ and ‘never’. Healthy communication can solve most problems in relationships, and this is no exception.

 

Marriage Counseling Improves Communication

The best way to learn to cope with triggers in your relationship is through marriage counseling. A trained and certified Counselor can teach you strategies like mindfulness and interrupting or distracting from negative thought patterns as well as better communication techniques.

 

In counseling, we learn that coping is not really about what is happening around us so much as how we interpret the situation. Our perception is the key, which is why good coping strategies focus on reframing or managing how we perceive stressors.

 

For more information about marriage counseling, call Take Charge at (913) 239-8255. To make an appointment, click here.