Making Sure Emotional Flooding Doesn't Capsize Your Relationship

We all know what it's like to get carried off by some rough emotional currents when we are dealing with our mate. These aren't the day-to-day flashes of anger or hurt. I am talking about the giant waves of bad feelings that completely knock you down and take any rational thought with them. This is how it usually goes. You are in the middle of a conflict or disagreement, your partner says or does something, and suddenly you fall down a deep dark rabbit hole. The only notes you register are rage, hurt, panic and fear.

When I'm caught in one of these rip tides, I have the physical sensation of something taking hold of my body -- my muscles clench, my temperature skyrockets and my stomach does turns. My mind goes into overdrive. I am deaf to anything my husband is saying and can only hear the blame narrative rapidly evolving in my head. I become a prosecuting attorney endlessly repeating a courtroom argument. Mind you, when I'm all caught up like this, my allegations are usually not terribly sound. Any reasonable judge would probably toss my case right out (or at least knock the charge down from a felony to a misdemeanor). But even knowing that doesn't dampen my prosecutorial zeal.

The difference between flooding and more manageable experiences of our emotions is one of magnitude. You reach the point when your thinking brain -- the part that can take in gray areas, consider other sides, stay aware of the real state of affairs -- is shut out. Psychologist John Gottman explains this emotional hijacking as the hallmark of our nervous system in overdrive. Something happens -- and it could be almost anything -- in your interaction with your partner that sets off your internal threat-detection system. This is your parasympathetic nervous system in action, preparing you for battle or flight. In this state, you lose some of your capacity for rational thought. Science describes this is as a decrease of activity in your pre-frontal cortex, the center of higher cognition.

The stuff that works well when you are being chased by a mastodon doesn't work so well in the home. Our instinctive reactions in these moments usually make the situation worse. The fight response we are primed for becomes a cascade of angry words that just deepen wounds. In flight, we might stalk out of the room or shut out our mate with icy silence. Basically, when we react in the grip of emotional flooding, we do and say the kind of things that are likely to trigger emotional flooding in our partner. And then both people in the room are out of control.

Here are some things I have learned along the way from my own experiences, and from counseling other couples, that may help you and your mate find your ways when either of you gets derailed by emotional flooding:

• Make a commitment to try self-soothing the next time you find yourself caught up in a heavy emotion over this or that with your partner. The reality is that it is not easy to hold back from acting out when we are completely enraged or feeling utterly devastated. But if you have essentially accepted the idea that you can't entirely trust yourself and your perceptions when you are in a state of total reactivity, you at least have a fighting chance of pulling yourself back from the spiral. Some part of you will have registered the notion that you probably shouldn't be so quick to buy whatever blame narrative or catastrophic rendering of things that your mind has come up with.

And by all means, don't get down on yourself when you do get tripped up and act out. That's what "I'm sorry" is for.

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