Today we're discussing cognitive reappraisal, or the notion of thinking your way out of a negative emotional response to a given situation. We'll be going over research available on cognitive reappraisal, what it looks like in real life, and whether or not it's just gaslighting yourself into feeling like your relationship is better than it actually is.

Dedeker: 00:00:03

Well, I think I've had to learn for myself, when do I know that the train has left the station already in the sense of this emotional response is underway, right? And it's intense. And even though I may have the temptation to be like, I can just think my way through this, I can just cognitize my way through this, I can think my way out of this, that I have to understand for myself, okay, no, I can tell, I can just feel that my heart rate is at a particular speed, and I can feel that I'm at a particular level of sweatiness or shakiness. Where I'm just, I know I'm not gonna think my way out of this. I'm not gonna reappraise my way out of this. It's just gonna turn into rumination. And that's what I know for myself, is I need to switch into finding a way to just feel it.

Jase: 00:00:53

Welcome to the Multiamory Podcast. I'm Jase.

Emily: 00:00:57

I'm Emily.

Dedeker: 00:00:58

And I'm Dedeker.

Emily: 00:01:00

We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.

Dedeker: 00:01:06

Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here for you.

Jase: 00:01:30

On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're asking the question, can you think your way out of a negative emotional response? Imagine your partner has just done something that gets under your skin. They are running late again. They made an offhand comment that hit a nerve. They had to reschedule your date again. You can feel your emotions starting to swell, and you know that this could turn into a bigger conflict. You don't want to go down that path. But it also feels difficult to shift out of the emotional response you're having. Today we'll be diving into the concept of Cognitive Reappraisal, the notion that we can change how we think and feel about a given situation. We're going to look at what the research says, what this looks like in real life, and whether or not this borders on gaslighting yourself into feeling like your relationship is better than it actually is. Before we get into that, if you're interested in learning about our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show and that can help in so many situations in your life, Check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships. It covers our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. You can find links to buy it, as well as links to get our new audiobook version, narrated by Emily, at multiamory.com/book or wherever fine books, ebooks, or audiobooks are sold.

Dedeker: 00:02:50

Emily, when Jase read the intro, I saw you make a pufferfish face. What was that about?

Emily: 00:02:55

Yeah, I feel like I do this pretty often. And it's funny because you used to talk about how you used to Buddhist your way out of negative emotions. And I do think that because the three of us have so much experience with so many different tools and so many different ways of self-soothing, feeling better, reappraising and relooking at what is underneath the baggage that that person just said to me, and how can I look at myself? Maybe I should have done something better in this situation. Maybe it wasn't them. All of those things. I just was like, woof, I probably do this on a daily basis. What about the two of you?

Jase: 00:03:37

It's reminding me, I guess the Buddhist thing reminded me of this, too. But this idea that when people who are raised Christian grow up, they have to somehow unlearn all the shame that they got brought up feeling. And when someone's raised Buddhist, they have to learn to undo all the spiritual bypassing that they were taught how to do when they were a kid. Like that kind of, I'm just gonna think my way out of my negative feelings. And it's just interesting to see how that might show up in people who are more drawn to that. I can just think it through. I can figure this out.

Dedeker: 00:04:08

Yeah, maybe we do gaslight ourselves. I could see that being a byproduct of a particular type of person who's maybe been a little over-therapized potentially. Yeah, that's a good one too. Not that there's anything wrong with therapy, but that it could engender this sense that, if I feel that burst of anger at somebody or annoyance, or if I can't shake my sadness, I think, like you said, Emily, I have all these tools to deal with this emotion so I don't actually have to be this miserable. I surely I need to reach for a tool in order to deal with it. So essentially what we're getting at is is all the many different ways that emotional regulation can look. But I want to look at a very particular flavor today. And so I am wondering if the two of you can think about times where you've been in a relationship conflict and you're very aware of the fact that you're having to hold yourself back emotionally. Or another example of this could be when you're feeling really bummed out, but you pull it together because you have to go to this work event, you know, you have to go to this work party and you have to show your face and so you have to pull it together. But I'm also curious on the other side of, for instance, if you find something really funny, but you're in a meeting and so you can't express it. So I'm just curious about these times where you notice that you're having to essentially pull yourself together and not express your emotions, even if they're positive emotions.

Emily: 00:05:27

The positive emotion one is really an interesting question. Do you remember when I talked about on the show how I was waiting on these two guys and one of them pulled out their phone and it was a headline that said that Joe Biden had decided to exit the race and I ran over because I was waiting on them. I'm like, oh my gosh, is that what's happening? And then he pulled it out and it was a dick pic. Instead, he clicked on the headline, and it ended up being a dick pic.

Dedeker: 00:05:54

Right, right.

Emily: 00:05:54

And that was very funny.

Jase: 00:05:56

Pranking him.

Emily: 00:05:57

Indeed, yeah. In the moment I laughed, and it was very funny, and we all were cracking up, even though I felt like maybe I needed to be a little bit more professional in that moment. But it was absolutely hilarious. But in relationship conflict, I mean, certainly, I do feel the need to be the bigger person in the room, especially in my long-term relationship, where I felt like the conflicts got heated very quickly. Very quickly and very intensely. And often I was being told that I was getting too emotional or too intense, even though I felt like, actually, no, I'm really, really making sure that I'm not doing that. And I can feel myself holding back, but my partner is doing that. And I think that there is a projection onto me of, you must be getting really emotional also. You must be really having an intense time here. But you want to be the bigger person and you want to make sure that it doesn't get out of hand. And it's like somebody has to do that, or else this whole situation is going to get to a place that we can't move past from.

Dedeker: 00:07:07

So this idea that somebody has to be holding it together.

Emily: 00:07:10

Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:07:11

Especially if the other person is really upset.

Emily: 00:07:13

Exactly. And I don't think that everyone does that. I mean, I'm sure that-- and I've certainly not always done that. But I do think that later on in my relationship, like in the last few years of my relationship, I really, really tried to keep the peace. And also in those moments of volatility, which were fairly frequent, I really wanted to be as calm and rational as possible, even though I was being told that I wasn't acting calm or rational.

Dedeker: 00:07:41

Sure.

Jase: 00:07:42

Gosh, there's a whole lot of layers of extra stuff on top of all that, too, I think.

Emily: 00:07:47

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So that was behind my face. That was the face.

Dedeker: 00:07:51

That was the pufferfish. Okay.

Emily: 00:07:52

That was the one.

Dedeker: 00:07:53

That was the spirit of the pufferfish coming out. Out of you?

Jase: 00:07:55

In thinking about this, what first came to mind is something that I feel like comes up in not only my work, but also with multi-amory and various things where you're in a situation or where I'm in a situation where I'm going into a meeting knowing that the other person is already upset with me or upset with my company or upset with something, right? That they're coming in upset.

Dedeker: 00:08:20

You do a lot of essentially kind of sort of customer-client support.

Jase: 00:08:23

Yeah, it's not quite support, but sometimes it is.

Dedeker: 00:08:26

Sometimes you're in that role.

Dedeker: 00:08:28

Yeah.

Jase: 00:08:28

And then also sometimes with multi- amory, if someone's had a problem and they're like, Can I talk to you about this? You know, like going into that sort of situation. And I think also, I've definitely experienced it with partners too. It's like, We're going to have a talk in a sec, and I know that they're upset with me about something. Finding myself in each of those situations, going into it with this, okay, I have to somehow become like water and kind of bend with whatever they throw at me and try to receive it and hear it and not try to fight back against it, because that's not gonna make anything better. But it's definitely that very intentional. I'm gonna go into this call, and I'm gonna try to make sure that person feels heard, that they feel taken care of, and without getting defensive, but also without just being a pushover and being like, you're totally right, I was wrong. It's like, I do find I often am in a situation like that, or where I'm just feeling tired and sick, you know, like getting a migraine or something, and then needing to be like, Nope, I gotta pull it together and be the charismatic person leading this call with a bunch of people or something like that. Yes. So definitely a lot of that feeling like I'm, I almost feel like it's a metaphor of I'm dragging myself along by a rope. Or something like that. I've kind of got to haul myself along, like, okay, haul you up onto this thing, and now you've got to dance on stage or whatever.

Dedeker: 00:09:52

So what's interesting in what both of you are sharing is at least what I hear is I can see how pieces of this type of emotional regulation could be really helpful and also could be maybe detrimental in our lives. I hear little pieces of that from both of you. And that's sort of the driving force of this episode. And specifically, so I found the work of James Gross, who is currently a professor of psychology at Stanford. And back in 1998, Gross published this study called Antecedent and Response Focused Emotion Regulation: Divergent Consequences for Experience, Expression, and Physiology. Now, don't get- yeah, don't get- don't just throw it out there. Don't even pay attention to it. I hope you said it. Okay. So basically what inspired his study was what he thought was this inherent contradiction in what science had been saying about emotion regulation. So the psychological health literature all suggested that emotion regulation was beneficial for mental health and for stress reduction, but all the physical health literature suggested that emotion regulation could be harmful and actually increase your physiological activations.

Emily: 00:10:58

I see.

Dedeker: 00:10:58

By holding it all in and.

Jase: 00:11:00

Repressing it with that whole idea. Okay.

Dedeker: 00:11:03

Yes. And I do think that's a really interesting contradiction to look at because I do think we today get this message that you shouldn't hold back your feelings. You shouldn't silence yourself. You should let yourself feel all of your feelings while at the same time knowing that if you're going to be a functional adult in relationships with other functional adults, you can't let your emotions just run the show the entire time. What do the two of you think?

Jase: 00:11:26

100%, yeah. I agree with that.

Emily: 00:11:29

Yeah, I think that absolutely both of those things are true. I know that when I was growing up, something that my mom often talked about with me is that she wanted to give me a sense of control over my emotions to a degree that she saw a lot of kids out there who couldn't control their emotions and who sort of ran wild a little bit, and that she very much wanted to instill in me the ability to be able to have some control over the intensity of emotions that I think a lot of young people feel. Maybe that was a little bit more than the average young person. But I do think that in my daily life now, I appreciate the fact that I'm able to regulate pretty well, although I do think that sometimes it can reach that boiling point where you've regulated so much and you've held back so much that you just have to go into a room and frickin break down because you're finally letting that pressure valve off. And I do wonder if that becomes less good from a physiological standpoint, I guess, than if you had kind of allowed yourself to feel the real emotion in the moment.

Jase: 00:12:46

Yeah, this is just bringing back a memory of when I was in high school, actually. And I was involved in a lot of stuff with the music program and the theater program and stuff like that. And we had this time where the teacher who was the director was on leave and a lot of students were trying to pick up the slack for that. And there were a lot of changes and a lot of things all happening at the same time. And I was in all of them and kind of in a leadership role because I was a senior at that time. And I remember at one point, our vice principal ended up coming in to lead our class one day because it was just like we're so short on resources or whatever with what was going on. And he was talking to me at one point and I mentioned being stressed out about this. And he's like, I never would have guessed that you seem cool as a cucumber. Well, about that. This and I wouldn't have guessed that you were stressed out. And that was the first time that it clicked for me of, oh, I am completely masking all these feelings I'm having inside, which I do think has been a really useful skill, but that was especially a time where I would have those just breakdowns in the evening sometimes and fall apart. And that's definitely continued through my life too of often people not seeing me as someone who's as vulnerable as maybe I actually experience myself to be.

Emily: 00:14:00

Right. Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:14:01

See, it's funny, 'cause I'm around you all the time, and I feel like you're very vulnerable, but I get the front row seat. I get the front row seat to everything that comes up.

Emily: 00:14:09

Well, what about you?

Dedeker: 00:14:10

Me? What about me? I don't need to share my emotions.

Emily: 00:14:13

I mean, exactly. No, because quite frankly, Dedeker, and I mean, I know that I have seen you in vulnerable moments, but I do think that you are extremely good at keeping your shit together, for lack of a better term. And it's only, it really takes quite a lot to move you in a direction of seeming at all out of control?

Dedeker: 00:14:36

Sure. I think that you and I, Emily, got maybe a similar flavor of parenting from our mothers around emotional regulation, right? Of really a lot of pressure to keep it together. The way that my cake was baked in terms of parenting and nature and nurture, I definitely tend toward the side of you gotta keep it together. You can't let your emotions run the show the entire time. It's not until I started going to therapy, doing somatic work, getting training in somatic therapies before I become a lot more comfortable with like, no, we need to actually feel our feelings, you know, and express our feelings in a particular way. But, but I want to bring it back to Gross's research because there's a distinction here that I think might help this conversation that we're having. Basically Gross designed a study to look at two different ways that we might regulate our emotions. And he called them antecedent focused regulation and response focused regulation. And so basically what he did is that with his test subjects, he would show them a really intense, really graphic video of a medical procedure. It was, and it was specifically designed to elicit feelings of disgust to bring a really strong emotional reaction of disgust. And he had his control group, and then he had one group where he told people to try to think about the content objectively ahead of time. So it's kind of like he gave them a preview of what the content was going to be, right? So that's the antecedent-focused regulation as in ahead of time, change the way that you're going to think about it, right? Try to think about it more objectively. And then he had another group where he told them, you can feel whatever it is you want to feel about it, but just hide your reactions while you're watching. Don't express your disgust, right? So that's the response-focused regulation. And what he found was fascinating that both groups looked calmer on the outside, but their internal experiences were completely different. So the people, the antecedent focus group, the people who tried to think about it objectively ahead of time, they actually felt less distressed while the people who were instructed to suppress their reactions, they felt just as much distress. Plus their body showed physiological signs of stress like increased heart rate and sweating. And so Gross came to this conclusion that this contradiction that he's seeing in the science, he thinks that maybe we're just lumping all emotional regulation tactics together when there's actually many different ways that we might regulate and manage our feelings that have different effects on our minds and bodies. So essentially this idea that...

Jase: 00:17:06

It seems so obvious when you say it.

Dedeker: 00:17:08

No, I know. Changing how you think about a situation before you have the emotional response. Can be positive for your mental health, right? It kind of can prep you for a distressing situation and make it so that less distress arises for you. But if you're already having the emotional response and then you regulate by trying to suppress it or hold it back, that can lead to the long-term negative physical health outcomes.

Emily: 00:17:32

Can I ask, what do you mean exactly by changing how you think about a situation before the emotional response happens? Because sometimes you are presented an emotional situation that you can't predict what's gonna happen.

Dedeker: 00:17:48

Totally.

Emily: 00:17:49

Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:17:49

And often that's part of the emotion is if something catches you off guard, right, and you weren't expecting it, yeah. So that's just a fact of life. To talk about some examples of what maybe that antecedent-focused emotional regulation might look like. So let's imagine that you do have the warning ahead of time. You have a sense that I'm gonna walk into a situation that I feel like might be emotional, right? I'm gonna have a difficult conversation with my partner about an awkward subject. In our intro, we talked about my partner's been canceling dates a lot or having to reschedule our dates a lot, and I want to talk to them about it, and I realize it can be maybe uncomfortable, awkward. Maybe we've talked about this before and they've gotten defensive. So this is a situation where you have that preemptive sense of what you might be expecting. And so that's a situation where you could choose to change how you think about the situation before you're in the middle of the situation and having the emotional response.

Emily: 00:18:41

Right.

Emily: 00:18:41

Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:18:42

So this makes me think of things like the Gottmans talk about, they call it preemptive repair, you know, this idea of maybe you head into that conversation already saying to your partner, I know we've talked about this before and I know that you've been, I see that you've been trying to work on this and also can we try XYZ, right? Or might be heading into that situation and telling yourself something like, okay, maybe it's that they're struggling with time management. Maybe that's something that we can work on together. Okay, I know, I know that they love me and I know that they want this relationship to work and I know that we're on the same team. Those kind of things essentially to prepare yourself for going into this emotional situation. Does that make sense?

Jase: 00:19:23

Yeah. Yeah.

Jase: 00:19:23

Now, I'm thinking about my previous example about getting on a call or going into a conversation knowing that there's going to be criticism and kind of going into it being like, okay, I want to come into this open-minded and able to receive that and not be combative, And I think actually I do pretty well in those situations. But then, yeah, there are also other situations where that kind of comes out of nowhere and catches me off guard. And those are the ones where often afterward I have that feeling of like, I just need to get this off of me. I need to shake this out or something of that. And yeah, maybe kind of like a sweatiness that comes on. So that's really interesting hearing that. And I can vividly picture being in both of those situations within the last two days.

Dedeker: 00:20:06

Oh, wow. Well, so, yeah, so then, then there's the flip side of where maybe you don't have the opportunity to really reappraise things ahead of time or to think about it ahead of time, something catches you off guard. And so then we're only left with a choice to regulate your emotions after the emotional response has already started. Yeah. Now, for some people and in some situations, this looks just straight up like suppression. Because sometimes we have no choice, right? You're headed into the work call. You have to hold back your tears. You're totally enraged by what your coworker just did or said, but you have to intentionally set a more neutral or unfazed facial expression.

Jase: 00:20:45

Or you're out in public at a gathering with your partner, and you learn something really upsetting, but now's not the.

Dedeker: 00:20:51

Time to- now's not the time, right? So you just kind of choose not to express those negative feelings to your partner in that particular moment. Now, I think we have, you know, we think of emotional suppression, and we think that, oh, that must be all bad. It also falls on a spectrum. And with this study, Gross clarified that there's no single emotion regulation strategy that's going to be uniformly superior across all contexts, right? He just kind of emphasized the importance of knowing when to use which strategy and understanding there's costs and benefits to both of these strategies. So I wanted to pose to the two of you is what do you think about something like halt, like calling a pause in a heated conversation? Do you think that counts as a suppressive technique? Where do you think this falls?

Emily: 00:21:37

I think it falls, maybe suppressive is a word to use to describe it, but I think that it's simply a way in which to help the situation not escalate further. I think that that's kind of one of the reasons for it, or it's like a reset button. It's kind of, you know, the game is not going well, and so you're rage quitting. No, I'm kidding.

Dedeker: 00:21:59

But you know, that you're- Some people could be that.

Emily: 00:22:02

That's true. Yeah, yeah. But essentially that you need a moment to stop it from getting more heated because right now, like, there is that potential for it to fly off the handle. And if you don't call halt, then it probably will. And so it's kind of saving yourself and the person in front of you from that potential to actually happen.

Dedeker: 00:22:25

Yeah.

Emily: 00:22:25

I mean, since the whole idea of.

Jase: 00:22:27

Halt is it's identifying that you're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, that there's this other factor that's contributing to how you're feeling. And the point of it is to go address that, not to say, don't feel what you're feeling. It's like, go take care of the other thing. So I don't think it would be a suppression technique. I mean, I suppose anything could be weaponized into that or weaponized against yourself into that. But I think it's addressing sort of a different issue, right? Where it's looking at the cause of it or maybe even giving you the time to scream into a pillow or shake it out or go for a run or something to get the intensity out. And even as I'm thinking about it, it also means when you do come back together to continue the conversation, you've also had time to maybe do that preemptive, that antecedent space of coming back to it.

Emily: 00:23:17

Yeah, that's true.

Dedeker: 00:23:18

Yeah.

Jase: 00:23:19

Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:23:19

So to get really granular with it, when I think about times when I know that I need to pause or take a halt, it's like there are two seconds of suppression, right? Because it's like, I need to suppress. If I can feel my blood is boiling and I can feel like I'm going to slam a door or I'm going to raise my voice, that it's like you need to have that suppression reaction come online for that two seconds that it takes you to, through gritted teeth, be like, Hey, I need to take a walk. Can we meet back here in 20 minutes? So it's like there does need to be a little bit of the suppressive piece, but then I could go for a walk and yeah, I can sigh, I can cry, I can, you know, take angry notes in my phone, or I can just kind of, again, like try to jog and just move that energy through my body. But I do not know, I do feel for me there needs to be that little piece of suppression. I think that's why halting can be so difficult for people is because it really requires you to clench that muscle really hard at the beginning before you can unclench it a little bit when you're on your own.

Emily: 00:24:18

See, halts often for me happened after a really nasty thing was said and then somebody called a halt.

Jase: 00:24:25

I see. So you kind of already got to that point.

Emily: 00:24:28

Yeah, sure.

Dedeker: 00:24:29

Yeah.

Jase: 00:24:29

I think that's the idea.

Jase: 00:24:33

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:24:34

For sure. And so Jase, you also highlighted that you feel like when you take a pause and you're able to release some of that emotion that then you have more of an opportunity to do this antecedent-focused, what the researchers now call cognitive reappraisal, before coming back to the conversation.

Jase: 00:24:52

Yeah, that it's because you know you're coming back into that same conversation. So, like you said, you already have that preview of what's going to be involved. And so, you know, when a halt fails is when you just spend that time getting more worked up, and so you come into that situation even more upset than before, and then maybe you actually did need to take more time or actually get sleep or something like that. But if that's not the case, and I find usually it's like you'll be in that state for the first 10-15 minutes, and then after that is when you'll tend to just naturally, your body will regulate itself a little bit, and then you'll be able to come back generally. It really varies, but I do think it gives you that chance to know, okay, I'm coming back in and I can approach this better.

Dedeker: 00:25:39

So we've already been teasing this a little bit, but we're actually going to get into what the research says as far as using cognitive reappraisal as a technique in your relationships and relationship conflicts specifically.

Jase: 00:25:51

We're going to take a quick break though to talk about our sponsors on this show. We really appreciate our sponsors for helping us to do this show, and we appreciate you for taking a moment to listen to it. And if any seem interesting to you, please do go check them out using our promo codes or links in our episode description. Even if you don't end up purchasing anything, just using those links does still help us so that they know you're listening and that you care, and they'll continue supporting us. And of course, if you would rather have ad-free episodes and be part of our exclusive Discord community where you can connect with other people to discuss this episode, you can go to multiamory.com/join and become one of our supercasters there.

Dedeker: 00:26:32

So since the 90s, there's been a lot more research into specifically how cognitive reappraisal plays plays out specifically within the context of romantic relationships. So this first study is a 2024 study by Poole et al. It's titled the Interplay of Negative Urgency and Cognitive Reappraisal in Couples' Communication Conflict. This was published in Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. And their sample size, they tracked 1,240 majority low-income couples specifically, and they tracked these couples' emotional regulation tactics via a scale that was developed by Gross, who did the original research. And on this emotion regulation scale, I pulled a couple of examples. I ordered them from what sounded to me more healthy to less healthy. So for instance, when I'm faced with a stressful situation, I make myself think about it in a way that helps me stay calm. When I want to feel less negative emotions, such as sadness or anger, I change what I'm thinking about. I control my emotions by not expressing them. I keep my negative emotions to myself. So you can see that even within cognitive reappraisal, there is a spectrum of, I mean, what I think is healthier versions of it versus less healthy versions of it.

Jase: 00:27:45

Yeah. Well, and that's specifically just an emotion regulation scale. So it's unclear if it seems like that included things both from the antecedent beforehand focus as well as... yeah, this.

Dedeker: 00:27:55

This particular scale, I think, focused mostly on the antecedent stuff on the reappraisal.

Dedeker: 00:28:00

But yeah.

Dedeker: 00:28:00

So they found that participants who had high cognitive reappraisal skills that, that would inhibit communication conflict in the relationship, but only for actors with low levels of negative urgency. And let me translate that. Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:28:16

Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:28:17

Negative urgency is the tendency to act irrationally in response to intense negative mood states. So as in this ability to rethink ahead of time how you want to see the situation to change your thoughts in order to change your emotions. It works if you're not somebody who has this very strong urge to act out when you're in a negative mood, basically. So they found that people with high levels of negative urgency, the cognitive reappraisal wasn't really that effective in reducing conflict, which suggests that when we're experiencing really strong emotions, this very deliberate very cognitive process is not as efficient in helping to prevent us from these impulsive behaviors. Which again, when you say it out loud, I'm just like, yeah, that makes sense. If you're blowing your top, you're not going to be able to sit and be like, I should actually sit and rethink this and think about this in a way that makes me feel less angry.

Jase: 00:29:17

It's interesting, though, if they're talking about this cognitive reappraisal beforehand, though, kind of this idea that even if you try to prepare for it, if you're someone who has a tendency to just go hard as soon as you feel something, something that it's like even planning ahead doesn't seem to make as much of a difference. Am I reading that correctly? That that's kind of what they're getting at?

Dedeker: 00:29:37

Yes. That, yeah, it's like if you don't also have this kind of response focused emotion regulation tactics that work for you, it seems like it's not going to matter how much reappraisal you do ahead of time is what my takeaway is here.

Jase: 00:29:51

Yeah, almost like you need a little of each.

Emily: 00:29:55

I did want to point out, because we talked a little bit about therapy and the overtherapizing kind of that some people get into. And I do think that a lot of therapists out there are very much in the mindset of, I just have to affirm my patient and all of their feelings that they have, period. And I think that while there's benefit in that, it can also sometimes teach a person that their feelings are valid regardless, that they should be affirmed and that it doesn't necessarily teach them the ways in which they can more appropriately act based on those emotions. And so when I look at something like this, I do think about situations that I've been in with people who just kind of allow their emotions to simply run the show instead of kind of stepping back and pausing and thinking about how can I better look at this situation or think about this situation beforehand and then act after that, after that thought process has occurred. I don't know. I'm not sure how much that that necessarily ties into this, but we do sometimes live in a land of both of those things being the case, where some of us are very much taught to suppress slash control our emotions, and some of us are taught your emotions are valid. You have to act on them regardless of how difficult or painful it is for anyone else.

Jase: 00:31:23

Yeah, I think not just from therapy, but I've definitely seen people who it feels like they were brought up that way.

Emily: 00:31:29

Exactly.

Jase: 00:31:30

About how expressing their emotions was received, whether they were taught to really emphasize keeping it under control, or whether they were kind of taught, yeah, anything you say and feel is treated as valid, and so they always expect everyone's gonna receive them that way. I've definitely encountered that. I feel like it tends to happen, at least from what I've seen, less often because of therapy, but more often just because of how they were raised and what it was like for them growing up.

Emily: 00:31:53

Yeah, or a combination of multiple things. I'm just thinking about a particular person who after therapy felt very emboldened by being told, like, your emotions are valid, you need to feel them, you need to act on them, blah, blah, blah.

Dedeker: 00:32:06

That you felt like they just kind.

Emily: 00:32:07

of puked them all over you. I do think that it had kind of a negative effect. I understand where they were coming from because they, at one point, really suppressed their emotions, and then they were told to go in the opposite direction, but that in doing so, It created these situations where the conflict that I had with them ended up being way more emotionally charged than I think it needed to be, just because there was a lack of that thinking beforehand. And let's try to emotionally regulate to a degree so that we can come at this with less volatility.

Dedeker: 00:32:42

Well, so I want to keep diving into how this shows up in relationship. And I found this interesting research from 2022 by Sison et al. Called When We're Asked to Change: the Role of Suppression and Reappraisal in Partner Change Outcomes. This was published in Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. I've actually written a whole other episode about this particular research, about this idea of what happens when somebody asks us to change. So I don't want to spoil too much about it, but essentially they did these short recorded interviews with about 100 couples where one person was given one minute to think about something they wanted their partner to change, and then they were given one minute exactly to tell their partner. Then the partner, who in the research is referred to as the change target, was given one minute to respond to that request, and then they were both given two minutes afterwards to speak freely. And so they recorded these interviews immediately afterward. The change targets, the partners who were asked to change, were given a survey to measure both their motivation to change as well as what emotion regulation tactics they used during the discussion. And they found that specifically, this cognitive reappraisal helped partners actually successfully make the changes that their partners requested. They found that the people who used cognitive reappraisal showed not only more motivation to change, but they put in greater effort, they had better success, and both partners actually noticed the improvement more. And so again, I'll get more into this in the dedicated episode that it, I think especially in a vulnerable situation like that where somebody is asking us to make a change, And hopefully in an ideal world, they do it in a non-shitty way when they bring, hopefully. This seems like a very controlled situation, you know, where the person was given time to think ahead of time. You know, it wasn't like a knee jerk just yelling at your partner for, you know, never doing the dishes or whatever. But, but it does seem like this set people up for success more. However, there is a lot of research that also suggests that this doesn't work if you're just in a bad relationship.

Emily: 00:34:43

Straight up.

Dedeker: 00:34:44

Yeah. You know, then it really doesn't matter. There's this 2018 study, Relationship Quality and Cognitive Reappraisal Moderate the Effects of Negative Urgency on Behavioral Inclinations Toward Aggression and Intimate Partner Violence. This is in psychology of violence. And the long story short is that kind of like what we saw with the earlier study that cognitive reappraisal, it really only goes so far. And specifically it only goes so far if you're in a relationship that is low quality, has low trust, has low satisfaction, or is abusive. So it's this thing where I do think that, and this is why I kind of started with this question of, can we just gaslight ourselves into a better relationship? Like if a relationship is bad, can.

Emily: 00:35:22

We just- We certainly have tried.

Dedeker: 00:35:23

We certainly have all tried, haven't we?

Emily: 00:35:25

Yeah, definitely.

Dedeker: 00:35:27

You know, like, is this actually effective? Just like think your way out of, you know, interpreting what you think is a partner's negative action into thinking more positively about it. And it's kind of like, yes, we can. But with limitations.

Jase: 00:35:41

Yeah, it's just really making me think a lot about this balance between your feelings being real and being valid, but also not being truth and not necessarily being the truth for anyone else, not even yourself really. And it's like some people come in, like you were saying, Emily, you had that person you knew who who had originally felt like, oh, none of my feelings are valid, so I need to keep them inside. And so they needed to learn, like, no, these are real. These are valid. But then they maybe swung too far the other way to feeling like, and these are truth that everybody needs to hear and that everyone should have to accept.

Jase: 00:36:21

Right.

Jase: 00:36:21

And that I think we have people who start on the opposite side of feeling like, oh, all my feelings are truth. And then, for them, needing to find that balance the other direction of. These aren't truth, but then you also don't want to go so far that then you don't feel like your feelings are valid or that they're real. And that balance seems like a key part of this here.

Dedeker: 00:36:41

Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:36:42

I think this leads into, again, thinking about the limitations of this is, I think this is why, like when people are in actually abusive situations that things like couples therapy are contraindicated.

Dedeker: 00:36:54

Yeah.

Jase: 00:36:55

Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:36:55

Because I think it's because of this is that a therapist can give you a lot of ways to reframe situation and can swoop in with like, okay, this really mean thing that I heard your partner say, what I think they're actually trying to say is, you know, that they love you and they care about you and that's why this is so hard for them or whatever, that it's like it can inject this kind of cognitivizing to a situation where like the ship has maybe sailed on that.

Emily: 00:37:25

It does beg the question, how do you know and how do you figure out what is the appropriate amount of cognitive reappraisal versus when is it time to cut and run? And I do think that it's that delicate dance that we all go through, especially in like long-term relationships where we've put a lot of time and effort into them, and maybe they were good at one point or it was easier, and then it just sort of goes sour over time. That's really fascinating, like talking about the couples counseling stuff and trying to to reframe sort of what the meaning behind someone saying something really unkind to you, triggering something, pushing a button. Because of course, those things may be true. They may have meant something else, what they're longing for, whatever it might be. But they just said it to you in a very unkind way. But if it is that pattern of behavior that seems to happen all the time, I think that that's when we get into a situation where this is better to not just try to Buddhist your way out of it, as it were.

Dedeker: 00:38:32

Right.

Jase: 00:38:32

We're gonna take one more break before we go on to learn some experiments that we can all do on ourselves and some ways that we can actually apply some of this to improve the quality of our lives and our relationships. We're gonna take a quick break again to talk about a couple sponsors. We really do appreciate you taking the time to check them out. If you want, you can just go to the links in our show description as well. To use those, use our promo codes. That does really help our show. And then of course, supporting us directly is amazing. And you can do that by joining our [email protected]/join where we have a sliding scale to try to make that accessible to everybody.

Dedeker: 00:39:11

So I don't want to discourage anybody from not trying to put on some sort of cognitive reframe, you know, especially if they're heading into a relationship conflict with a partner or they're noticing that something their partner or did or said got under their skin, because I do think it's still quite useful. I'm wondering about if you're in a situation where you already have an emotional groove that's worn into your reactions with a particular partner, do you think it's still possible to implement something like this and helpful?

Emily: 00:39:41

It can be helpful, but I do think it's difficult. And if it is too difficult, I think that that's telling about the state of the relationship in general. But if the two of you are willing to try, because again, as we've said, especially the longer that you know someone, sometimes the less you actually know about them, because your cognitive biases surrounding all of the things that they used to do are sort of the way in which you see them rather than perhaps the person that they've become or the changes that they've made.

Jase: 00:40:13

Something that I've thought about a lot with these kind of ingrained patterns is I'll see couples do this thing where one of them will try to make a change, but the other doesn't receive it. And so that person ends up kind of feeling more hurt and ends up falling back into the way they were before. And then that other person, I've seen them try to change something, try to repair something, but by that point, the first person is not ready to receive it. And I remember first seeing this actually with my parents long ago. But, you know, and there are lots of years of ingrained behaviors and stuff there. But I've seen it in a lot of other cases and sometimes in my own relationships where looking back, able to see this, what was missing was kind of a big enough shake-up and change where both people were on the same page about it at the same time. And I think that that's one of the reasons why I've been such a big proponent of RADAR. As our way of having these check-ins, is so that you're making it less likely that you miss each other's attempts at things, that you're able to check in regularly enough that it's not just let's decide to do a thing, but it's let's make a decision again every month or every couple of weeks or every couple of months or however often we're checking in. And then I also think that doing something to really shake up how you approach things is often a way that I want to approach it. And I know we've done some of that, the three of us, if there have been things in doing MULTI, where we kind of keep getting frustrated over certain things, or there keep being types of friction there of this not just let's say, let's do it differently, or let's try to handle that differently. It's like, okay, how can we totally change the way we do this thing as a way of kind of breaking out of those ruts? So kind of thinking about if there are ruts on the road and your tires fall into those, It's like trying to just sort of scooch to the side is going to be hard because you fall back into it, but just turning 45 degrees and going a different direction or, you know, going down a road that's a few feet over, you're not going to be as close to those ruts to fall back into them.

Dedeker: 00:42:26

So how do you think that plays out here?

Jase: 00:42:28

Kind of like even before the cognitive reappraisal is this, what could we do to make the conditions that we associate with these emotions that we have to make less of those exist. So if you think about with Halt, the hungry, angry, lonely, tired thing, it's like if any of those are going on, you're gonna be more likely to be upset. But maybe it's also we're more likely to be upset when we talk about money after a long day at work or something that it's like a constant, this is a constant argument we get into. Or it's always when we talk about chores at the same time that we're changing the baby's diaper and trying to get ready for work or that there's kind of this place in time, we noticed this pattern coming up of saying, how can we change that? Let's maybe commit to we're not going to have that conversation at that time anymore. We need to plan a different time to have that conversation and also have some discipline for both of us to not bring it up at that time, which is maybe where a microscript or something to kind of short circuit that pattern could help. But it almost feels like if you could remove more of the other triggers, it might be easier for that cognitive reappraisal to work as well as that little bit of emotional regulation and suppression that seems to be required to let that cognitive appraisal in advance actually do its job.

Emily: 00:43:44

Sure.

Dedeker: 00:43:44

So it's like you've got to create enough breathing room for your brain to even show up in the first place.

Jase: 00:43:49

That's even in your body, too, not just your brain. But yeah, the whole system, the whole association, to try to do something to change that up. And I think that could look lots of different ways.

Emily: 00:44:00

I will say some of those seem like the nothing fights perhaps that we get into. I am wondering about smaller disagreements versus ones that are larger and more global in the relationship that might cause friction because, you know, it's not going to necessarily ever change or ever be better. It's those perpetual problem type things versus everyday issues that are potentially going to be able to change or grow or something along those lines.

Dedeker: 00:44:33

Yeah, I think part of that is, yeah, so if you are actually able to halt or you actually do have time heading into a situation where you're anticipating that you might have an emotional response or maybe you're starting to notice that you're having an emotional response to a particular conflict, like Jase's example of, I need to bring up this money conversation because literally we need to pay the credit card bill by six o'clock today. And so it's like we can't keep putting it off. And unfortunately it's happening right now, right? I think a cognitive reappraisal for yourself might look something like reminding yourself, okay, yeah, my partner is probably also gonna be feeling scared and overwhelmed by this conversation too. Or telling yourself, okay, I have to remember that I love this person and that we're on the same team and that ultimately we want the same goals. Because I really do think this is very simple. I don't think you have to sit down and meditate for half an hour just repeating something to yourself about how I'm not gonna get angry, I'm not gonna get angry, I'm not gonna get angry. I really do think it just takes.

Jase: 00:45:31

That little bit of cognization.

Jase: 00:45:32

Yeah. And I think that's also easier when you change up the circumstances around it of like, yeah, we're gonna go into this, but let's make sure we both make tea beforehand. So we kind of have made a little ritual, just like something to change the association from like, oh, I'm half distracted while we're trying to talk about this thing that I think can also make it easier to react emotionally when you're kind of not totally present. Like you're a little bit distracted thinking about other things at the same time.

Emily: 00:46:00

You're changing the container for the ways in which the two of you approach the conversation and trying to break the unhealthy pattern that you usually get into when that conversation starts.

Dedeker: 00:46:12

Well, and speaking of that, if I can come skidding in to defend Buddhism finally.

Emily: 00:46:16

Oh, good. We've been dunking on it this whole episode.

Dedeker: 00:46:19

To raise a defense of mindfulness, meditation, Buddhism. Like you were saying, Emily, there's a lot of value in identifying your patterns, like your wave pattern of your emotional triggers. There's a lot of value in learning to identify what it feels like in your body when you're at a level two versus you don't even notice until you're at a level nine and you're about to yell or throw something or slam a door or something like that. So I do think that having some kind of mindfulness practice can help with that of learning to notice when those processes are starting earlier in your body, but also with your brain. There's a certain amount of this is, you have to notice what thoughts you're having before you can choose to reappraise those thoughts and put it in a different thought, I think. Sure. Like, you have to, when you're heading into that money conversation, there has to be a part of you that notices, right, I'm already playing out this script. I'm feeling tension in my body. And so in response to that tension in my body, I'm already playing out this script of, this is gonna be hell. This is gonna be difficult. He's probably gonna give this same argument that he always does, and I won't be able to stand. And if he tries to say that yada yada yada, right, that it's like, I think you have to notice that that's where you're starting to go. Before you can make the decision to be like, no, you know what? I'm gonna try this reframe so that I can hopefully set us up for success heading into the conversation.

Jase: 00:47:37

Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:47:38

There. That's my defense.

Dedeker: 00:47:39

Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:47:40

It's good.

Jase: 00:47:40

I actually, I mean, yeah, we did dunk on it a lot, but I mean, I also think it's great and a really powerful skill to have and an important thing to have because it's really, Buddhism isn't really about just suppressing your feelings in the moment. It's more about that reappraisal, more of that preemptive kind of changing the way that you look at life and your own feelings and your own existence and everything, right? So I do think that's really helpful. The thing I keep coming back to that's really baking my noodle is this idea that you need both of these types of emotional regulation for the other one to function well. It's like by doing this preemptive, antecedent-focused reappraisal, you're able to better control those emotions when you're in that situation, but also you have to at least have some ability to control them in the situation. It's like you're almost like you're setting up an ability beforehand, but kind of like you said with the halt, where you need to suppress enough to do the halt, it's almost like in the moment you need to have enough ability to delay your expression of the feelings or suppress them just a little bit so that your cognitive pre-appraisal work helps you to then not get as upset about it. That, to me, is really interesting, the interplay between those two different ways those go.

Emily: 00:49:04

I think in non-monogamy, both of those things are extremely important, especially when, for instance, you hear, okay, my partner just slept with someone new for the first time, and I'm hearing about it after the fact. And you realize, okay, this has happened before. I maybe even knew that they were going out and going to have a fun time. And so the possibility of that was going to happen. And so I'm setting myself up for knowing beforehand this is a possibility. And so I can come at this situation a little bit more easily when I hear about it. And then when it does happen in the moment, you have kind of that reaction set up in your brain. Okay, I'm not going to react to this negatively. I'm going to be able to sort of just listen and hear and be like, okay, how did it go? I hope everything, you know, we were safe, we were doing all the things that we agreed upon kind of thing, and hearing more about the facts, but that you're using again all of these tools in your toolkit, and that one of them is understanding that you can suppress maybe negative emotions that you're having, as well as helping yourself preemptively with understanding that this might be a possibility. So I'm able to come to the situation more easily and rationally and carefully.

Dedeker: 00:50:20

Right.

Dedeker: 00:50:21

And then also, I mean, it sounds like in your description that it's like, but you also have these tools on hand where even though you did the reappraisal, it's like maybe you still have like the squishy feeling that comes up in the moment, even if you did all the reappraising of like, I know this is a possibility, and also I know I'm in a non-monogamous relationship and I'm consenting to this and all that stuff, but it's like you still have the skills to also hold steady.

Emily: 00:50:47

With yourself, soothe yourself, even when the squishy feelings still come up. There are so many skills, and this is just yet another, I think, tool in the toolbox to be aware of. I appreciate that we're learning how beneficial this can be, how beneficial both skills can be for sure, especially in something like non-monogamy, that you don't always know what you're going to get, and you have multiple people involved, and so there's the potential, I think, for more unknowns to occur. And therefore the possibility for you to need to have these skills available to you because there may be emotions that come up that are squishy, that are challenging.

Jase: 00:51:25

Something I'm curious to hear from you, Dedeker, since you've done some training in somatic practitioner work, that a lot of times when we talk about somatic therapies, it's expressing stuff that's held in your body, but way after the fact. But I think something that I'm curious what your thoughts are on this as well, but that idea of learning to notice these changes in your body earlier. Like I think I've talked about this in the past of, what was it like setting the the sensitivity of your detector lower so that it gets triggered earlier on in the process of getting upset or of getting stressed out so that you earlier can go, oh, I need to do something to handle this or regulate this instead of waiting until you're screaming to realize I'm angry. So I'm curious your thoughts on that, or if there's any particular techniques or things you've learned in that training.

Dedeker: 00:52:20

Yeah, well, I think I've had to learn for myself, when do I know that the train has left the station already in the sense of this emotional response is underway, right? And it's intense. And even though I may have the temptation to be like, I can just think my way through this, I can just cognitize my way through this. I can think my way out of this, that I have to understand for myself, okay, no, I can tell, I can just feel that my heart rate is at a particular speed, and I can feel that I'm at a particular level of sweatiness or shakiness where I'm just, I know I'm not gonna think my way out of this. I'm not gonna reappraise my way out of this. It's just gonna turn into rumination. And that's what I know for myself is I need to switch into to finding a way to just feel it. Now, ideally, I'm in a situation where I'm able to ask for some time away, right? I'm able to take some time away, or I'm in a space where I can just move my body around, right? I can roll around on the floor if I want to, or I can just curl up in a child's pose on top of my bed if I want to, or I can sit down and just journal it all out or whatever, or I can have a cry, you know, that's the ideal. Obviously it's a little bit more tricky if it's, oh wow, I just had a bomb dropped on me and now I need to go present a workshop or whatever. And I just sit on this client call, which has happened sometimes. That's a little bit harder. I think those are the situations where then it's just a little bit of whatever it is that you need to ground, just immediately ground to get through the next hour or whatever until you can actually go and let yourself feel it. Did that answer your question?

Jase: 00:54:00

Yeah, I guess what I'm wondering about is it's like one thing to say, be aware of your body and how it's feeling to try to detect this earlier on, but it's another thing to say, how do you learn to do that? I guess that's the thing I'm pondering. I think the only thing that's coming to mind for me is if you find yourself after a situation where you felt like you really had to hold it in, and that afterward is to kind of go, When you're at that moment of, okay, now's the time I can break down, I can freak out afterward, of what is it that my body wants to do? Is it that I want to hit something? Is it that I want to wave my arms around? Is it that I want to shake myself? Or is it, like you said, Dedeker, I want to curl up in a corner of kind of maybe actually taking a moment afterward to then see if you'll start noticing that feeling come up earlier. That's what came up for me in my mind when thinking about this. I was just curious if you had any other things you've noticed working with people.

Dedeker: 00:54:59

I think at least in my work with people, it involves a lot of slowing down, like really slowing down and actually creating space to feel things. Because honestly, our day-to-day lives are set up so that we really don't have to feel much if we really don't want to. Like in your pocket, you have the instant distraction machine that will take you away from having to feel anything but the thing that you're feeling right in that moment, right? And there's a lot to hide behind. So at least for myself, my journey has involved, you know, needing to have a lot of time and space, whether that's like sitting with a therapist who's gonna let me sit and actually feel things, maybe guide me through that, or, you know, I'm that person who will go on the 10 day meditation retreat and just sit with only myself and my feelings. And that really makes your instrument very sensitive very quickly.

Jase: 00:55:42

Yeah.

Dedeker: 00:55:43

I don't know. I think some of it is an awareness of what are the things that we hide behind so that we don't have to notice that we're feeling these things. But it's like, it can be very benign though. I will have, I still have to catch myself when I'm going about my day and I'm realizing I'm starting to get irritated about this thing that my partner said an hour ago, but I'm only letting myself actually notice that I'm feeling irritated right now because for some reason before, I was just like, I can just power through, you know, and just force myself to, I don't know, just do whatever it is that I'm focused on doing right in that moment and not even acknowledge, hey, I'm feeling this way. Because I find for myself sometimes I don't even have to say it out loud to anybody if I just have to notice, My chest is tight and I know it's in response to this one thing. And I see that and I can acknowledge that and I feel like I'm at a level one. But there's something about putting that attention on it is really important.

Jase: 00:56:33

I like that. Yeah, maybe practicing in situations where you might be at a level one or two and never go past that. I'm only mildly irritated by this thing. But taking a pause to be like, oh, I got a little irritated at that. What did it feel like to to attune you to recognizing that later on. That's an interesting one.

Dedeker: 00:56:50

But I also want to say again, there is a place for these moments when we have to emotionally suppress. Seriously, though, don't laugh out loud when you're in the audience watching your metamour's horrible performance art. That's a good time for you to emotionally suppress and let it out somewhere else or express it in some other way. If you're about to sit down at dinner with your partner's family and you're really annoyed about, I don't know, the way that they were driving on the way over there, that's probably a good time for you to pull yourself together and suppress so that you're not just puking all over your partner and their family, right?

Jase: 00:57:28

Metaphorically speaking.

Dedeker: 00:57:30

Metaphorically speaking. And it doesn't mean you have to do that all the time, but it does mean this is just one piece of the puzzle and it is part of the toolkit. But on the flip side, it's also good to have the reality check that if there is a consistent pattern in your relationship where you feel like you have to constantly suppress your feelings around your partner where you can never actually express them or feel them, where you're routinely disrespected or neglected or personally criticized, that that's a situation where no amount of your emotional regulation tactics are probably going to change that. You always have to put in that disclaimer.

Jase: 00:58:03

No, that's a good way to think about it too, of seeing, is this just a pattern of reaction or is this more of a problematic pattern of I'm continually not able to express these things no matter how hard I try, then yeah, maybe that is a bigger thing to look at.

Dedeker: 00:58:18

So in closing, I think emotional regulation tactics and specifically this cognitive reappraisal, it can be a powerful tool for managing the way you show up in relationship conflicts or emotionally intense situations. And it's important to remember that none of this is about forcing yourself to feel differently. It's about expanding your perspective to be able to see the full picture and allow for different possibilities. The goal isn't to gaslight yourself into thinking you're in a better relationship than you are, or gaslight yourself into happiness, but it's to be able to approach conflicts with both that emotional awareness and that cognitive flexibility.

Emily: 00:58:54

All right, well, this was a really fascinating episode. Just interesting to look at how we all tend to, I think, do this and how there can be great parts of this cognitive reappraisal and then also how maybe sometimes you need to actually feel your feelings and be sure to understand that there is value in knowing what's going on there and not just constantly suppress everything, because I think some of us are taught to do that, and that's not always the healthiest way to go about being in relationships with other people. Our question of the week, which is going to be on our Instagram stories, is when you're anticipating conflict with a partner, how do you set yourself up for success? I like that one. That's really good. That's Very interested to see what people have to say about that. And the best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is in the episode discussion channel in our Discord server, or you can post on our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to multiamory.com/join. In addition, you can share with us publicly on Instagram @multiamorypodcast. Multiamory is created and produced by Jase Lindgren, Dedeker Winston, and me, Emily Matlack. Our production assistants are Rachel Shenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on Multiamory.com.