As humans, we find ourselves in the strange predicament of being “rational agents” capable of logical thought and intentional decision-making and simultaneously being emotional animals whose behavior is substantially organized by our instinctive and unconsciously conditioned responses to stimuli in our environments. Our collective behavior and experience are determined by the functioning of these two parallel, interrelated systems: the cognitive mind, and the emotional/intuitive one. When your emotions are generally “aligned” with your conscious intention and rational decision-making—when you feel like doing what you intend to do—things tend to go a lot more smoothly than when your emotions are “working against” you. As such, there are a lot of reasons for us to want to control or at least steer our emotional systems into alignment with our goals—a task generally called “emotional regulation.”
So, the previous post on emotion and attachment roughly boils down to that core insight that there are these two systems running in parallel—the cognitive/rational and the intuitive/emotional. From there, this post will dive into the relationship between them, approaching that practical task of emotional management using parenting (or more specifically self-parenting) as a central working metaphor. The analogy of a parent-child relationship here refers to the relationship between the inner child of emotion and intuition (Haidt’s elephant, Kahneman’s system 1, Tina Payne-Bryson’s downstairs brain) and the inner parent of conscious, intentional, “cognition” thought (Haidt’s rider, Kaneman’s System 2, Payne-Bryson’s upstairs brain). Within an interpersonal relationship, this metaphor expands to a conceptual “family of four” composed of two inner parents and two inner children.
To put that differently, the overall task of “emotional management” can be prohibitively complex if you try to approach it mechanistically, employing a particular cognitive tool for a particular emotion arising in response to a particular situation. Conceptualizing the overall functioning of your emotional system as a “child” entrusted to the care of your cognitive mind can reduce this complexity through analogy to “parenting situations” that may be easier to visualize and find effective interventions. Nonetheless, parenting is still a vastly complex topic from a conceptual standpoint, with which psychology has been wrestling since its inception. Within that vast topic, I’ll just be focusing on a few core “parenting issues” which particularly illustrate the analogous core concerns and potential “leverage points” in the parenting relationship between your cognitive mind and your (and your partners’) emotional self.
Paying Attention
Effective parenting necessarily starts with paying attention to your kid. Similarly, the task of productively relating to one’s or one’s partner’s “emotional self” starts with paying attention to it, or in other words, “emotional awareness.” Mindfulness has become the common label for the act of intentionally focusing one’s awareness on some feature of one’s own sensory experience or mental process, a skill many of us learn in childhood whether or not it’s called by that name. That skill of noticing and naming the emotion you’re feeling serves as the foundation for self-parenting in the same way that paying attention to a child is a precondition for effective response to their behavior and needs.
When asked to notice or identify our own feelings, many of us find ourselves drawing a blank much of the time, but emotional awareness is ultimately a skill that can be improved with practice. It’s often observed emotions are often first perceptible as sensations in the body, such that focusing conscious attention on the body may be a useful part of developing this awareness. This overall process could be summarized as a habit of asking yourself questions like:
- What am I feeling right now?
- What emotion might be motivating my actions?
- What am I feeling in my body?
- What is my body telling me?
Considering emotional awareness within a relationship brings up the more complicated question of paying attention to and potentially managing a partner’s emotional experience (which we’ll return to later). Humans are genetically equipped with extraordinary technology in this area, resulting in surprisingly common situations where—while interacting, and especially if you know me well—you may be more aware of my emotional state than I am. This presents us with both the opportunity—and the risk—of sharing or using this information in support of our relationship. One part of the complication is the fact that—even if it might be good information for you to have—it often feels a little condescending (or in other words, parental) to be told what you’re feeling, especially by someone you’re not feeling particularly warmly towards at the moment. One way to handle this is simply to avoid this kind of commentary while in conflict with your partner, but many couples seem to find benefit in developing some agreed-upon procedure for sharing such information, in that explicitly inviting you to respectfully offer observations about my emotional state may help reduce the sting of being “caught” having feelings. In other words, my ability to make productive use of your observations about my emotions, depends both on my willingness to see myself as having them, and on my willingness to be seen having them, which in turn depends on my overall attitude about those feelings in general.
Relatedly, I may also be able to leverage my observations about your emotional state as information about my own emotional state, effectively using your feelings as a “mirror” for my own. Even if I don’t say anything about it to you, simply noticing that you seem to be getting frustrated might be a good cue for me to ask myself if I might be feeling similarly. Alternatively, I might use my observation about your emotional state as a moment to ask myself what feeling of mine that your feeling might be a logical response to.
Verbal Strategies
To boil down a lot of research and theory on “affect regulation” the process of explicitly verbally/cognitively “making sense” of emotional experience is perhaps the single most powerful and flexible tool we have available for directly soothing emotional distress. In other words, as in literal parenting, much of the job of effective self-parenting involves “talking,” and “listening,” (to yourself), reflecting the importance of verbal interaction in building a child’s capacity to coherently “make sense” of their lived experience. Tina Payne-Bryson’s popular parenting books label techniques of “name it to tame it” or “telling stories about feelings,” advising parents to “name”the emotion their child is feeling and/or some cognitive explanation of why they are feeling it as a means to both soothe emotional distress and “teach” (by example) the skill of self-soothing.
In applying this process to our own inner-children, an important component is the intentional stance of “curiosity” rather than “judgement,” meaning the “sense-making” is importantly not about whether the feeling is the “right” or “wrong” or “useful” or “proportional” or “reasonable” thing to be feeling, but instead simply linking stimuli or events from the physical or mental environment to the feeling, in order to make sense of it. This also means starting from the assumption that the behavior of our inner children (our feelings) make sense somehow and then proceeding from that assumption with the “detective” task of figuring out how it makes sense, and cognitively verbalizing that explanation. Of course, this relies on our being aware of our emotions in the first place, so the aforementioned “paying attention” part is a necessary prerequisite.
Similar to going through this verbally-making-sense-of-feelings process with actual people, sometimes “telling the explanatory story” is all that’s necessary to soothe our inner children, but to quickly review more culturally-ubiquitous strategies: Providing reassurance (explaining why it’s going to be okay) is sometimes necessary in addition to – or in place of – the sense-making—the point being that it may be helpful to consider actually doing this verbally for yourself if you haven’t tried it. From there, the Serenity Prayer from the Twelve Step tradition (grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the courage to change the things I can) is relevant—in that much emotional distress results from “problems” in one’s environment (some of which can be changed, others which cannot). This distress, then, may be “soothed” by either accepting that the problem is not in one’s power to solve, or by simply solving the problem.
More generally, among “verbal” self-parenting strategies, would be what Cognitive Behavior Therapy calls “cognitive reframing” or in more intuitive terms, telling a different story about the same thing or even more simply, looking at it differently. The idea is that – to some degree at least – our emotional responses to situations are mediated by the way we think (i.e. talk to ourselves) about those situations, such that intentionally thinking about them differently can reshape our emotional reactions. This is particularly instrumental in the context of a relationship, in that so much emotional conflict in particular is based on—or at least exacerbated by—things like our perceptions of our partner’s intentions. For example, there will likely be a vast difference between my emotional reaction to discovering you did not buy the butter I expected on your grocery run depending on whether I tell myself the story: “you forgot the butter because you are charmingly absentminded” versus telling myself: “you intentionally chose not to buy butter because you actively want me to suffer.” In other words, the particular story we tell ourselves about our partner’s behavior (or really any event in our environment) typically functions to promote a particular emotional response, such that if I want to have a particular emotional response to my partner’s behavior (for example not getting so pissed off about it) it may be necessary to tell myself a different story about it.
Particularly applicable to long-term intimate partnership, there’s a disquieting aphorism that people get divorced for the same reasons they get married, speaking to the idea that the “loveable quirks” and opposites-attract-differences that initially draw us to our partners often become annoyances and conflicts with the passage of time and the accumulation of unresolved mutual resentment. In confronting this emotional process it can be helpful to remember that—as a rule—our partner’s qualities and behavior that we find most annoying are connected to the qualities we find most loveable about them. A partner who I love for being carefree and spontaneous, for example, is likely to annoy me for also being forgetful and inconsiderate; both the “positive” and “negative” qualities are really part of the same personality characteristic. Intentionally looking for these connections to my partner’s loveable qualities, and reminding myself of them when annoyed by their “bad behavior,” may be a powerful way to help me soothe my own annoyance, assuming that’s something I want to soothe.
Care and Discipline
Tying together the general processes of “emotional awareness” and “emotional management,” there’s a useful conceptual dichotomy splitting the task of parenting into the domains of “care” and “discipline.” I find these concepts especially convenient given their connection to the existing labels of “self-care” and “self-discipline.” The particulars of what falls in each category aren’t important here, so let’s say care is the side of parenting that’s generally meeting needs, pursuing enjoyment, and providing nurturance; while discipline is about limits, structure, delaying gratification, tolerating distress, and generally doing the things that are uncomfortable but also healthy. There’s a sense in which the “care” side is about following emotion, while the “discipline” side is about acting in spite of emotion.
This parallels the research on “parenting styles,” which has identified an analogous breakdown of two “axes” of responsiveness and demand, yielding the commonly-discussed four categorical “styles” of authoritarian, (high demand, low responsiveness) permissive, (high responsiveness, low demand) uninvolved, (low responsiveness, low demand) and authoritative (high demand, high responsiveness). In that research, “authoritative” has generally been found to lead to the best outcomes for children, while demanding the most effort and patience from caregivers. The core (pretty much “common sense”) foundational insight is that it’s probably good for us to practice levels of both “self-care,” and “self-discipline.”
From there, though, I think there’s a more interesting question about how these two sides of the self-parenting coin interact with one another. At first, they might appear opposed—with “care” equating to indulgence and saying yes; and“discipline” representing denial and saying no. On a deeper level, though, they are often more mutually supportive than opposing. On the one side, the guardrails of discipline represent the necessary structure to make care’s indulgence and closeness “safe. ” In other words, it’s only “safe” to get close to you if I trust my ability to protect myself if you turn on me, and it’s only safe to indulge in some streaming entertainment if I trust myself to get off the couch at some point. On the other hand, the motivation and support of care provide the necessary substrate for discipline to be effective. Athletes can only perform if they are also supplying their bodies with necessary nutrition and rest, and it’s only possible to do uncomfortable, difficult things in life if there is sufficient nurturance beforehand, and something comfortable and pleasurable to look forward to as a result. Without discipline to modulate it, care can mutate into addiction; and without care to support it, discipline tends toward self-destruction.
On a very practical and tangible level, care and discipline together form the basis for effective mood-managament where “mood” refers to the longer-term emotional tendencies or biases (i.e. feeling generally sad or happy all day or all week) which generally do not have a specific situational “trigger.” Our moods instead result from persistent life circumstances or the general satisfaction of physiological “needs” for sleep, exercise, nutrition, socialization, etc. Though there is often also influence from genetic and biological factors (a “predisposition” for depression, for example) basic “self-care” and “self-discipline” habits such as eating enough but not too much, or maintaining a consistent sleep and exercise schedule—form the basis for maintaining mood within desirable parameters.
The interactive dichotomy between care and discipline is also captured in the concept of “delayed gratification” well described in Frank Herbert’s words as the ability to self-impose a “delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.” In childhood, it is typically a parent that first “imposes” this delay—and if handled well—instills this ability to self-impose in the child. In a relationship, there are a wide range of circumstances where this ability becomes important, from the ability to restrain one’s impulse to say something cutting when a partner does something frustrating, to the courage to risk “ruining a nice evening” in order to address a necessary conflict. As I discussed previously, there is a general tendency for “conflict avoidance” to increase conflict over time such that we are often faced with a choice between the immediate gratification of avoiding a hard discussion right now and the delayed gratification of having a more secure relationship in the long term.
Relatedly, there’s an aphorism from sex therapy circles that: you don’t have a ‘yes’ until you have a ‘no.’ The idea is that it’s hard to enthusiastically consent to – or in other words, to really enjoy – an activity unless you feel safe (emotionally and practically) not consenting to it. This can be an important insight for relationships generally in offering a good reason to do the uncomfortable work of effectively managing our own disappointment or frustration about partners who don’t give us what we want. If you respond to my no with warmth and acceptance, in other words, I may be more likely to enjoy giving you what you want in the future.
Returning to the concept of “parenting styles,” it’s worth noting an important difference between literal and self parenting in terms of access to coercive force and the “authoritarian” (high discipline, low care) style in particular. What I mean is that literal parents tend to possess unique and unilateral leverage to force compliance from their children if they so choose, and get apparently “good” behavior out of their children as a result. A common observation among therapists, though, is that when the children of such approaches reach chronological adulthood and practical independence, they often find that their “inner” children have more ability to stage effective rebellion against inner authority than the individual in question had in their literal childhood. In other words, as adults, we don’t have very much effective power to “force” or “bully” our emotional selves into compliance, though that certainly doesn’t stop us from trying. Adults often find their authoritarian approach to parenting their selves less effective than it is with their own actual children. In other words, it’s often a huge advantage to be able to say no to myself when I need to, but my ability to listen to my inner parent when that parent tells me what to do may depend on—or at least relate to—a background of affectionate self-care.
To briefly touch on practical “tools” of care and discipline, we may have some ability to intentionally focus attention on particular parts of our experience which function to increase enjoyment or satisfaction from that experience… commonly (and potentially eye-roll-inducingly) referred to as choosing joy, practicing gratitude, or taking pleasure seriously. There are also a range of mechanisms—from “mindfulness” to “focused breathing” to “counting down from ten and then just doing it”—that may function to enable actions in spite of emotional experiences of fear, anxiety, or distress.
To roughly summarize, if you want to be able to “expect a lot” from yourself or your partner, (and don’t we all?) you’re going to have to do a good job attending to – and meeting – the relevant needs. Or said differently: high performance tends to require strong, responsive support—a reality that many of us miss in our understandable wish to be able to deliver without being too “needy.” Applying this insight to our emotional selves in particular, if we want to feel things that help us accomplish our goals, (which might be close to the definition of “emotional discipline”) we may have to first take good care of ourselves. A related thing to note is that having unrealistically high expectations (tempting to justify with “shoot for the moon and at least you’ll end up in the stars” logic) often ends up backfiring as both real and inner children get discouraged and refuse to even try when “success” (by the relevant parents’ perceived definition) feels unattainable. Put differently, in self-parenting as elsewhere in life, developing the ability to enjoy “good enough” often gets better results than sticking to rigid perfectionism.
Co-Regulation and Emotional Step-Parenting
Much like the role of step-parents, the question of how much responsibility and authority we have (or should have) in “parenting” our partner’s “inner-children” is a lot murkier and more fraught than with our own. Also much like real step-parents, we often find ourselves frequently confronted with the question of whether – and how – to step into a “parent” role with them. On one end of the spectrum, we might elect to effectively say “not my kid, not my problem,” or on the other “I’m just as much of a parent as you are, we’re a couple, this is my kid too.” This is an especially complex question because our partners’ emotional state(s) and resultant behavior have such a profound effect on us, and because there are so many circumstances in which we may be more aware of—and in a better position to influence or “regulate”—their emotional experience than they are.
Technically, the concept of “co-regulation” refers to the ability of partners in a relationship to regulate one another’s emotional experience either simultaneously or sequentially in ongoing interaction. This capacity is typically central in the task of resolving (especially high-stakes) conflicts, in that the cognitive capacities necessary for the complex problem-solving involved in successful conflict resolution are often impaired by states of high autonomic arousal (i.e. emotional distress). The particular methods that couples use to coregulate are as varied and unique as couples themselves, but can involve anything from eye-contact (or eye-contact-avoidance), and physical touch, to verbal reassurance, or even a direct commands to one another to “pull your shit together.”
A particularly useful principle for co-regulating in conflict particularly, is the idea of approaching the verbal negotiation of conflict from an intentionally and explicitly “we-centered” rather than “me-centered” frame of mind. In other words, especially when confronting feelings of anger or disappointment, many of us have a tendency to become more focused on – and vocal about – our own needs, unmet expectations, perspectives, and sense of injustice, than our partners’ or the relationship’s as a whole. A common phenomenon is for each partner’s verbalized assertions of their own perspective, needs, or wrongs done to them to ironically encourage their partner to focus more on their own needs, and further escalate the conflict and both partners’ distress. The alternative of intentionally focusing on we, or in other words, choosing to put the interests of the collective relationship ahead of either partner’s individual interests, may function to mitigate the emotional distress caused by the conflict as the conflict progresses. This has to do with both the private way we think about the relationship and ourselves and our partner(s) in it, as well as choices about how we express our point of view within those conflicts including things like word-choice, topic, and focus.
Each participant’s approach to self-parenting necessarily interacts with the other’s. For example, if one partner generally takes a “permissive” approach to their emotions… (which might look like assuming their feelings deserve to have their way without question) while the other takes an “authoritarian” one (assuming their emotions should be ignored, silenced, and otherwise forced into line) the “permissive” self-parent’s feelings might end up running the whole show of the relationship do the degree that their partner “gets on board” with accommodating to the feelings that are visible. Alternatively, the permissive partner may end up with negligible decision-making authority if they end up getting on board with the idea that their out-of-control-irrational feelings render their perspective invalid.
This also relates to a common source of conflict in relationships about how much “weight” to give emotions in shared decision-making. On one extreme, the (often implicit) policy that emotions are irrational and childish and therefore should be left out of “rational decision-making” tends to lead to varying levels of misery because we are unavoidably emotional animals as well as cognitive ones. On the other end of the spectrum, emotions can become an oppressive and tyrannical force in relationships when treated as unquestionable authority. It tends to be most effective to find a middle ground where emotions “get a voice” but are not assumed to be uniquely sacred sources of revealed Truth. This parallels the common wisdom that in families, things tend to go best when children’s perspectives and desires are considered and listened to, but not treated as law.
Differentiation
In Family Systems psychology, the concept of “differentiation” describes a functional balance between autonomy and connection in relationships, referring to your ability to maintain a sense of self while being emotionally close to others. In that sense, it’s the opposite of co-dependence—it’s about staying true to yourself without either withdrawing from—or thoughtlessly accommodating to—a partner’s emotions. This reflects the competing tendencies in relationships to suppress aspects of ones “healthy self-expression” to maintain connection on the one hand; and on the other, to reject connection when it threatens one’s autonomy and individuality. If a partner’s behavior functions to punish our “healthy” behavior, the resulting avoidance behavior might mean either molding ourselves into a “performance” of our partner’s preferences or withdrawing completely to “be ourselves” in isolation. Both of these extremes represent alternative “avoidance strategies” which also avoid intimacy (defined as connection simultaneous with the expression of one’s real self)Differentiation, then, is the ability to resist avoidance when faced with potential negative reactions from a partner. It’s about expressing oneself honestly—even when there are consequences—without either withdrawing or retaliating; tolerating discomfort without letting it dictate avoidance-based behaviors in the future. This contrasts with the concept of “codependency” where I feel I have to control or manage you behavior or emotional experience within tight parameters in order to feel okay myself. “Differentiated” step-parenting, then may be exactly what we were discussing earlier in striking an effective balance between care – in the form of emotional availability, empathy, attention to needs, and enthusiastic pursuit of mutual enjoyment) and discipline (the telling of hard truths, and the holding of agreements and boundaries).
Simulated Parenting
From here, we’re going to venture into the complex and turbulent airspace of psychoanalysis, so to quote David Cameron’s Aliens: “Strap yourselves in, boys! We’re in for some chop.” I’m not going to rigorously follow the theory of particular thinkers, but instead just offer my own loose synthesis in the terms we’ve been thinking in so far, but I’m planning to return to this topic from the other end in the future.
So, as we’ve discussed, relationships are the environments which shape our behavior, and a big part of that behavior (for us humans especially) is “simulating” that environment. In interaction with other humans, a big part of our effective behavior in relation to those other humans is based on the behavior of simulating them and their behavior. Part of that “simulation” (e.g. imagining what my mom would say in this situation) may go beyond helping us interact with those “real” others, and come to represent functional behavior on its own—as when my behavior of imagining my mom’s behavior functions to prompt my wise and loving response to my present situation. So, in this example, my behavior of simulating my mom’s mind works not just to help me interact with her, but also to effectively include her mind in my other relationships (for better or worse).
In the world of psychotherapy, there is a broadly observed tendency for adults to treat themselves in similar ways to the ways that their literal parents or caregivers treated them in childhood. This relates to what psychoanalytic theory refers to as “internalizing” (simulating) a parental figure. This makes sense functionally in that it is a child’s parents’ behavior that represents the “environment” which shapes that child’s mind and to which the mind’s shape is an adaptation—so even on an implicit level, the child’s “mind” is a kind of photographic negative of the experienced family environment. In a sense, then, the simulated parents of each partner in a relationship are (figuratively, but by default) present in their adult relationships, adding simulated grandparents to the aforementioned “family of four.”
In couples therapy approaches informed by psychoanalytic thinking, it’s common to conceptualize dysfunctional patterns in couple interactions as partners responding to one another as if their partner were in fact one of their childhood caregivers—often, ironically, functioning to recreate the precise interaction patterns that their adult attachment relationships were supposed to be an escape from. In our own self-parenting relationships though, our “starting place” for self-care and self-discipline are the models provided in the care and discipline we experienced in childhood, “internalized” in the predictive models of our simulated parents. As adults, then we have the opportunity (but not the obligation) to “correct” our parents “mistakes” in our roles as caregivers of ourselves.
A particularly useful technology for understanding our own psychological and behavioral functioning in this “self-parenting” domain is articulated by Michael Karson, (a mentor of mine who maintains a blog here) as a process of essentially “literary” analysis of our early memories. This is makes sense to me in relation to contemporary neuroscience research on “memory reconsolidation” and the idea that memories are effectively “rewritten” each time they are recalled throughout an individual’s life, re-experienced in a new context, and continually shaped to fit the ongoing evolution of the overall personality structure. So, these memories can be seen as “models” of our perceived environment as “reconsolidated” by successive iterations of recall, which might be another way of saying selected for—or simply shaped by the evolutionary environment of situational re-experiencing-states over the successive generations of the behavior of remembering.
The implication is that I remember the particular things I do, and remember them the particular way I remember them—because they accurately illustrate, or “tell the story” of how I see myself and the world. So, these memories are not just “models” of the world, which we use to navigate the present; but also (if you look at them aesthetically, as in: like a piece of art) may serve as models of your “default” approach to caring for yourself. For example, regardless of what actually occurred in my historical childhood) a memory of my literary father celebrating my intelligence at the expense of my pain might serve as a useful model for how—as an adult—I struggle to present myself as openly suffering. Asking myself “what would I do if I were them?” in considering a memory of your parent condemning your “frivolous play” might then serve as something of a “formula” for how you could the care and discipline of both lighthearted play and necessary hard work.
My adult task of self-reparenting is illustrated in the problem depicted in the memory. It’s up to my adult ingenuity to engineer solutions—whether in my relationship with myself or with my partner—to the memory, when I find that shape recurring in my present life. More generally, by looking for parallels between my early memories and my current relational life, I may be able to illuminate opportunities where new approaches to self-parenting can restructure entrenched, problematic interactive patterns. Of course this also expands to our caretaking approach to our partners’ “inner children.” If you remembered your parent as condemning play in favor of hard work, you might notice you tent to treat your partner’s “frivolous enjoyment” with similar suspicion. You might also be biased towards perceiving your partner as trying to take your fun away, biased towards a behavior of retreating to the “safety” of solitude in order to freely enjoy things. Finding ways to “remind yourself” that your partner is not, in fact, your remembered parent—may open up opportunities to enjoy shared play that you don’t remember, (which is a behavior, remember) in your own childhood.
Sources
Tina Payne Bryson & Daniel Siegel (2011) The Whole Brain Child: 12 revolutionary strategies to nurture your child’s developing mind
Tina Payne Bryson & Daniel Siegel (2016) No Drama Discipline: the whole-brain way to calm the chaos and nurture your child’s developing mind
John Gottman (2011) The Science of Trust: emotional attunement for couples
Jonathan Haidt (2006) The Happiness Hypothesis
Michael Karson (2006) Using Early Memories in Psychotherapy
Margaret Mahler (1975) The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: symbiosis and individuation
Salvador Minuchin (1974) Families and Family Therapy
Carol Garhart Mooney (2000) Theories of Childhood: an introduction to Dewey, Montessori, Erikson, Piaget & Vygotsky
David Schnarch (1991) Constructing the Sexual Crucible
Stan Tatkin (2023) In Each Other’s Care: a guide to the most common relationship conflicts and how to work through them
