Imagine a situation where you try to address an issue with your partner, but their response is… not what you expected. You all try to work it out, but throughout the conversation, you feel like you are getting nowhere. Things are just going in circles, and the longer you don’t feel like your partner understands you…the more frustrated you get. You notice yourself getting physically warmer; maybe your leg starts to shake, it becomes harder to collect your thoughts, and your patience dwindles down to zero. The next thing you know, you all are in a yelling match, and someone leaves the room.
Does this sound familiar?
I wonder how the situation would have changed if someone had taken a break?
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Break-taking can be a very useful tool in conflict management. Engaging in a conflict can make it very easy for us to become emotionally flooded during that process. Emotional flooding describes moments when we begin to feel physiologically and psychologically unorganized and overwhelmed. Gottman (2018) says emotional flooding occurs when heartbeats surpass 100 beats per minute. In other words, our fight or flight is kicking in. Your sympathetic nervous system is in full activation. While our fight or flight is a physiological response to protect us from perceived danger, it also can get in the way of us having the kinds of conversations we intend to have with our partner (threats in the wild are different than the emotional distress we may be feeling in conversation, but they trigger the same physiological response).
Emotional flooding (or that fight or flight response) may look different for everyone. While “fight or flight” is colloquially used to describe our sympathetic nervous system, we can respond to distress in several ways, and identifying within yourself when you are emotionally flooded is the key to self-soothe.
