Emotional Processing is NOT a Healthy Relationship Practice
You may know that I am not about verbal emotional processing.
I define this as “speaking about the issues between us while they’re happening.” It can also apply to clearing old resentments or revealing withheld hurt.
There are lots of teachers teaching this skill, and it has plenty of value, it's simply not a practice I bring into my close relationships, and I help other people take it out of relationships to become closer. The skill itself is incredibly valuable if we each do it within ourselves or with someone we don’t believe it’s about. It’s trouble when we do it with someone we think it’s about.
Processing-between is allegedly designed to bring us closer, but it's working on assumptions so flawed that it ends up driving us apart.
The first flawed assumption is all over relationships and relationship advice, our entire emotional economy runs on this assumption, and it's why we have depletion, disconnection, and overwhelm in almost every relationship as a default setting.
The assumption is "I should tell you about the worst things I'm feeling. The most important thing is the worst feeling or event that has transpired between us lately. It’s natural that that will be the center of my attention. It's important for you to hear my feelings and thoughts about it to repair. I won’t be able to move past it until I speak to you about it." This is also, paradoxically, something which keeps us in “bad” situations longer. If I am willing to do cycles of hurt and repair, I am willing to remain in and return to conditions which reliably hurt me.
Of course, this has the real assumption underneath it which is “people who are really loving me will give me good experiences, and if I am having an experience I don’t like, I’m not being loved well.” This is the beginning of the end of intimacy. It is natural that we pursue our preferences, but it is suffering to be at war with what is not according to our preferences. It is natural to walk ourselves to what we like—it is suffering to demand something we like from a place reliably offering us something we don’t like.
I once told a woman that I advocate for couples to drop emotional processing techniques out of their relationship, and she said that she'd recently decided to do so. She immediately noticed more closeness and more accountability with her boyfriend.
She said that where she used to jump in and say something about a small slight or a rude tone, she had begun to reserve her words and feel the experience. She noticed that he was correcting himself and returning to kindness and respect more quickly than when she addressed everything she found hurtful.
That was exactly my experience as well. Good people want to treat the people in their lives well. When we give them a moment to see how their behavior is landing, they’re likely to make any necessary realignment with their intention.
Emotional processing with someone close to you either stifles the internal process of a good person or keeps you relating with a person whose internal process is not enough to get them into love again.
Emotional processing with someone close to you is a way of staying in a relationship you can’t reliably enjoy without help. This is how it keeps us in “bad” situations—we are willing to talk it out time and time again with someone who doesn’t see how we feel, or sees us hurting and doesn’t find it inspiring of any adjustment. We have conversations to create understanding with someone we are not willing or able to understand, or someone who doesn’t reliably understand us.
Because this is the other assumption this practice runs on—the assumption that resolution comes from a conversation, when resolution is the most natural thing in the world. Resolution is perfectly natural between anyone who knows how to allow it, wants to be in love, and is in compatible connection.
Respect is natural. Forgiveness is natural. Adjustment is natural. Amends are natural. Acknowledgement is natural. It’s also natural to simply let a hurtful moment pass and keep no record of it, to know even in the moment that it’s not personal and it’s none of my business.
My advocacy that couples do other things with their time than process “bad” emotions they've had “about each other” with each other is based on my knowledge that love will flow if it's there unless it's obstructed by the idea that it can't be there.
Love is not in a land beyond repair and amends. In any moment we can release the record of wrongs and resentments with anyone truly worthy of our time, and be in love right now. Forgiveness is here and now. Love is here and now. #deeptakes