How To Stay Calm When She’s Upset

Talking points: breathwork, calm, emotional volatility

I’ve talked pretty often about leading in a relationship, but a session with a recent client inspired me to dig into one of the more key components: regulating yourself and staying level-headed while your partner is upset. What does this mean, how do you do it, and why? Listen in.

02:02 – What it means to regulate

05:24 – Why the “take a deep breath” cliche actually works

08:33 – Women don’t want to have to validate your emotions

Transcript below

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Transcript

What’s going on, men? Welcome back to The ManTalks Show. I’m Connor Beaton. Today we’re gonna talk about the single most important thing to the success of your relationship; and this might be one of the most important elements to being able to lead in your relationship. Now, last year I put out this video that’s done incredibly well called How to Lead in Your Relationship, or Five Steps to Lead In Your Relationship. And you can find it on my YouTube channel. You can find it on my podcast.

I got a lot of questions from men asking me to go a little bit deeper into some of those principles. Recently I was having a session with a man and we were working on some conflict that had come up in his relationship. And he said every time that my woman gets a little fiery, some of her anger starts to come out, or she starts to get sad, I find myself freezing up or I become reactive and it’s hard for me to manage. And I said, “okay, well, let’s make this very clear: your mission in your marriage, your mission, in your relationship is to out-regulate her. It’s to out regulate your partner.” It’s the same with your kids, it’s the same with your colleagues, right? Your mission is to out-regulate that other person.

Now, what does that mean to out-regulate? And it’s not to say that they don’t have their own responsibility. It’s not to say that you need to parent your wife or your girlfriend. It’s not to say any of those things, right? So don’t misinterpret my words, because I can hear the comments coming already, like “I’m not my wife’s father,” or “I don’t need to parent my girlfriend.” No, you don’t. But you still need to regulate yourself, right? You still need to be in charge of your internal charge.

So what does it mean to regulate yourself? Well, if you just look at the definition of to regulate, it means to control or to maintain – and I like the word maintain here – maintain the rate or the speed of a process that it operates properly, okay? To maintain the rate or a speed of something, a machine or process, et cetera, so that it operates properly.

Now, what does that mean for us? It means that we need to maintain the internal rate, the internal speed, the internal experience that we’re having, so that we can operate properly in a conversation, during a conflict or a disagreement, in a sexual interaction. One of the main challenges that a lot of us men have, and I’ve been working with men from all over the world for a decade, and I see this happening all the time, is that they don’t have good – and I fell into this category as well, I’m not excluding myself from this – that we don’t have good maintenance over the speed at which things are happening internally. So we have this internal charge, right? And you can think of it as like an electrical charge, and that’s your normal state of homeostasis. And when you start to feel more stressed, you know that charge starts to go faster. Your heart rate starts to go up, your breath rate starts to go up. The amount of thoughts that you start to have, those start to go up.

And so our work is to, what’s called downregulate – the clinical term, which we’ll talk about in a second, but our work is to be able to reduce the speed at which everything is happening within us. Reduce. Reduce the speed of our breath, which in turn is going to reduce the speed of our heart rate, which in turn is going to calm the mind, right? It’s literally going to settle the storm of the mind, all the thoughts that are racing through. Should I say this? Should I say that? I disliked what she just said there. And it’s going to temper the emotional charge. This, the rate at which, and the intensity at which your emotions are coming through. For most of the guys that I work with, I’m like, “okay, walk me through the process of what happens when your wife or your girlfriend says something or does something that causes you to feel angry or disrespected or upset, or she’s upset with you.” Or she’s just upset about something that happened with her mom or one of the kids or something. And what a lot of guys will describe is that their whole internal process starts to speed up, right? Their mind starts to go faster. How do I solve this problem? How do I fix things for her? Their emotions start to become more intense, right? Maybe their anxiety starts to rise, or their anger starts to rise, or their discomfort starts to become more intense. Their breathing rate elevates, their heart rate elevates and they move, right? We move into a more stressed out state.

Now, how in the hell are you supposed to support, lead, or direct any kind of interaction with anybody, right? This isn’t just with your partner or your girlfriend, or your wife, [but] with your kids, with your colleagues at work, with your business partners, with clients. How are you supposed to guide or lead any kind of interaction when you are in this naturally stressed out state?

So what do we do? Well, the first thing that we need to do is we need to slow down our breathing. Your breath is in many ways, the dial that over a little, brief period of time can turn up your heart rate and can turn up the stress response in your body. This is why this sort of cliche saying of “take a deep breath” is actually kind of accurate. Now there’s a type of deep breath that is going to help you specifically, and there’s deep breaths that are gonna cause you to feel a little bit more panicked, right, a little bit more stressed out. So how we regulate, how we start to maintain that speed is that as soon as something, as soon as we receive any kind of external stress stimulus, right, our partner is emotional, maybe she’s, angry about something that happened at work, or she’s pissed off at one of the kids, or maybe she’s disappointed that we forgot to do something, or her dad or her mom said something and she’s upset. We immediately bring some of our focus and our consciousness and our awareness to the breath, to be able to just check in.

Okay, did I stop breathing just now? Can I take a deep breath? Can I slow down my breath rate? Can I tune into the experience, what I call the D.F.E – our Direct Felt Experience? Can I tune into the direct felt experience of what I’m experiencing in this? Because if I’m disconnected from that, then there’s no hope in hell that I’m gonna be able to support my partner or navigate and traverse the intensity that my partner might be experiencing.

So we move back into our breath. We slow down our breath, we maintain some focus and attention on our breath, and we tune into what we are feeling and experiencing in the body. And by doing this, we are able to articulate and regulate what’s happening within our own experience. And this feels like safety to most women, right? This feels like a kind of – I heard a woman describe it once as, “getting to sit underneath the shade of a tree, after being in the sun for a long day.”

When a woman has a lot of emotions, she’s upset, she’s angry, whatever it is, even if it has nothing to do with you, and you can maintain your connection to your own body, your connection to your own breath, you can provide a kind of safety co-regulation stability that you don’t necessarily need to do much. I think a lot of guys are actually trying to do too much when it comes to supporting their partner when they’re upset or when conflict happens, right? It’s like, “oh, I gotta solve this. I gotta fix this. I gotta figure out what’s wrong. I gotta figure out what to do about this.”

And one of the best ways that we can do that is by returning to the breath, slowing the breath down, tuning into our heart rate, tuning into the charge, and the intensity in the body, and begin to down-regulate that. And as soon as we can do that, we have more bandwidth, we have more capacity for our woman, for our partner, for our kids, for our colleagues at work, whoever it is. But within our relationship, this is specifically one of the most important things because the reality is that even though the world is telling men to be more open and be more vulnerable and share their emotions more and do all of these things, women still want strong men.

And I’ve said this time and time again, and it’s gotten a lot of attention in a lot of my videos, from both men and women, which is that women don’t want to validate a man’s emotions. When a woman says, I want you to be more vulnerable, what she’s really saying is, I want to know what you’re experiencing, so I want you to know what you are feeling and to be able to articulate it to me, but for me to also know that you’ve got it. That you can regulate your own system.

Because a man who is out of control, unable to maintain his own emotional state is going to be an unsafe man. That man might leave, he might peace out, he might become violent, he might become aggressive or abusive in some way, right? So there’s a very real physiological threat that a woman feels around a man who is unable to maintain his internal emotional experience.

And so the more that you can begin to work on understanding your internal experience and regulating it, and out-regulating your partner, right… It’s like, okay, she’s having an emotional reaction. I’m gonna breathe. I’m gonna maintain a sense of peace and equanimity and calmness. I’m gonna understand how I’m feeling and I’m gonna be with that while listening to what she’s going through. That provides the ultimate level of safety and understanding for the relationship. So try this today when you’re around your girlfriend, when you’re around your wife, and you’re around your kids, just start to tune into the breath, inhaling through the nose, and letting your exhales be a little longer out the mouth; and you’ll find that naturally over a little bit of [time], 30, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, as you slow down your breath rate, your heart rate will slow down, and you’ll feel a little bit more calm and grounded in that moment.

So give that a try today. Let me know what you thought about this. Don’t forget to man it forward, whether you’re listening to this on the podcast or watching this on YouTube. And as always, until next week, this is Connor Beaton, signing off.