The One Crucial Thing to Do When Your Partner Is Upset

There are many ways to respond when our partner is upset or angry with us. We can shut down and clam up, launch a counter attack, try to reason with them, make excuses, explain why they are wrong, offer a quick apology and hope that will be the end of it, and others. However, none of those alternatives will calm things down and lower the tension between you as much as doing one crucial thing—providing emotional validation.

Emotional validation involves conveying we understand how a person feels and acknowledge they have every right to feel that way. Now yes, telling someone who is upset or furious with us that they have every right to be seems highly counter intuitive as it might seem that doing so will only make them even angrier or more upset. Yet, when we convey that exact message and do so from a place of empathy and sympathy—magic happens (psychologically speaking). Rather than fueling the other person’s fire, our message of emotional validation will actually douse the flame. Read more here.