When you start a new relationship you never expect that your emotional personality might sabotage your success.
Your emotional personality defines how you relate to other people and the world around you. This is an important factor in romantic relationships.
If you are in a brand new relationship or you are in a long term relationship, understanding your emotional personality can help.
What is emotional personality?
Everyone has a way of relating to the world and other people that is independent of the situation. Some examples may help:
- Do you always wonder if other people like you?
- Do you need to know what to do next?
- Are you looking for validation or respect?
People can have personality questions or statements. Here are some examples of statements:
- Everything is going to be okay.
- I am never satisfied.
- I am happy.
Do any of these ring true for you? Your personality question or statement is always running in the background. It helps you quickly evaluate relationships and situations.
Your emotional personality may not reflect your true self. This personality was acquired around four years old.
Is your emotional personality helping you?
Your emotional personality can help you or it can limit you. For more information read my post: How Emotional Wounds Affect Relationship Stress.
Today I am going to focus on relationships. In a relationship you have two questions (or statements) that interact. This can happen outside of your conscious awareness.
For example, all of a sudden you realize that you are upset with your partner (or maybe you even feel enraged). If you don’t understand your emotional personality you will look for another explanation. For example, your partner left the kitchen a mess or ran up the credit card debt. That may not be the real problem. If you have a lot of problems that never seemed to get resolved, you may be addressing the wrong issue.
I am going to use the term personality question in this post. Questions are more likely to cause problems. You can think of this like telling your partner that the answer to their personality question is no.
The real problem may be that your partner violated your personality question. If you need to be valued, your partner ignored your opinion. If you need to know what to do next, your partner discounted your plans and told you that you need to be more spontaneous. If you need to be liked, your partner ignored you.
Understanding your emotional personality
Knowing your personality question and your partner’s question can help in two ways. If you want to discover your personality question (or statement), I have listed four posts at the end to help you.
First, you become aware of what is important to your partner. If your partner is upset, you can ask yourself, “Have I violated my partner’s question?” If you have then you can address the real issue. And, of course, you can make an effort to be more respectful of your partner’s question.
Second, you can release your emotional personality and reclaim your true self. Without these limiting emotions you and your partner can discover your true relationship.
Her are some posts to help you discover your emotional personality:
Personality: How Do You Discover Your Personality
Personality: Discovering Your True Personality
Is Your Personality Keeping You Stuck?
All of these posts are based on the poetry of emotion process.
To read more about the poetry of emotions process click here.
(Image: Tom Godbar @ Flickr)
