The 5 Traits of an Emotionally Intelligent Marriage
An emotionally intelligent spouse understands their own emotions while also being able to empathize and understand their spouse's perspective.
Talking Points:
Self-awareness – Recognizing your own emotions is the starting point. You can’t clearly express yourself if you don’t understand how you feel and why.
Self-regulation – Managing your emotions is imperative to a healthy marriage. You have to show self-control in how you express the emotions you are experiencing. Ephesians 4:29
Motivation – Directing emotions toward a goal helps creates a growth mindset for the relationship – an opportunity to strengthen the marriage not to tear each other down.
Empathy – Recognizing the emotions of your spouse will help you to have a balanced approach. It’s not just about how you feel- it’s also about how they feel.
Social Skill – Managing the emotions in your spouse means you move past the emotions to a real conversation about how to do better next time.
Discussion:
Initial reactions to this topic? What jumped out at you?
How good are you at expressing how you feel, especially in times of conflict? What proves to be most challenging for you?
How well does your spouse do at expressing their feelings to you? What could they do better?
Read Ephesians 4:29. Share a time your words really hurt your spouse. Why is self-regulation a must for healthy communication?
What should the motivation be when you enter a conflict with your spouse? What are some bad motives to avoid?
How can you show more empathy for your spouse’s feelings and perspective?
What reactions have you had in the past to your spouse’s emotions that only made things worse? What are some positive ways you can respond to your spouse’s heightened emotions?
Is there a step you need to take based on today’s topic?
hey couples in today’s video we’re going to talk about something called emotional intelligence also known as eq and we’re going to talk about how important it is for you to have good solid healthy emotional intelligence in your marriage yeah so emotional intelligence is simply understanding your own emotions how you think and feel about things and then the ability to understand your spouse’s emotions and the way they view things now there are five skills of emotional intelligence self-awareness self-regulation motivation empathy and social skill we’re gonna walk through each one of these one at a time so that you can sort of grade yourself and if you’re brave enough you can even grade your spouse on each of these items let’s start with self-awareness which is your ability to recognize your own emotions you think about those couples in your relationship things happen right you’re you’re married to someone you you share the same home your life is completely enmeshed and connected and so sometimes things happen and we get upset we get hurt we get mad so the first thing about eq and if you want to have a healthy marriages you have to understand your own emotions you have to reflect on a conversation you just had or look your spouse maybe just gave you and be like why did what what am i feeling right now what am i reacting to why do i feel what i’m feeling because that’s going to be important moving forward about how you communicate that but recognizing your emotions is just the beginning the next thing is what we call self-regulation and that’s your ability to manage your emotions right so let’s say you just had a conversation and you felt belittled perhaps by your spouse the tone they used or something that they said that was hurtful so in a healthy marriage then it isn’t just okay i feel belittled and hurt so now i’m gonna just react and start yelling and belittling you that isn’t the right answer or approach either so the second piece then is really that self-regulation that you can look internally and say okay this is the feeling i’m having this is the emotion i’m feeling but i don’t want to just react to that what am i going to do that’s productive with that emotion so the third skill is what we just call motivation and this is your ability to direct your emotions toward a goal and tracy i think the goal obviously in a marriage is to make the marriage healthier the goal is to grow old together right yeah and i think sometimes when our spouse hurts us you know there could be a temptation to just we want to feel anger and bitterness we just kind of stew on that in our heart we don’t really want to be productive with it we just kind of it justifies then maybe the way we treat our spouse and so we just kind of harbor those negative emotions but if we’re really healthy in our eq and want a healthy marriage then our motivation needs to be okay this is how i’m feeling and i’m hurt but i want our marriage to be better so i want to give my spouse the chance the opportunity to to right the wrong all right so those first three skills are directed you’ll notice toward yourself self-awareness self-regulation and really in a sense self-motivation but the next two skills are really about how you interact with others how it actually comes out and the first one is what we call empathy it’s your ability to recognize emotions in others and this is really important if you want to have a healthy marriage yeah so remember in eq there’s two parts of it there’s our own emotions understanding how we’re feeling but then it’s wanting to understand how the other person’s feeling and that’s what empathy is all about it’s being able to put yourself in your spouse’s shoes seeing it from their perspective that when you had an argument you know maybe you said or did something maybe your tone of voice set them off maybe they had a bad day at work maybe they also have been hurt by something that’s happened and so it’s your ability to say okay i know what i’m feeling but i recognize my spouse is probably coming to this conversation or this situation with their own emotions i need to understand those too and then that leaves us with just one final skill of eq and it’s what we call social skill it’s your ability to manage emotions in others now tracy i could hear someone saying well wait is it really my job to manage the emotions of my spouse and is that what this is talking about social skill no and i think that’s important i can’t control how you feel but i can work to understand how you feel i can use words or ask questions that show and demonstrate a desire to understand your perspective right to empathize with you so that we can start having a conversation about how do we get to solutions how do we avoid these hurts from happening again so it’s not that i’m trying to stop you from being angry but certainly in response to your emotion i can either show a level of care and interest in what you’re saying and how you feel or i can want to shut you down and say i don’t care how you feel yeah and we’ve noticed with a lot of couples if if you’ve got a husband and a wife that both have really low eq it’s really it’s really not necessarily a heart thing but it’s a skill thing maybe neither one of them has the skill to manage emotions in the other person and so then there’s just always this conflict which is really sad because if they could just learn some of these skills maybe their marriage could be better than they ever imagined yeah that’s why it’s important to keep working on it you can you can learn the skills of eq you can get better at it as you go along to not just understand your own perspective but in a marriage you have to be able to understand things from your spouse’s perspective so if you both come to those conversations or to a conflict or to a situation when someone’s hurt if your heart is to say i’m so sorry that you’re hurt i want to understand what i did to bring that hurt and how we can change that if you both do that then you can have a healthy marriage and you can move through the seasons of life with ease so go ahead and give yourself a grade on each of these five skills of emotional intelligence and if you’re brave enough give your spouse a grade and more important than anything make sure to talk about this with your spouse or with a mentoring couple and hey if you’ve got questions make sure to leave them in the comments below and if you want more videos like this be sure to subscribe to this channel on youtube we come out with new content every single week
The official family values channel for pursueGOD.org. Join Tracy and Bryan Dwyer every week to talk about marriage and parenting and everything that makes for a healthier family.
