When Your Partner Feels Something Different: Meta Emotions

“Why can’t you just let me have my emotions? You don’t have to be positive all the time!”

“I’m just trying to help! Why can’t we try to look on the bright side?”

If you’re experiencing infertility or reproductive loss, it’s pretty likely that you and your partner have had an exchange like this. I see this exchange all the time in the couple therapy space while serving couples navigating reproductive grief. It all goes back to something called meta emotions.

Reproductive grief is an intense experience, to say the least. In one study that I conducted in 2023, 43% of respondents who had experienced one or more forms of reproductive grief (such as miscarriage, infertility, or traumatic birth), had symptoms associated with posttraumatic stress. That is much, much higher than the typical 5% prevalence rate for these symptoms. Other researchers also point out that reproductive grief makes us feel out of control, engenders intense anxiety, and may make us feel completely helpless as we are trying to build a family.

And through it all, you also want to be on the same page as your partner. But because of meta emotions, that may not be the case for every couple.

Simply put, meta emotions is just how we view emotions within ourselves, and how we believe those emotions should be processed out in the world. There are so many things that affect how we view emotions – our upbringing, our gender, our culture, and even socio-economic status can play a role.

And often times, when we experience intense emotions (such as during reproductive grief), our differences in meta emotions can cause significant disconnection. One person in the couple relationship may view emotions as something to be validated, heard, and verbally processed. However, another person in the couple relationship may view emotions as something to “stuff down”, “deal with on your own”, or generally disregard.

For one couple experiencing infertility (a husband and a wife) they experienced it like this – the wife wanted to just simply express her feelings of despair and anxiety, while her husband wanted to “rescue” her out of those emotions, so he immediately went into positivity and problem solving. This is well intended (more on this in a later blog!), but actually causes significant disconnection. The wife felt unheard, dismissed, and even ashamed that she couldn’t be “more positive” like her husband. The husband felt helpless that he couldn’t save his wife from her intense feelings.

So how do we get past this?

We mindfully hold emotions together.

It’s much like holding a bar of soap in the shower. The tighter you try to hold it, the more it will slip from your hand. But if you hold your palm out, it will simply rest in your hand.

We don’t have to solve our partner’s problems during reproductive grief. We can simply validate, hold space for them, provide connection.

I often provide emotion coaching for the couples that I serve who are navigating reproductive grief. When I coach these couples, I often give them things to say to “hold the soap” with one another, it can look like:

“Sweetheart, this is so terrible. It makes sense that you are feeling so overwhelmed, and helpless. I’m here for you. What do you need from me right now?”

Or, you can even express how you are feeling too.

“I can tell you feel so, so helpless and hopeless. Honestly, I do too. I feel so helpless in making you feel better. I want to be here for you.”

One other tool that I often encourage couples to use in couple therapy is identifying your emotion, and then naming the value that you want in that moment. So a good question to ask is: What do you want for your relationship as a whole? What do you want for yourself and your partner? It’s okay to name that in the moment, especially when emotions are high. It can go something like this:

“I’m feeling really distant from you because we haven’t talked about our infertility, and it makes me feel like you don’t care. I really want us to be connected on our emotions, even if it’s difficult to talk about.

Connecting on the emotional level is incredibly important during the reproductive grief experience. It is one of the biggest predictors of connection during almost every form of reproductive grief (Brigance et al., 2024; Casu et al., 2019; Pasch & Sullivan, 2017). But it takes work. Intentional work. If you and your partner are willing to sit with one another and validate each other’s experience, you might find that you will become incredibly connected through even the most trying of circumstances during reproductive grief.

Just remember – hold the soap loosely.