Meta-Emotions: What They Are & How To Deal With Them

What's your relationship to your feelings? Do you generally embrace them and like to talk about them with others? Or do you prefer to not get emotional and try to avoid negative feelings? These different perspectives about emotions and feelings are known as meta-emotions.

A meta-emotion is the way we "feel" about feelings. They're the emotions you have around your emotions, hence the meta. Different people have different feelings about feelings. For instance, some believe that feelings are helpful, while others see them as unproductive.

These people often use what is called "solution coaching" in their communication around issues that bring up emotions. When there is an issue, they go straight to the most "common sense" solution in order to skip over the exploration and sharing that takes place in emotion coaching.

You can integrate these two practices into your life to better understand your meta-emotional experiences:

Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

One way to reflect on this further is to make a list of emotions and then to explore with yourself how people responded to you. How did your parents, friends, and family respond to you when you had the feeling? Does this mirror how you respond to people now?

However, when couples get gridlocked this way, they miss a very important point—that if they can actually come together on their preference, they can be a powerhouse. To have one person that can guide the emotional conversations and another that can guide the couple toward solutions is to have a couple that can intimately connect and create change and growth.

After reading this article, you might recognize that you and your partner have a meta-emotion mismatch. Don't fret. If you can channel this "mismatch" in a healthy way, you can create a powerful connection that supports the experiences, beliefs, and feelings of both people. Here are tips for coming together (rather than falling apart) when it comes to your mismatch:

Say it out loud. Mark it. Let each other know that you are very aware there is a difference. Make sure you identify this without judgment but rather with intrigue, curiosity, and acceptance of the reality.

Both people must be willing to work toward embracing emotions as part of the process. Agree with each other that you will both work to honor emotions as part of the process toward building intimacy and connection. For the person who believes feelings are a "good thing," you will need to work toward embracing your partner's discomfort with emotions and their process in learning to utilize them. As the partner who believes that emotions are unproductive, your work will be to begin to develop an interest and curiosity into the emotional world of your partner and yourself. (Here are some ways to increase emotional intelligence.)

Tend to the emotional experience by utilizing validation and curiosity with your partner. Allow them to be the guide of their own internal world.

Understanding your meta-emotions is important for navigating any and all relationships, and it's also helpful knowledge to have about yourself no matter your relationship status. When you understand the way you react to your own emotions, you're developing more self-awareness. Ultimately, we all have emotions, and accepting our emotions (and the way we feel about them!) is part of developing self-compassion.