5 Ways Our Partners Can Help Us Calm Down

Losing your temper when something sets you off can leave you, after things simmer down, embarrassed, ashamed, and perhaps in trouble with the people you care about the most.

Perhaps you were at a small, informal gathering when one of the other guests spilled a drink all over your brand-new outfit. You swear that this was intentional, even though the offender’s profuse apologies would make it appear otherwise. Lashing out with no holds back, you accuse this person of trying deliberately to ruin your evening, not to mention your clothes. Everyone else stares at you in disbelief that you could be so unhinged. You may never win back the respect or affection of some of those who witnessed the debacle.

While the drama plays out, your partner begs you to stop yelling, but to no avail. It’s not until much later that you realize your partner was right, and the whole thing was an unfortunate accident. Why couldn’t you have stopped yourself before the situation erupted?

The Advantages of Interpersonal Emotion Regulation

Being able to turn to others for help in calming down could be an effective way to prevent the many disastrous consequences of losing your cool. While in the moment, you may not appreciate it, there can be real advantages to allowing yourself to listen to the wise advice of someone close to you. The question is, would you be open to this advice even if it were offered?

People vary in their willingness to allow others into their inner emotional turmoil. According to the University of Connecticut’s Mariah Xu and colleagues (2025), the quality of interpersonal emotional regulation is an important process for achieving affective stability. In ordinary emotional regulation, you can generate your own internal guardrails. In interpersonal emotional regulation, “close others’ or social supporters … can promote either positive or negative emotions," note the authors.

This “extrinsic” kind of interpersonal emotional regulation shifts to other people the power to intervene in your own inner escalation of negative emotions. Think back to what your parents might have done for you in childhood when they distracted or consoled you as rage flooded your brain when another child nabbed your favorite toy and broke it. Ideally, they found a way to acknowledge your emotions while also managing them.

The Five Emotion Regulation Strategies

To tap into these processes in adults, the University of Connecticut authors developed the External Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, which they tested across four large online samples. The measure itself was oriented around times of distress, when people could stand to benefit the most from the intervention of a person close to them.

As a validational check, the authors also assessed social isolation, attachment style (secure versus anxious or avoidant), and the tendency to think of yourself in terms of your relationship with others close to you (“If a person hits someone close to me, I feel hurt as well”). Those involved in committed relationships also answered questions about satisfaction and commitment. One important measure in terms of the extrinsic emotional regulation concept was a scale assessing difficulties in emotion regulation, including trouble regulating impulses and a lack of emotional clarity.

After data reduction, these are the five scales to emerge in the questionnaire with sample items. Each refers to how a partner helps you handle stress:

Problem-Solving/Reappraisal

• Thinks about ways I can change the situation.
• Helps me think differently about the things that led to how I’m feeling.
• Helps me figure out the steps I can take to solve the problem.

Invalidation

• Tells me I am overreacting.
• Communicates to me that my feelings don’t make sense.
• Lets me know I need to deal with how I’m feeling by myself.

Empathy

• Feels the same things I feel in the moment.
• Puts himself or herself in my shoes.
• Can see things from my perspective.

Avoidance

• Stays away from me for a little while.
• Focuses on only the negative aspects of the current situation.
• Does not help me change the way I feel about the situation.

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Distraction, Soothing

• Distracts me with something fun or interesting.
• Does something to cheer me up.
• Tries to cheer me up by reminding me of my strengths.

As you can see, the factors of avoidance and invalidation would do the opposite of helping one’s partner calm down, versus the remaining three, all of which would have a positive impact.

The findings supported the theoretical predictions regarding how the questionnaire would relate to other couple variables, leading the authors to conclude that these interpersonal regulatory “processes have important connections with interpersonal and psycho­logical functioning.”

Putting Emotion Regulation to Work for You

The importance of these three positive and two negative strategies of helping partners feel better to couple functioning suggests the value of trying to implement them in your own relationship. The questionnaire also provides a useful framework for having a frank and open discussion with your partner, preferably not in the heat of the moment after a large flare-up. Before doing so, however, ask yourself which would help you the most. Because all five scales are related in theoretically consistent ways with relationship-specific variables (trust, closeness, intimacy), no one method stands out as “best” in general.

However, couples may have specific histories and individual qualities that lead some strategies to be easier to adopt than others. Maybe you like to be distracted when you’re upset, or perhaps your partner is particularly good at making you laugh. This would seem like the best starting point until you are able to work through the remaining strategies.

To sum up, couples can and do help themselves get through tough times. When those tough times erupt in the moment, knowing how to restore equanimity can be an important way to build lasting and fulfilling relationships.

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