Pat is absolutely right in how the term is used today, and he’s got some good...

Pat is absolutely right in how the term is used today, and he’s got some good advice for women here.

When we think about it, removing the negative connotation that’s been added through overuse and misuse, one of the primary jobs of a wife and mother is to do emotional labor. It’s her role to help regulate the emotions of small children who are too young to regulate their own emotions, to care for her own emotions, and to help mentor younger women in the community. And yes, your wife should be a source of peace, calm, and joy in the house for both her and her husband. She should provide an emotional uplift.

Something I tell men is that they need to be less concerned with their wife being happy all the time and make sure they’re looking after themselves. It’s the opposite of the “happy wife, happy life” meme.

It’s okay for your wife to be unhappy sometimes. It’s okay for her to be sad or to cry. Yes, you want to comfort her when needed, but don’t absorb or reflect her emotional state, and don’t try to MAKE her happy. Let her have her own emotions, especially if she chooses an uncomfortable or negative emotional state instead of a positive one. Let her feel the pain of it. Some people really are the “misery loves company” type, and if you refuse to go along with their misery, it stops being interesting for them. If it can no longer be used to manipulate you, then they’ll eventually cut it out.

In other words, let your wife own her own emotions. Don’t be responsible for her emotions, don’t take charge of them, and don’t make them your problem. Let her emotions be her problem to deal with. If she comes to you and asks for help, what she needs most of all is for you to just listen, nod along and then say something to acknowledge that you heard her. That’s it.

If you do help, offer to help her learn how to regulate her emotions rather than offload them onto you.

It would be wonderful if all women were taught how to regulate their emotions in childhood by their mothers and fathers, but that doesn’t happen for most women. So, they live their lives emotionally dysregulated and, as Pat said, codependent on others to regulate their emotions for them. They almost never learn unless the pain of being dysregulated is high enough to force a change. If you keep anesthetizing her she will never feel strongly enough to spark a change. That’s the evil of codependency.

As a husband, you can teach your wife how to regulate her emotions, but first, you need to not only know how to regulate your own emotions but also set a great example. You need to understand emotional regulation as almost a science. You can’t teach what you don’t understand. You can model it, and that helps, but if you don’t understand why what you’re doing works, you’ll have a very difficult time explaining it to someone else and getting their cooperation.

I teach men all the time how to regulate their emotions since many men weren’t raised with this skill set. Very often, in couples counseling, I teach the husband how to do things, and then he goes and leads the family toward mutual understanding, both on the part of the wife and the children, so they’re all on the same path. Personally, I find this to be the best method for improving family harmony, having the husband take the lead in learning, then teaching the rest of the family. This follows the natural order of things.