Hello and welcome to the Empower Couples podcast where you get non-boring modern relationship advice

for you and your partner to communicate like pros, fight smarter, and stay on the same team no matter

the challenge that comes up. I am one of your hosts, Aaron Freeman. And I'm Jocelyn Freeman,

but you all just remember us as the Freeman's. And today we are talking about take control of your own emotions and mental health so that you don't

rely on your partner to feel better. And Jocelyn, where does this come from? Well, as always,

it comes from what you all ask us in the DMs on Instagram, as well as when we have coaching sessions.

And we put up like three topics that we've been noticing in our sessions and different ways

we interact with couples.

And then you all voted.

And this was the number one topic.

It sounds like you all really want to know about emotional and mental health, taking

responsibility for that.

And the reason we put it in one of the

votes for you guys is because it's been coming up a lot lately in our coaching sessions with couples,

both private and group sessions. And what we're noticing is, you know, let's say we're working

with a couple through a communication challenge is there's this pattern of taking out emotion on each other.

And when we dig underneath, of course, there's a few layers of things going on, but one

of them being, one or usually both partners are not doing anything for their mental and emotional

health.

They don't have any outlets.

And so then their partner becomes that door mat for their emotion.

So they go from being kind of like calm to quick startup.

...