Everybody in a relationship has moments of feeling frustrated, aggravated, or angry at their partner. While this is common, unleashing emotions towards our partners is not a healthy behavior, and repeated arguments can be corrosive for a relationship.

When you feel angry at your partner, here are some ways to calm yourself before it gets out of hand:

Stress is rarely something experienced as enjoyable, even if some people thrive on it. Unfortunately, stress is nearly inevitable, especially in today’s world. What people often don’t realize is that we have all the resources we need to be able to reduce stress. The challenge is to learn how to identify and use these resources.

Before being able to implement stress reduction techniques, we have to be able to recognize signs of stress. Some symptoms are more obvious than others. The more specifically we can understand our triggers — for example, not just knowing that work causes stress, but knowing what specifically in our work causes stress — the more we can do to prepare for stress, and ultimately reduce or prevent it altogether.

What is your New Year’s resolution?

This is one of the fun points of turning the calendar — reflecting on the past year and considering our goals for the next 365 (or 366) days. I have heard many well-intentioned resolutions for healthy personal improvements: make new friends, eat less dessert foods, quit smoking, conquer a phobia, pay more attention to partners and loved ones, spend more time with children, go to the gym, increase dating life, save more money, spend money (for chronic savers), balance personal vs. career life, improve stress management, etc.

How many times have you heard someone refer to a person’s personality or character, saying, “He’s a strong man”, or , “She’s a strong woman”? In managing our relationship with ourselves and interpersonal relationships, it is important to understand emotions, associated behaviors, and overall character traits that hurt us more than they help us. These traits we carry or see in others impact how we view and treat ourselves, how we present ourselves to others, and how we view and regard others.

One problematic stereotype is what people generally regard as a “strong” person. It’s problematic because there is often an inaccuracy of how people label “strength” — which impacts the qualities we admire or idealize in others, as well the traits that we want to develop and emphasize in ourselves. When people refer to a “strong” person, the traits that are being pointed to as “strong” are often closer to grandiosity, contempt, rigidity, stubbornness, aggressiveness, and desire to control others. All of these traits hold similarities to bullying.

This post is about a common relationship issue: gift-giving anxiety. With the Hallmark holidays constantly expanding (and now that it’s November), men and women in any significant relationship — girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives — are all in the same boat of constantly looking for new ways to make their significant other feel special on a gift-giving occasion. But what isn’t always discussed is the anxiety that many people feel in having to generate new ideas and still have them be meaningful.

The ability to  show appreciation to the important people in our lives is heavily underrated. When we feel under-appreciated, it can start eating away at our relationships. We may start to feel taken for granted, or taken advantage of, and get a sense that our partners, family, or friends don’t actually regard what they bring to our lives.

If you take the time to make someone a cup of coffee every day, and they never say ‘thank you’, and act as if it your job to do this, after a while you may start to become annoyed at the person. In our lives, we serve many figurative cups of coffee, and other people do the same for us, in whatever form this may actually take. Just like we want to be appreciated, so do others.

Here are seven ways to show appreciation.

It can be very hard to say “no” to people. It seems like it should be an easy thing to do; someone asks a question, we want to say “no,” but something stops us from actually letting the word out, or even speaking a comparable, more gentle variation. In many cases, we end up either saying “yes” when we don’t really want to, or we outright lie. But saying “no” is a necessary skill to have in our relationships with friends, family, and significant others.

What makes this so difficult?

Have you ever been in an argument with your partner where you both reference a conversation or an event that occurred in the past, and can’t agree on what actually happened? But you both believe beyond all doubt that you know exactly what happened and what was said?

It’s a common relationship battle where a point in the past is the focus of a current conflict. For example:

Partner #1: “You said you’d take out the garbage when you got home tonight!”

Partner #2: “No, I said I’d take out the garbage tomorrow after I got home, and that tonight I wouldn’t have time.”

Both partners remember having a conversation, and both believe they remember it exactly as it happened. Obviously, it’s not possible that both partners have an accurate version of the conversation, even if both believe strongly that they do. There is a reason that this happens:

Have you ever experienced a feeling of helplessness when a loved one or friend has struggled with depression?  We don’t want to see our loved ones in pain, but it’s not always clear how to provide the appropriate support for what they are going through. We may end up saying things that we think they want to hear that either add fuel to the fire, or just simply are not helpful. Depression is an emotional struggle that prevents logic and reason from helping someone feel better. We can point out all the good things from our perspective, and then end up frustrated that our friend or loved one both isn’t feeling any better, and now has probably asked you to stop talking.

Confrontation with anyone, let alone our friends, can be difficult. One of the skills we hope to develop is how to speak up for ourselves and advocate for our needs with other people. This doesn’t only mean learning how to ask for what we want, but also learning how to confront others when we feel wronged or in some way upset by them.

When strengthening a previous area of personal weakness and developing a new skill, it is a common tendency to overcompensate. For example, if our previous difficulty was handling conflict or issues with confrontation, and we learn new skills to confront in a healthy manner, we may start confronting more often than necessary, almost as if we seek opportunities for confrontation practice.