Find What Triggers You To Overreact

“I’m bored silly in my marriage and feel totally unappreciated,” says Carly, 23 who runs a party-planning business. “Tom says he’s waited four years for me to grow up. He wants a wife and a family, and if I don’t, he wants out.” The trouble is, Carly doesn’t know what she wants.

Carly met Tom when she was 17 and a waitress in his mother’s restaurant. “I thought I’d struck gold!” she recalls. “Tom was a college grad and had an excellent job as a computer programmer. Carly loved working for Tom’s mom, a funny, loving woman and a stark contrast to her own depressed mother, who complains all the time about her health and how she never gets out of the house. Though Carly’s mother was miserable in her marriage - her father, a captain on a freighter based in the Orient, was never home - she nevertheless drilled into her daughters that a woman is nothing without a man.

Carly settled down to be the perfect wife, scouring gourmet magazines for the perfect feast for her hard-working husband and making sure the apartment was spotless when he returned. But the honeymoon glow dissipated quickly. “Tom couldn’t have cared less about anything I was doing for him,” Carly explains. “He expected nothing less. And when I asked why he never complimented me or seemed impressed, he dismissed me by calling me silly and childish.” Carly tried to ease the tension by making her glum husband laugh, just as she had done with her father when he was home on short furloughs. But in time, the distance between them grew.

Just when she thought she’d hit bottom, a friend suggested that Carly join her in a party-planning business. “We clicked,” Carly reports, “We took on all kinds of parties, and we have a knack for helping people enjoy themselves.” But the business cut severely into her time at home - which made Tom even angrier.

Tom, 24, wants to save his marriage, “but I want a normal marriage with a normal wife who spends at least some of her time at home. And I want children. Is this asking too much?”

Tom yearns for an orderly family life because he never had one. “Mom was always adopting troubled neighborhood children who needed a good home,” he explains. “But the house was a mess, and I often felt ignored and left out. Her attitude was, ‘You’re not messed up, so you don’t need my attention.’ “

When they first married, Carly seemed so happy just to be his wife; Tom can’t figure out why she’s changed. “Why is Carly such a bubble brain?” he wonders. “She’s always making jokes or acting silly; I never know what she’s really thinking or feeling.”

Tracing Patterns To Your Reactions

“Many times, even the seemingly innocuous things our partners do trigger reactions that may be way out of proportion to the actual incident,” explains Phyllis Carlson, a marriage counselor in Dedham, Mass. “That’s because certain actions or attitudes awaken unresolved problems from childhood that resonate with meaning. When this happens, we tend to overreact.”

Explosive rage is enervating and destructive, and it doesn’t usually come out of nowhere. Once you both become aware of the patterns that set you off, you can work on defusing your anger. Here’s how to design an emotional road map to help steer clear of toxic triggers:

Play detective. Keep a detailed list for at least one week of all the things that enraged you - at home, at work, or as you go about your day..

Trace the patterns. Do you get angry when people make careless mistakes? When they seem to ignore you in favor of others? When they don’t do what you want?

Think about how these situations could be handled in ways that don’t make you angry or upset. Pick a calm time to discuss with your partner what triggers an explosion in each of you.

For instance, when they did this exercise, Carly saw that her mother had always been so wrapped up in her own miseries she had no time for her children’s needs. Her father made scant effort to spend time with his daughters, yet Carly learned early on that she could at least attract his attention by making him laugh.

Tom admitted that he had also suffered from parental neglect. As a result, he became self-involved, almost smug, and found it hard to praise others. Tom equated love with a neat home and a hot meal - the things he didn’t get as a child.

Once these two stopped alienating each other, they were able to spend more loving time together.