Have you ever known a well-intentioned, kind person who had a pattern of creating interpersonal drama? I’ve known quite a few people like this, and they’ve often baffled me. Why would good people engage in behavior that systematically destroys relationships?
After spending a while thinking about my past experiences with such cases, I now have a name for a cluster of traits that I believe, in at least some of these cases, help explain what’s going on.
I call this cluster “Emotionally Reactive Traits.”
I use the phrase “traits” because I’m referring to rather long-lasting tendencies, but they are not immutable. A person can change these traits over time, for instance, by healing from trauma, going to therapy, or learning to see the world differently.
Emotionally Reactive Traits have two main aspects:
Aspect 1: Strong negative emotions triggered in innocuous situations
The person tends to have intense, negative emotional responses to harmless (or very nearly harmless) situations.
It’s, of course, up for debate what a reasonable reaction to any given situation is. Everyone sometimes has negative emotions in innocuous situations. But what I’m referring to here is a pattern of intense reactions to situations where reasonable, truly unbiased third parties would all agree that a situation was basically harmless.
Aspect 2: Emotional reasoning with blame
To an unusually high degree, the person’s emotions about a situation are interpreted as indicating the objective truth of the situation. For instance, if they feel scared by something someone said, they assume the other person must have done something objectively scary. Or if they feel angry, they assume the other person must have done something really harmful. Additionally, they tend to blame other people when their emotions are triggered (rather than considering whether their reaction might have more to do with themselves than the other person’s behavior).
The emotional reasoning can be so strong that the facts of the situation (as remembered by this person) get warped to fit their emotion (e.g., “I’m feeling X, and that only makes sense if the other person had said Y, so they must have said Y, even though all the people who witnessed the event say they said Z.”) Important details about the situation or context can get glossed over or forgotten so that the situation (as remembered) better fits their emotional response to the situation.
Of course, everyone engages in emotional reasoning at times (e.g., when we’re feeling anxious, we tend to think that something frightening may happen, and when we’re feeling angry, we tend to think that someone is trying to harm us). What I’m referring to here is a recurring pattern of engaging in emotional reasoning to an unusually high degree.
Why would someone have intense emotional reactions (coupled with blaming others) in harmless situations? This pattern can have a diverse range of causes, for instance, arising from:
i. past trauma (e.g., getting triggered in situations that superficially resemble those of the trauma, such as a friend saying something harmless in a tone of voice that an abusive partner used to use)
ii. difficulties reading situations in general, but with a bias towards assuming negative intent (e.g., misinterpreting body language in such a way that innocent behavior seems nefarious)
iii. false beliefs about the world that cast others in a bad light (e.g., being convinced that someone who believes X is bad or scary, even though X is a harmless belief)
iv. paranoia, which in some cases could be linked to psychosis or drug use (e.g., believing that others are out to get you when they aren’t)
v. anger management issues (e.g., feeling attacked and getting extremely angry as a result of gentle constructive criticism)
vi. a highly sensitive ego (e.g., a friend doing something that feels at all like a put-down or social comparison will cause an intensely negative reaction)
vii. a long history of being mistreated (e.g., jumping to the conclusion that they are being mistreated – when they are not – due to sensitivity from years of actually being mistreated)
What are some example situations with people who have Emotionally Reactive Traits?
Below are some examples of what you might experience with different kinds of people that have these traits. Note that these situations are NOT real ones I’ve encountered, but I’ve designed each of them to try to capture key themes of what I have experienced with real people who I think have Emotionally Reactive Traits.
Example 1: Traumatized
Sally has serious trauma from an abusive past partner. Her current partner, Don, unfortunately, sometimes accidentally triggers this trauma. For instance, Sally’s ex used to engage in extremely controlling behaviors (e.g., controlling what she would eat, wear and say). Don, on the other hand, is not more controlling than an average partner but sometimes asks her to behave differently (e.g., he was upset about the way that Sally acted around his friends the other day and asked her not to behave that way anymore). This request triggered Sally’s trauma from her controlling ex, causing her to become extremely upset. She blamed Don for this, interpreting her own extreme emotions as proof that Don had done something very bad. She yells at him that he is being abusive and misremembers details of his request that make it seem abusive. Don is really upset by this accusation and tries to defend himself, but these attempts to explain his behavior make Sally even more upset, as they are invalidating her emotions.
Example 2: Angry
Gideon has a bit of a hot temper and a fragile ego. He regularly doubts his self-worth but also tries to protect himself from this doubt by blaming other people. One day Gideon asks his friend Alice for a small favor. She agrees to do it but hasn’t gotten around to it yet due to a busy schedule. After a couple of days, Gideon realizes she hasn’t done it yet; he takes this as a form of rejection, assuming it means Alice doesn’t care about him. He leaves her a voice message screaming at her for lying to him about doing the favor and accusing her of only pretending to be his friend.
Example 3: Idealogical
Jill believes that all masculinity is toxic and that most men disrespect women in myriad small ways. In her friendship with Johnny, this presents a problem because he grew up being taught to engage in “chivalrous” behaviors like holding doors for women, paying for their meals, and carrying bags for them. Sometimes he attempts to do these things for Jill, which makes her mad (but she hides this anger from him). One day when he picks up her bag and carries it for her without asking, she blows up at him, telling him she can’t stand his toxic behavior anymore. He is shocked and confused, failing to understand why she appears to suddenly be so enraged with him. His denial of toxicity enrages her further. Jill stops responding to Johnny, writing him off as a bad person.
What does it feel like if you have Emotionally Reactive Traits?
One reason that this cluster of traits is tragic is that the people that have it are often very good people (i.e., they are often very kind and empathetic), yet they end up with a history of destroyed relationships.
Another reason it is tragic is that from the inside, what it feels like to have these personality traits is that other people you trust keep suddenly doing things that harm you. Then, when you get upset, they deny your emotions and tell you that you are being unreasonable (or they subtly distance themselves from you). Not only does it feel like people keep hurting you, but it feels like they seem to be attempting to gaslight you in the process and may cause you to doubt your own interpretations. This is a terrible experience to have.
What other traits could be confused with Emotionally Reactive Traits?
There are a few different situations that might sound like what I’m describing above, but which are importantly different.
First of all, you could simply be friends with assholes or harmful people who WILL repeatedly harm you and then deny it or gaslight you or be unwilling to take responsibility. This feels very similar, I suspect, to having Emotionally Reactive Traits. The difference is really in the people around you and the facts of the situations. If the people around you are kind and good and the things you are getting upset about are actually innocuous, that’s really different than if the people around you are jerks who are actually doing harmful things. Of course, there is a great deal of subjectivity here since it’s hard to say what precisely the truth is in any given situation and what exactly is innocuous vs. harmful behavior. But if you find that even with the most good, kind people in your life from a wide variety of social circles, you are experiencing something like this, again and again, that is evidence that you have Emotionally Reactive Traits (but, of course, you could just be very unlucky and are continually surrounded by jerky behavior).
Another thing that may be confused with Emotionally Reactive Traits is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). While people with BPD have an elevated chance of having Emotionally Reactive Traits (because there are some common elements), BPD also has other symptoms that are not related to Emotionally Reactive Traits (such as intense fear of abandonment), and I think that most people with Emotionally Reactive Traits would not have BPD.
How do Emotionally Reactive Traits lead to ruined relationships?
The basic pattern of relationship destruction is that a friend (or colleague or romantic partner) will do something innocuous or very slightly harmful, which leads to an intense negative emotional reaction, which gets blamed on the friend. Then, emotional reasoning kicks in, with the intensity of the negative emotions being interpreted as a demonstration of how harmful the friend’s action was. Details of the situation or context may also be misremembered or reinterpreted in light of the negative emotion, which can cause a disagreement about the basic facts of the situation.
If the friend is empathetic and patient, they may try to accept blame or apologize but come away feeling that the other person acted in a harmful or unreasonable manner and may (especially if this pattern is repeated) choose to distance themselves. On the other hand, if the friend is not as empathetic or patient, they may themselves grow angry or argue that the person is acting unreasonably, which can intensify the negative emotions, making things even worse and causing a sudden blowup in the relationship.
What is useful to do if a friend or romantic partner has Emotionally Reactive Traits?
I think it is usually unwise to challenge the perspective of a person with Emotionally Reactive Traits while they are in the midst of experiencing strong negative emotions. They are likely to feel the challenger is denying an obvious truth or harmfully invalidating their emotions, either of which may cause anger or other intensification of negative emotions (potentially leading to the feedback loop of even stronger emotional reasoning).
Hence, attempting to directly correct a misunderstanding in the heat of the moment can backfire. A better approach may be to validate the fact they are feeling those emotions, express empathy and concern, and apologize for accidentally causing them negative emotions without validating any misinterpretations of events they may have. When the acute negative emotions have subsided, that is a much better time to gently explain your perspective on the situation.
Of course, before assuming someone has Emotionally Reactive Traits, it’s also useful to do some self-reflection. Maybe you’re just being a jerk, doing things that hurt this person, or are in denial about your own behavior? A stronger signal that someone has Emotionally Reactive Traits is that they have acted this way with many people in their life, not just you.
What should you do if you think you may have Emotionally Reactive Traits?
I think that one of the most helpful things you can do is to learn to notice when you are experiencing strong negative emotional reactions and have strategies you can use in that situation. For instance, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) has a number of useful techniques for this (there are helpful books available about these techniques, such as “The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook”). Additionally, it can be really helpful to wait until you are in a more calm and collected state to dig into the details of what happened in a situation. If you try to talk it out with someone while you are still feeling really bad, it can lead to unfortunate outcomes.
I think it can also be really useful to recognize that you may have a tendency to engage in emotional reasoning and try to remind yourself that feeling angry doesn’t always mean that you have been wronged, and feeling anxious doesn’t always mean that something dangerous has occurred, etc. If we think of our emotions as smoke detectors for different sorts of situations, yours may be like those that often go off while cooking. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t really a fire, but the smoke detector is not always a reliable indicator of fire. Techniques from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can be helpful for processing emotional reasoning after the fact (e.g., considering the evidence for and against different interpretations of an event).
I also think it can be helpful to get really curious about other people’s frames if you have Emotionally Reactive Traits. If someone feels that a situation was really different than it felt like to you, it can be useful to explore with curiosity what they experienced by asking them open-ended questions. Once you empathize with their perspective, you may see that your original interpretation was not as objective as it seemed.
I think it’s worth keeping in mind that you don’t choose to have sudden, intense negative emotional reactions to things. But you do, to an extent, have a choice of how you behave once you are having such a reaction (though it may be difficult to make choices in that state). You also choose whether to seek to reduce those emotional reactions (e.g., to work on yourself or, if you can afford it, to find an expert to try to heal the trauma that may be causing the reactions to occur).
Finally, if you have close friends who you trust with the information, you can consider explaining to them that you sometimes have emotionally reactive behaviors, and you can tell them how you’d find it most helpful for them to behave in such situations.
People with Emotionally Reactive Traits are not bad people (often, they are unusually empathetic and kind). But they can accidentally leave a trail of broken relationships.
As with all aspects of personality, Emotionally Reactive Traits exist on a spectrum. Some people are not at all like this, others are just a bit this way, and others are very much this way. It is people who are very high on these traits that I’m referring to in this post.
If you think that someone you care about may have these traits, I hope this essay will give you some ideas for how you can have a healthier friendship with this person. And if you think that you may have these traits yourself, I hope this essay will give you some ideas for how to have better relationships in the future and reduce the chance of them falling apart.
After posting this, five people have reached out and said that they feel that they have Emotionally Reactive Traits. Here is what one such person said, if you’re curious (posted here with permission):
“I ended up recognizing myself in [this post]. I couldn’t see fully what I was doing that was destroying my relationship with my partner until I saw your systematic and analytical presentation of the Emotional Reactivity concept.”
This piece was first written on August 13, 2022, and first appeared on this site on September 9, 2022.
This is creating ambivalence in me. On the one hand, I see myself in this- a trail of hurts and broken relationships behind me, often feeling hurt and invalidated (much as I did in my formative years).
On the other hand, my therapist encourages me to consider that I don’t listen to my feelings, say, if someone makes me feel bad or invalidates me, and I work really hard to get them to understand and be kinder towards me, but it becomes a cycle that leads to loneliness and pain.
Which is it? Do I create these scenarios because of my trauma, or do I put up with unreasonable behavior because of my trauma? Or both? I’m conflicted. I’d like to think it’s something I can work on, and therefore control, but my therapist thinks I just have a deep distrust of my gut feelings and should end things when my gut tells me someone or some situation is not right for me. I worry that that will mean a trail of people and situations that I leave behind.
I’m just a random person who read your comment and felt sad to see that you’re obviously putting in time and effort but look back at a cycle of loneliness and pain.
I hope you are doing well Anna and can look back to the day you wrote this comment and see that you’ve made progress since then.
It’s an excellent question to ask, and of course it’s only something that you (with the help of your therapist perhaps) can figure out! And yes, “both” is always a possibility that should be considered.
I have a mild mood disorder (not as extreme as Bipolar but similar in that my moods and emotions can be erratic at times). I agree with most of what you have written here. However, here is something my therapist has shared with me that I find to be accurate. People who are emotionally reactive may indeed overreact, however, many times the event or action they are reacting to is, in fact, problematic. Not all the time. Sometimes I have misinterpreted situations and assumed offense where there was none meant, and I’m quick to self-correct in those situations. But many more times, the person in question is objectively being rude, dismissive, or insensitive (because other people have confirmed the person makes them feel that way too or they agree the person was behaving badly because they witnessed the precipitating event). However, my response to this treatment can be too intense. So for me, it’s more about learning to validate my feelings, recognize that this person is making me feel a way I don’t like, but also to remove myself from the situation instead of reacting impulsively to it (which often makes things worse). I think it’s important to acknowledge that even emotionally reactive people can often times be correct in their perceptions, and that, it is in fact invalidating to assume they’re always exaggerating. Being reactive means you respond to things too intensely, it does not mean you are always wrong about a person’s behavior or intentions towards you. I hope this helps.
I totally agree.
Great points Bree, I agree!
I’m glad I came across this and want to thank you for sharing it.