It’s not uncommon for the person who loves you the most to also be the person who pushes your buttons. In long-term relationships, deep emotional bonds are inevitably complicated by moments of exasperation; you might perhaps even find your partner infuriating or unbearable at times.

If not handled well, these moments can blow out of proportion and escalate. To add fuel to the fire, since the source of conflict is a trigger, the emotional reaction almost always appears extreme and one-sided to the person who triggered it.

Triggers can be both external and internal. Being in a crowded place or getting scared of loud noises are examples of external triggers. Internal triggers include being flooded with complete vulnerability, being overwhelmed, anxiety or recalling a stressful event or person from the past. It can feel like being back in a situation that made you feel helpless.

In essence, a trigger is something that prompts you to fight, run or hide. So when your partner triggers you, it’s quite difficult to see the situation for what it is and not to mark them as the enemy.

These are three things you can do in place of instantly reacting to being triggered.

1. Ground Yourself Before Re-engaging

There are many ways a person might get triggered and react in the heat of the moment; they may lash out, project their guilt or shame buried underneath and say things they don’t really mean. But it’s in the spaces between getting triggered and responding where emotional intelligence lives.

A 2023 study published in Frontiers in Psychology explored how women’s emotional intelligence prevents emotional flooding in relationships, and where the female partner may get overwhelmed and lose control of her emotions during a fight.

The researchers discovered that women who were able to recognize, understand and control their emotions (all indicators of high emotional intelligence) are most likely to employ constructive methods. These included discussing things in a calm manner and adhering to constructive problem-solving to manage conflict. This results in more joyful, more satisfying relationships.

So, the instant you find yourself triggered by your partner, withdraw and don’t respond immediately. Take a time-out to center yourself first. You can do that by taking a quick break and engaging in an activity that brings you back into the present moment, such as taking a two-minute walk, brewing tea or coffee, folding laundry or journaling. Even sensory grounding, such as naming what you can see, touch and hear, can pull you out of an emotional flood and back into the present.

2. Take Space As A Habit

Triggers in relationships may be rooted in previous trauma, communication patterns or everyday interactions. And this is why even the most loving and attentive partners can unintentionally trigger flashbacks or painful emotions. As a rule then, it’s better to take space kindly and non-reactively.

It is in this space that plain, non-accusatory communication can be useful, like describing why you need to step away without shutting your partner out entirely. Statements such as, “I need some time to calm down so I don’t end up saying something I might regret,” or, “I love you, but I need a little time to think clearly,” tend to work best.

It lets your partner know that you are not shutting down and that they didn’t mess up, and it’s more about you needing space to process your emotions than rejecting them.

A 2022 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships interviewed more than 200 participants to assess how couples managed conflicts over goals like career, health and family, even during stressful situations like the lockdown caused by COVID-19.

Conflict resolution worked only when used along strategies like respectful communication, coming to compromises, melding each other’s goals, respecting each other’s feelings, being pragmatic and taking a time-out from conflict to calm down.

When you consciously step back to relax and manage your emotions first, your mind will automatically shift to pragmatic conflict resolution and out of survival mode, where it must fight, strike back or protect you.

3. Utilizing Triggers As Opportunities For Awareness

In a 2023 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers followed up on 88 adults who took a daily diary for a week, describing the situations that provoked their strongest negative feelings, measuring how strong they were and specifying the types of strategies they used to cope with them.

They focused squarely on four primary strategies:

• Acceptance, or acknowledging the situation at hand

• Reappraisal, or changing the way you think about a situation to manage its emotional impact

• Rumination, or repetitively and passively focusing on the negatives of the situation

• Suppression, or inhibiting emotional expression, thoughts or feelings

The researchers discovered that the stronger the emotions, the more likely individuals were to use less efficient strategies such as rumination. The takeaway is that the intensity of the emotions felt influenced people’s regulation strategies. The more overwhelming the emotion, the more likely we are to ruminate on it instead of reframing or accepting it.

Interestingly, the research also found that men employed a broader range of regulatory strategies when they saw a situation as stressful and emotionally demanding.

In most successful relationships, what aids couples is the knowledge of each other’s triggers. Knowledge that is hard-won after many repeated cycles of getting triggered, fighting, communicating and, finally, understanding. But over a period of time, couples learn to consider these specificities and arrive at a common understanding of what the other person finds off-putting.

Here’s how you can develop your own methods through trial-and-error, and utilize your triggers meaningfully:

• Develop a safety plan. When you are not upset, tell your partner your worst triggers, how you feel when you are triggered and how your partner can react in a constructive way under such circumstances.

• Track and reflect. When you get triggered, note down what exactly is informing this reaction, what emotional and physical responses accompanied it and how your past experiences might have informed it. This assists you in building awareness about your triggers.

Want to know how happy you really are in your relationship? Take the science-backed Relationship Satisfaction Scale and find out.

A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes, here.