“How we feel about how we feel.” John Gottman, marriage psychologist at the University of Washington, opened up to us the concept of “meta-emotions” or essentially “how we feel about how we feel.” Not just how we feel or even what’s our emotional makeup, but how we emotionally deal with the inward phenomena? John Gottman gives us 3 meta-emotional categories: “those in favor of emotional expression, those opposed to it, and those in favor of finding a balance between positive and negative emotions.” He admits these can be fuzzy. Nevertheless folks differing with others in their meta-emotional category may not be so well-matched. He sees his wife’s anger as, “yelling at me.” A wife with an abusive background had “lots of anger” but didn’t see the anger as a bad thing. She saw it as a source of strength. The husband had had a home life where his parents bickered…