Accept Your Emotions 

Accepting your emotions occurs when you don't judge or avoid the feelings. 

When you validate your feelings and give them the acceptance they deserve, you are on the way to learning how to manage difficult emotions in a marriage.

Whenever you feel emotions, just welcome them kindly. 

Try to calm yourself with some deep breaths, allow the feelings to roam in your mind till you fully process the events, and let them leave your mind when they are ready.

Although they will hurt, you can mitigate the pain by employing some physical therapy on your body.

You can try to feel what body part of yours has the most intensive emotional placement and place your hand on that part. 

Then, you will gently massage the place so you may calm down and allow the emotion to seep in.

Emotions are present in human life to help you process, understand, and react to events in life; thus, refusing to accept them will prevent you from letting go of adverse events. 

You should accept them so they won't bounce back in more complicated ways.

Identify the Emotion 

If you can adequately identify the emotion you are feeling, you are lucky because you are already on the second step on how to manage difficult emotions in a marriage.

If you cannot, you probably feel some intense bursts of passion and react at the moment, preventing you from responding adequately.

To identify your emotions better, try to cycle through the emotional wheel to choose the closest emotion to what you are feeling.

Go through the definitions and characteristics of multiple emotions and pick the most potent emotions you feel; sometimes, you may feel various emotions at once.

After picking the most suitable emotion, go ahead to break it into tiny bits. 

Dissect what is happening to you and why it's happening. 

Thinking about it in such a detached manner takes the passion out of the emotion and leaves you with a logical approach to managing the feeling.

Once you understand the reason and details of the emotion, endeavor to think of ways to make the situation better and reduce the emergence of the feeling. 

You can do this by journaling your emotions on phone applications or in paper journals.

Realize the Emotion is Fleeting 

The reality of the world is that nothing is permanent: a lousy job, a terrible financial situation, a stressful commute, and difficult feelings. 

The sooner you realize this, the faster you will be able to manage difficult emotions in marriage and prevent them from overwhelming you.

After identifying your negative emotions, calm down and accept that the feelings will be temporary. 

When you face your emotions with such patience, you can think clearly and act without doing things that can jeopardize your marriage.

Another great way to accept the problematic emotions is to understand that life itself is finite, and it's essential to live a fulfilling one before it ends. 

When you learn to manage the problematic emotions well, you will prevent them from piling up and hurting your chances of living a fulfilling life.

Also, when you realize how fleeting emotions are, you will be able to find an opportunity in them before they dissipate.

For example, when you feel sad and take some time to analyze the sadness, you can learn how to deal with people's bouts of sorrow.

Investigate the Cause 

Now, you can start to investigate the emotions and why they occurred. 

This will allow you to understand the trigger for the feelings and learn how to handle the events around their occurrence to reduce the likelihood of you undergoing difficult emotional periods.

If you have identified your emotion as anger, you can try to understand its origin.

The anger may have emanated from terrible traffic or an unreasonable customer at work.

If you realize the emotion's origin, it also allows you not to transfer aggression to your partner.

You may also be anxious from interviewing for a new job and be unable to handle the anxiety before learning the steps to manage difficult emotions in a marriage. 

But if you understand that the anxiety is from the job, you can research methods that will help you deal with anxiety in future interviews.

Similarly, the difficult emotion may be a sadness from the feedback for a bad result at work. 

Sadness can make you unresponsive to your partner if not correctly maintained.

Thus, you should try to figure out that the sadness is from the feedback and work on ways to prevent such feedback in the future.

Do Not Control the Emotions 

Controlling emotions has become the norm for many people because it allows them to present a straight face in an uncomfortable situation.

However, as beneficial as the strategy may be, it should not be present in a marriage as it prevents you from showing yourself to your partner and allowing them to support you. 

It's essential that you allow your emotions to run their toll if you want to manage difficult emotions in a marriage.

Therefore, after going through the four previous steps and having some residual emotional effects of the problematic situations, you should allow these emotions to show to your partner so they can comfort and console you.

Your partner understands that you can have bad days, and they are ready to be there for you. 

Giving you the much-needed emotional support and encouragement also gives them an opportunity to be relevant in your life.

Conclusion

The worries and events of life may sometimes cause you to have negative emotions that can affect your marriage if you don't properly manage them.

To correctly manage difficult emotions in a marriage, you should follow these steps in an orderly sequence: accept the emotions, identify them, understand they are fleeting, investigate their causes, and avoid controlling them.

Resources 

https://www.happify.com/hd/4-steps-to-embracing-your-negative-emotions/

https://advice.theshineapp.com/articles/struggling-to-name-how-you-feel-try-using-this-wheel/

https://www.gottman.com/blog/6stepstomindfullydealwithdifficultemotions/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2020/03/20/5-ways-to-design-our-lives-for-impermanence/?sh=46971324b2ef

https://positivepsychology.com/negative-emotions/

https://drsusanbernstein.com/stop-trying-to-control-your-emotions