I was a newly minted psychiatrist in 1989, when the largest earthquake since 1906 struck the Bay Area. The couples I was seeing were having trouble staying connected, and helping each other through the crisis. As I listened it seemed that some of their difficulty had to do with different coping styles. One person needed to talk about their experience, especially their emotional experience, in order to feel better, while the other needed quiet or distraction and talking about the difficulties made them feel worse. One might need to get a lot of information, hourly news updates, while the other needed to avoid disturbing information.  Or as one man put it, “what you’re doing to feel better is making me feel worse.”