Every pair of partners will quarrel from time to time. There’s just no way around it. Misunderstandings will happen, feelings will get hurt, we’ll say things to each other we later wish we hadn’t….. How to settle these inevitable disputes? How can we best move through the upset, the resentments, so we can get back to that place where we feel loving and safe with our partner?
I wish there was an easy “cookbook” formula or some “insider secret” I could share with you to address the challenge of stopping the arguing and getting to the bottom of what’s propelling the disagreement. However, there are some general guidelines.
First off, stop feeling badly about fighting with your partner in the first place. There’s no shame in it. Sometimes we see couples who proudly announce “we never fight”. Although this might masquerade as a good thing, it’s not. It’s as if they don’t trust the durability of their relationship enough to engage in a temporary period of conflict.
It’s important to note that of all the feelings we human beings can have, only anger is not self-limiting. Think about this and notice what it means. For instance, when we watch a touching movie and we start to cry, the tears only last a certain amount of time and then they dry up…we can’t force ourselves to “cry more”. The same is true of laughter at a good joke; the laughter lasts a certain time and then stops…and we can’t squeeze more laughter out of the moment. The feelings are self-limiting. But the same is not true of anger – when caught up in an angry moment we can escalate and spiral upwards, getting angrier and angrier, until we’re many times angrier than when we started. This is why in a marriage argument a minor matter can develop into a major blowup. What are we to learn from this? That we have to manage our anger; we can’t just “let the dog off the leash” and expect creative results. So how are we to do this?
There are several important steps partners can take at this point:
- listening and hearing
- recognizing and accepting the feelings of the other
- dropping one’s defensiveness
- understanding the point of view of the other
In the next several posts we’ll discuss more about these last four items. For now, give some thought to what’s been said so far and let it sink in…
Chase E. Kneeland, M.Div. LMFT 