In the aftermath of a disagreement with a spouse or partner, the silence can be deafening. The time spent waiting for the other person to break the ice with an apology often feels interminable, fraught with a mix of hurt feelings, stubborn pride, and a daunting emotional standoff. However, persistently waiting for your partner to apologize first may not just prolong the conflict—it could actually undermine the very foundation of your relationship
Tit-For-Tat Doesn't Work In Marriage
In the close-knit journey of marriage, complaints can either help us grow closer or push us apart. When one partner complains about something, it’s super common to want to hit back with a complaint of your own. However, this kind of reaction can really mess with the health of your relationship. Let’s dive into why firing back with your own complaints when your spouse raises an issue can hurt your bond, come off as defensive, make the conversation way more complicated, and often leave the original problem hanging.
How My Anxious Attachment Gets in The Way Of My Marriage
I wanted to write a blog post about the ways I get tripped up personally in my relationship with my wife. Why? I’ve always felt it is a real public service for leaders in the mental health community to talk about their own struggles. It humanizes things. It normalizes what you may be feeling, so instead of feeling like “something is wrong with you,” you can understand things as “I’m a human experiencing human things.” It stands to give readers that universal salve: hope.
Insecurity and Fear Can Really Undermine Conversations About Sex
Fear and insecurity can really throw a wrench into the delicate gears of talking about sex with your spouse. These talks need openness and trust, but when fear and insecurity show up, they can slam the brakes on meaningful connection and understanding. One of the repeating themes is that your preferences for sex can directly speak to how you feel about yourself instead of your actions. If you feel badly about your decisions or desires, you can quickly feel badly about yourself.
Why Relationship Conflicts Can Feel Terrible
Relationship conflicts are a natural part of any partnership. However, the intensity and emotional charge of these disputes can sometimes feel overwhelming, even dangerous. This perceived danger is not necessarily about physical harm but often relates to the emotional vulnerability, fear of loss, and the intensity of feelings involved. In this blog post, I delve into the reasons why relationship fights can feel so threatening and how understanding these dynamics can lead to healthier conflict resolution.
The Role of Humor and Friendship in Relationships
In the tapestry of marital relationships, humor is vital for weaving a strong and enduring bond. Renowned relationship expert John Gottman highlights friendship as a cornerstone of a healthy marriage, and when combined with humor, it fortifies the relationship, fostering a deep connection, easing tensions, and paving the way for effective communication and resilience.
Easing Tension and Overcoming Conflict
Conflict is an inevitable aspect of marriage, but the dual forces of humor and friendship act as buffers against the strain of disagreements. A strong friendship fosters empathy and understanding, allowing partners to navigate conflicts with a sense of team spirit. Humor, in this context, serves as a gentle balm, easing tensions and offering a perspective that can prevent minor irritations from escalating into serious disputes.
Facilitating Open Communication
In a marriage anchored in friendship, communication flows more freely and honestly. Humor plays a pivotal role in this dynamic, breaking down barriers and making difficult conversations more approachable. It can soften the delivery of critiques or grievances, enabling partners to express themselves in a manner that is less likely to be met with defensiveness, thus enhancing the quality of their interactions.
Building Resilience in Adversity
The synergy of humor and friendship equips couples with a robust toolkit for facing life's challenges. Together, they create a resilient bond, enabling partners to support each other through thick and thin. Humor provides a light-hearted reprieve from stress, fostering a positive outlook that can help couples navigate the storms of life with grace and unity.
Maintaining Perspective
Humor intertwined with friendship helps couples maintain a healthy perspective on life and their relationship. It encourages them not to sweat the small stuff and to see the bigger picture in challenging situations. This ability to laugh together at life’s quirks and inconveniences is a testament to the strength of their friendship and the health of their marriage.
Enhancing Emotional Well-being
Laughter, stemming from both humor and the joy of a deep friendship, releases endorphins, enhancing emotional well-being and happiness. This state of emotional health strengthens the marriage, creating a loving and positive environment where each partner feels valued and appreciated.
Adapting to Change and Growth
As individuals and relationships evolve, the adaptability fostered by humor and friendship becomes invaluable. These elements allow couples to navigate the changing tides of life and relationship dynamics with ease and acceptance, promoting growth and understanding within the marital bond.
If you are needing help from a trained marriage and family therapist who specializes in couples, contact me. If you want to know more about dynamics in relationships, look at my Marriage Counseling page. If you are in Minnesota, I can help in person or on video. Contact me by phone: 612-230-7171 or email through my contact page. Or you can click on the button below and self-schedule a time to talk by phone or video.
Own Your Pain. Even If It Hurts.
No Unconditional Love In Adult Relationships
I tell my clients all the time that there is no unconditional love in adult relationships.
“What'? Mike, I thought you really want people to feel loved in their relationships? I thought you really want people to be vulnerable? I thought you really want couples to be happy?”
All of that is true. But having no conditions takes away the value that you bring to relationships through your loving kindness, effort, and vulnerability. This also opens you up for abuse. Let me explain.
Zero-Sum Game: How To Make Your Marriage Reliably Terrible
Raising Kids: Teamwork Makes The Dream Work
Raising kids is like being on a rollercoaster that doesn't have a pause button. It's thrilling, scary, and a bit chaotic all at once. And just like any wild ride, it's way better when you have someone by your side, especially when that someone is your co-parent. Getting on the same page about how to handle the ups, downs, and loop-de-loops of parenting is pretty much the secret sauce to cutting down on family drama. Here’s why teaming up is your best move to keep peace at home and make sure everyone’s on track for a smooth ride.
How To Self Calm After Being Triggered
When we speak of being "triggered," we're referring to those moments when something in our present environment closely resembles an aspect of our past that once led us into a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. These triggers can be anything from a tone of voice, a particular phrase, a sound, or even a smell that catapults us back to a moment of intense emotional response. Recognizing these triggers and learning how to self-calm is essential, not just for our
Understanding the Pursuer in Relationships: Insights from Emotionally Focused Therapy
Everyone has a “go-to” behavior in their part of the relationship dance. Sometimes people are “withdrawers” that recoil from difficult emotional conversations. Sometimes people are “pursuers” who seek the resolutions of these difficult emotional conversations. We’re going to delve into the experience of someone who typically assumes the role of a pursuer in relationships, exploring their attachment style and what Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) reveals about them. A word of warning. . .
How Do Withdrawers Experience Relationships?
As a couples therapist trained in EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy), I often talk to clients about Pursuers and Withdrawers (sometimes called distancers). Withdrawers in relationships exhibit a specific attachment style and face unique challenges and experiences. Today we’re going to look at some of the challenges and experiences unique to withdrawers in relationship.
Understanding Triggers in Relationships: A Perspective from Evolutionary Psychology and Modern Therapy Approaches
A New Inspiration In the New Year
Re-architecting your relationship is hard work. Sometimes you're learning how to do your relationship in a way that you never contemplated. When you are in middle-age and yet feel so immature in your relationship, it can feel really discouraging because you haven't been this bad at something in a long time. So it can help to find inspiration from people doing hard things. My new inspiration is children.
What To Do When You AND Your partner Are Hurt.
In any close relationship, misunderstandings and hurt feelings are inevitable. It's especially complicated when both you and your spouse have hurt each other, and neither of you feels ready to apologize. This standoff can create a rift in your relationship, but it doesn’t have to be a dead end. Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), is an approach to understanding and helping couples that has the most outcome research out of all the modern couples therapies.
Understanding the Role of Emotions:
EFT emphasizes the importance of emotions in shaping our interactions and bonds with our partners. When we're hurt, our primary emotions – like fear, sadness, or loneliness – often get masked by secondary emotions such as anger or frustration. Recognizing these underlying feelings is the first step towards healing. Why? Because secondary emotions like anger protect our vulnerability. Think about this: when you’re scared that your spouse doesn’t love you, isn’t it easier to criticize how they didn’t say “happy birthday” in the morning than to say ,”I’m scared you don’t love me anymore?”
But there’s no free lunch. Though anger and its gang of secondary emotions reduce vulnerability, they make it more confusing to your partner why you’re acting that way. Anger can serve to push people away (because angry people aren’t pleasant to be around) or it can serve to bust through people’s defenses. Anger is really good at that, but now anger takes up all the attention and people will react to the anger, not your hurt, fear, or loneliness.
Now the confusing thing is that frustration, annoyance, and irritation also serve the same function of reducing vulnerability. I wrote a blog post on how some emotions such as frustration, irritation, and annoyance serve the same purpose as anger.
The Antidote
Get underneath the anger/frustration/annoyance. Spend some time identifying your primary emotions behind the hurt. Are you feeling neglected, unimportant, or scared? Understanding your own emotional landscape is crucial before you can address the situation with your spouse. This is what you want to share, not the anger, frustration or annoyance.
If you can’t do this, then your partner is probably still “your enemy” and you’re needing some more active calming. Look at the linked article on active calming. This isn’t just taking a break. It’s establishing with your partner that you need to take a break and that you want to come back together. Then it’s using breathing techniques to help calm you down. You can use other techniques too - some people go for a run, or meditate. Breath activates the parasympathetic nervous system to calm you down.
The Power of Vulnerability
In a stalemate, it’s tempting to wait for the other person to make the first move. However, EFT encourages vulnerability. This doesn’t necessarily mean rushing to apologize but rather expressing your underlying emotions without blame or criticism.
Share Your Feelings Without Accusations
Try to express your feelings without making it about your spouse's actions. For example, say "I feel hurt and lonely when we don't talk about our day," instead of "You never listen to me." This reduces the chance that it comes across as criticism.
3 Examples
Here’s an example of how to change a statement from a “blamey criticism” to something that talks about your internal need. Imagine that you find out about your spouse’s new plan to change their work hours during a party. They hadn’t talked to you about it until you heard it at a party, which really made it feel like they didn’t care what you wanted. Ouch. Here are a couple of different ways to go about it.
Likely to provoke a fight:
[During the party] What the hell, Madison! You couldn’t tell me about working Tuesday nights before you told everyone else? Guess what? Surprise! You’re sleeping on the couch tonight!
Less likely to provoke a fight:
When you talked to Sam about your new work schedule without talking to me about it first, the story in my head is that you don’t really care what I think. I feel unimportant and that makes me really sad, especially since this isn’t the first time this has happened. Can you tell me what was going on that you felt a need to share that with someone at a party before you shared it with me?
Also less likely to provoke a fight:
When you told Sam about your plans for schedule change, I was really hurt and felt unimportant because you hadn’t checked with me. Can you tell me what was going on that you had decided that already before coming to me?
Creating a Safe Emotional Space
A key aspect of EFT is creating a safe emotional space where both partners can express their feelings without fear of judgment or retaliation. This is crucial in a situation where both partners are hurt. This is one of the big reasons why “talking about feelings” can actually become a negative experience - people will divulge feelings that are not safe, like anger or frustration. Here’s an example:
Instead of: I feel so frustrated that you’re so disorganized.
Say: I’m hurt that I haven’t felt listened to when I said I needed you to get everything at the grocery store. I understand occasionally messing up, but it’s happened a lot lately and I don’t know how to ask differently.
Getting the time to talk right for both of you
Establish Ground Rules for Discussions Agree on a time and place where both of you can talk without interruptions. Set ground rules, such as not interrupting each other or using accusatory language. I have a post on how to have a difficult conversation with your partner.
Remember, not rushing to apologize doesn’t mean avoiding responsibility. It's about understanding the deeper emotional currents and creating a space where both of you can feel heard and valued. Through the principles of EFT, you can navigate through the hurt towards a place of greater understanding and connection. Healing is a journey, and with patience and empathy, you can walk this path together.
If you are finding yourself stuck and can’t stop your pattern of fighting, get help! When both of you are hurt, it can be difficult to come to each other’s aid. If you want to know more about dynamics in relationships, look at my Marriage Counseling page. If you are in Minnesota, I can help in person or on video. Contact me by phone: 612-230-7171 or email through my contact page. Or you can click on the button below and self-schedule a time to talk by phone or video.
Ways Your Holiday Exhaustion Can Stress Your Marriage
Holiday exhaustion can significantly impact marital relationships, often exacerbating underlying conflicts that couples may already be facing. This period, typically filled with joy and celebration, can also bring forth stress, fatigue, and tension, particularly affecting couples with different coping mechanisms and personality traits. In this context, understanding the concepts of distancer-pursuer dynamics, along with the differences between introversion and extroversion, becomes essential in navigating marital conflicts during the holidays.
Having In-Law problems During The Holidays?
Marriage is not just the union of two individuals but also the blending of two families. This integration often brings a unique set of challenges, with in-laws frequently becoming a flash point for marital conflict. Understanding why this happens and how to navigate these delicate relationships is crucial for marital harmony.
Are You Emotionally Over-Reponsible In Your Marriage?
In the realm of romantic relationships, the line between support and over-responsibility for a partner's emotional state is often blurred. Many individuals find themselves carrying the burden of their spouse's emotions, believing this to be a sign of true love and commitment. However, relationship experts like Sue Johnson, Terrence Real, and Esther Perel suggest that this approach can have unintended consequences. Let’s delve into why assuming responsibility for your spouse's emotional state can backfire, hindering personal and relational growth.
How Sexual Rejection Can Improve Your Marriage's Sex Life
Sex is a difficult topic of conversation, even in marriages where people share children, a household and finances. It’s difficult because rejection and how we navigate it can get to the root of who we are, not just what we do. . .One of the less discussed but crucial aspects of sexual relationships is dealing with rejection. While it may initially seem disheartening, a rejection can actually serve as a valuable opportunity to open up a conversation about what fuels and dampens sexual desire for both partners.