The other day, a couple comes in, sits down, and they break into a deafening silence. They reminded me of an incident in Maui a lifetime ago, sitting in a little bar named the Maui Belle. It was the middle of the day, and I walked in and sat around a group of sailors. About five or six men were seated at a table and next to them at the bar. It was stone-cold quiet—the strangest feeling. A nanosecond later, a man flew off the bar and landed on several guys at the table, and all mayhem broke loose as the rest of them jumped into the fight. I stepped over flying bodies and made my exit. I learned later that they had just returned from six months at sea, and the grudges were off the charts.
Dealing with high-conflict couples is like stepping into the aftermath of a bar fight. Tension builds, and when it’s released, it can be destructive. The aftermath of a conflict is not just harsh words, yelling, criticism, contempt, and hitting below the belt. It’s destroying the good feelings that once existed, leaving a trail of emotional wreckage. This is the destructive aftermath of relationship conflicts, a stark reminder of the urgency of addressing relationship issues.
In doing couple therapy for forty years and married for thirty-two, I have learned much about creating and maintaining a loving relationship. Funnily enough, putting all the pieces together took a long time. Relationships are not superficial; they are incredibly complex. We bring our whole life experience to the table, including a myriad of defenses, the important ones being projection and entitlement. The victim becomes the perpetrator. I felt hurt, so I’m entitled to hurt you back. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. These counterproductive responses are not only unhelpful but also destructive to the relationship. This complexity underscores the crucial need for professional guidance in managing conflicts.
One of the tools I often use is the metaphor of living in a time capsule, the Yellow Submarine, a nod to Ringo Starr. This fascinating concept helps us understand that we live in a body that stores all our emotional memories. We don’t remember much of it consciously, but our body does, and they can significantly influence our present actions and reactions. Understanding and acknowledging these emotional memories can be a key to managing conflicts in relationships.
Let me draw a diagram of words for you. There is a stimulus (Some behavior or lack thereof, something that is said or done that triggers you). You feel a response that could be about what is going on but also may evoke anger, rage, and urges to retaliate, either passively or aggressively. Here is the crucial part. Your response has three parts:
- There is a stimulating event.
- There is an appropriate response.
- There is a secondary response that originates from your time capsule.
The secondary response is most important because it belongs to you. Your unique experiences can morph into a sense of entitlement to retaliate.
The trigger can be correct, and the response can be off base, but only if you are not considering your history. So, you need to divide your response into two parts. One is the correct response to the trigger, and the other is to be accountable for the feelings you bring to the situation.
If you come from a combative family, you cannot help it if you have those responses; they are built into your system. So, what can you do? First, you need to understand your unique history. Most people play out their family dynamic in all current relationships. Secondly, you need to connect the experiences in your body to the current situation. Third, what do you want, need, don’t want, feel, and what does that mean? Let me explain.
Let me give you an example of what happened during one of my sessions. My patient, a married man with two children, complained that his wife was critical, ordered him around, and was consistently irritated with him. I have known her for a couple of sessions, and I am also a married man, and I see that pattern in my wife and me. So, I told him that he may need to see this correctly. His father was very authoritative, critical, and irritated with him. So, when she says these things to him, he responds as if she is saying and doing the same thing his father did. As it happens, it’s not true. She is trying to inform, show, and help him do something the best way possible. She has also asked him more than once, so there was a particular amount of irritation.
In the situation I just described what would have been a natural response if his history had not been there. A natural response would be, “Ok, sure, I will try to do that. I know you’ve asked me this before, but I will try to do it this way in the future.” Then, of course, try to do that thing in the future. Or he could tell her he has a tough time because it reminds him of his father, so could she say it more softly? Once he understands his secondary response and can be genuinely empathic, his resentment for her subsides, and they can work towards a positive solution.
On a neurological level, the fight-or-flight part of your brain is stimulated in one-tenth of a second. We all instantaneously react that way. This is why I developed the word WAVE, which means Wait, Acknowledge, Validate, and Emphasize. Stop long enough so the stimulus can reach the frontal lobes, where empathy and compassion occur. It takes reflection to find our part in the problem. We immediately blame the other person; that’s our reflexive reaction. Here is where it gets complicated.
We must separate our lifetime of experience from our current conflict by reflecting and taking accountability for our secondary response. So how do we do this? You need to own your part of the argument by discussing your response from your history. Like “When you do this, I respond this way.” Taking ownership of your part will often take the blame away.
The kicker here is to get to a solution as fast as possible. Going over what happened never ends because no one ever agrees on what happened. So, skip that part and head straight to how we can make this better in the future. Primarily, it’s considering what’s important to the other person and trying to do those significant things to them. They must be within reasonable human boundaries that you both can live with.
So, to not end up in that bar in Maui leaping onto tables in pure chaos, take a minute and consider your Yellow Submarine. You bring your time capsule with you wherever you go. It’s in there and will be intensified by a particular stimulus. Someone else in the same situation would respond differently. Knowing this allows you to distinguish between the stimulus and what might be a reasonable reaction.
Instead of blaming your mate, let them know how their actions affect you and why. Then, go for the solution. Make sure your time capsule has holes in it so other people can get through to you. Some people have such thick protective shells that nothing can penetrate. The key to relationships is the one we have with ourselves. The more closed off and disconnected we are from our past and how it has affected us, the more defensive, angry, and unreachable we become. The Greek Delphic Oracle, written in 1400 BC, states, “Know Thyself. ” This is just as true today as it was then.