Relationship Fights

A little game I used to enjoy playing, back when I was in the parish and coming under heat on any given Sunday from someone who felt my sermon that day was theologically wrong or just not what they believed, was to listen very intently, acknowledge and honor every single point they made, and then finish with this line, “I guarantee, if you and your spouse were to come into my office for 30 minutes, no more, I could find between the two of you fundamental theological differences. Guaranteed. And do you want to know why? Because there are so many points being made in our shared theology that it would literally be impossible for two people to share the exact same theology, all of the time, even two people under the exact same roof. The sucky part of human relationship is that I’m not always right and I don’t always get my way.”

It is next to impossible to have a human relationship, of any sort, without disagreements. They are the natural byproduct of communication. There are inevitably in any relationship going to be areas and points of not seeing eye-to-eye.

What happens next, however, is the big question. For if we buy into the idea that disagreements, arguments, and even the occasional verbal fight are an inevitable consequence of living in human community, then the real question is not if but how. How do we execute those fights, when do they tend to happen, what do they indicate, and what needs to happen?

 Author Bias

Coming out of the gate, I have to tell my bias, so that you take my words with a grain of salt, or at least acknowledge that my vantage point may be different from yours.

Two things, I came from a big family. So, the way I got heard was to elevate my volume. Many people perceive loud to be angry, coming from a male especially. It’s not always, but it can definitely feel that way to the receiver. But now at age 58, I have had to put particular work into not elevating my volume, over the years, because it can shut others down. And I happen to feel that I have a responsibility to tread more gently in the world.

Two, my long-time girlfriend and I both come from loud homes and are both very expressive and demonstratively emotional people. She’s a Bronx Italian from the 1960s. So, when we disagree on something, we knock heads. It is part of the salt of our relationship that gives it good flavor for both of us, yet we both agree that too much salt can easily ruin any dish. I can be too loud and make her feel yucky. Having run a large and successful company for a long time and been the dominant of her sisters, she can at times not listen as much as other times.

You may recall, I said a minute ago that I became loud in that large family in order to feel heard. That not feeling heard is very disempowering and feels aggressive. So then I get loud and she feels dominated or like I’m not being sensitive.

You see the problem.

So, in our 12 years together, she has done an excellent job of focusing more on listening and also letting the other person finish their sentences. I have strived to quiet myself in conversations, let more points go (if they weren’t as important), circle back if she walked over a point, and just be more understanding that her heart is in the right place.

But, we have both also simultaneously strived to make clear to the other person that boundaries are boundaries. She WILL be treated with kindness and gentleness, even in a fight, or she will fight back. And I WILL be heard; you don’t get to silence my voice, even in a fight.

And we have fought to fight better, because we are each what the other needs, each admire the other, and each just enjoy playing together through life.

So, I’m in no way saying we have all the answers, only that she’s always wrong. (Just kidding! ;D)

Anger is Good

I know it’s an odd place to begin, but I believe that anger is one of the most useful of all human emotions. It can cause profound damage, which most people instantly assume means damage when it is expressed and acted out. But I believe that the worst damage anger does is when it is not expressed, but pressed way down, bottled up, denied, forgotten, or papered over. Because then that sh*t spills out into a whole raft of other ways and directions. That’s the stuff that eats at us from within.

But that’s not my point. Anger is good – very good, actually – because it is the soul’s own monitoring device, its own sort of health tracker. It would be easy to think anger is monitoring what is wrong outside of you or tracking the health of your relationships. But that’s not it, at all. What anger is really tracking, monitoring, and bringing back to you as this grand gift is a rapid assessment of where your own boundaries, your own sense of self is being invaded, hurt, or wounded.

When it comes to conversations and disagreements, this is why frustration can come up so easily, so quickly. Because, it is so easy to not feel understood, or at the very least not feel heard.

This is also why for some people it can register not as anger but as sadness. That feeling disempowered or invaded can feel very lonely and sorrowful, because it feels like you don’t see me or care about me and what I have to say.

So, whether it is anger or sadness, frustration or even the desire to just run away, all of these feelings in human disagreement or conflict are the body and soul communicating to you that your own voice is being minimized or mistreated in a way that doesn’t feel good TO YOU.

And you’ve either been conditioned in childhood to believe, “Tough sh*t! Eat it, kid. Your voice doesn’t matter,” or “You have a right to be heard, even if you aren’t right or don’t get your way,” or “You are always right, no matter what, and always get your way. And everyone else is a loser.” In other words, you got some derivative of either your voice is always dominant, always passive, or let’s listen to each other. If two people in any relationship – friendship, intimate, work, extended family – come from different childhood conditioning, well, then we’ve got problems, especially if one was conditioned to always be dominant and the other always passive. But you probably guessed that, already.

 Tabitha

I had a significant other who used to start a lot of fights, like screaming fights, like three times per week, on average, to the point where it got so exhausting that I had to end the relationship simply because of this one fact, even though I really adored her.

I came to realize two things. I didn’t start the fights, but I was the one who made them far worse with my acerbic tongue and yelling. She started probably 90% of them. So we each played an ugly role. And even if I did change me fully, which I didn’t in that relationship (that would come later), it still would’ve only changed half the problem, despite all the therapy we got together.

But there was one particular quirk I noticed about Tabitha, after a brief while, and I mentioned it to her one Sunday afternoon when we were enjoying a leisurely drive in the California mountains. I said, “Tabby, have you ever noticed that you start a fight, and usually a vicious one, every time I’m about to go away on business or to fly home to Minnesota?”

I caught her in a relaxed mood. The car was quiet for a mile or two, as she liked to think on stuff, sometimes. “What’s funny about that, honey, is that I remember mum doing the exact same thing with da. He would have business to go to for an overnight or whatever, and she would pick a fight with him. I remember it so clearly, because it was so obvious and like clockwork, once or twice a month. So, yeah, you’re right.”

I’ve thought about Tab’s comment a lot, over the years, this idea of why we fight, why we argue. As I stated earlier when discussing anger, the fight can actually spring from a good place. But as we see here from my ex’s mother and herself, it can also spring from what seems like a bad place, just sorta fighting for fighting’s sake.

But the thing is, it’s never that. Everything has an origin and even a purpose. As Tabby and I dug into it, we discovered on that long drive that it’s not just that that behavior was modeled by mom, because one of her sister’s did not do that, at all. Rather, while that was part of it, what was going on inside Tabitha was that she was attempting to elicit an emotional response from me in the form initially of anger, which for her conferred that she was being seen (which she didn’t feel as a child, and so she fought as a way to get attention). But after the anger phase came the resolution phase or the phase where we got the kiss-and-make-up part, which gave her the warm fuzzies that she needed to power her through another absence of mine for work or to see family. (Though, she would do it even if she had to travel for her work, too.) Sometimes, resolution would be in an hour, or sometimes she would not allow resolution for days into the trip. The added benefit of protracting the argument into the trip was that it kept me sorta on a leash, insofar as it kept me in touch trying to resolve it, almost begging for us to work it out, so that we could return to some peace.

As she saw the pattern, thereafter, to her credit, she did begin to chip away at lessening that particular one, if for no other reason than she hated being like her mom, at least on that.

So then, Fighting is Bad?

It really didn’t require the example of Tabitha and me to see that fighting or arguing in a relationship can be powerfully debilitating to a relationship. Every single one of us knows that, which is why some people avoid all confrontation or even disagreement, whatsoever. It’s too scary.

But that doesn’t seem to jibe with the earlier point that anger is good. Granted, anger and fighting are technically two different things. One is an emotion I feel; the other is conflict happening between two people. They generally go hand in hand, however.

So, it’s not that fighting is bad or anger is bad. It’s more like both are necessary, at times. It’s more a question of how they get executed and why they’re being executed.

Jon

Jon didn’t like Briana touching him. He was so out of the relationship and disgusted by finding out she had cheated on him, more than once. But he was also angry at himself for putting up with it for so long. All this together meant that he did not want sex. Right up until they each started seeing me, just months earlier, they used to have sex, even after 17 years of marriage, 2-3 times per day!

But, he reported lately that since I had helped him tap into his anger from his childhood and this relationship (all of which had been completely untouched, “because I was taught to be a good boy and not get angry”) and begin to release it in healthy directions such as journaling and talking with me, he was standing up for himself more, even if not yet always in the most healthy ways. He said that he was starting fights now to avoid sex, not daily but frequently.

This was a radical divergence in their relationship to not be having sex multiple times per day, and Bri knew it. She saw him fighting, felt him pulling away, and she was doing everything in her power to placate this man who had always been meek and served her, as I helped her see. The times they were a-changin’.

The grand irony of this was that Briana had for years used fighting as a way to cover up her cheating! Any time Jon would be sniffing around facts that didn’t make sense in her stories from work, she would start making wild accusations, accuse him of not being trusting and loving, and just gaslight the fk out of him.

Needless to say, that relationship was so far gone that no amount of deep diving was going to save it. However, what it did save was two individuals in becoming their authentic selves, just not together. Jon found his voice, for the first time ever, not just the anger but his own sense of self, his true passions for his career, and became an even better father. Briana, after the abortion of the marriage and divorce, was a wreck because she had lost that constant love source of Jon forever confirming her worth and was forced to go inside herself in our work and ‘name the beast’ in the form of those messages inside that had been saying her whole life that she sucked, didn’t matter, and that she was unlovable. The more we attacked that and saw all the patterns that grew out of it, the more her old life and self fell away, and new growth came.

The anger, sadness, and fighting brought about the destruction of the relationship…and new birth in its wake. Years later, they both reported being much happier, coparenting well, and realizing that the marriage went where it needed to go, even if it hurt getting there. There was forgiveness, because they knew they needed to work together for the kids.

Jon’s Deeper Problem and the Bland Marriage

The long-standing problem for Jon in the marriage was not Bri’s cheating but Jon’s utter absence of fighting, the utter absence of anger, the utter absence of any sense of self. The not-fighting was what kept him silent. He had been conditioned to be so conflict-averse that it caused him to lose all sense of agency and worth in his relationship and in his work, too.

He had swallowed his fight. NOT fighting was the problem. And she dominated the hell out of him.

Interestingly, I’ve seen a similar though different pattern in couples where they both got a no-conflict message in childhood, and they each eventually report a relationship that has gone stale from sheer ecru boredom. Both were so conditioned to not have a voice that there is zero conflict. The downside is that years later one, or both, report a sense of emptiness from either the relationship or life  in general, even though the relationship feels completely safe.

The fight in us is the expression of self. Jon had his ripped from him, as a kid, but finally found it again at 42 in his courageous and brief work with me. The oddity of it was that as he did so and as our appointments became fewer and fewer, the anger began to bleed out completely. Eventually, he reported in one session, “That inner motor you talk about Sven has stopped. It’s weird how all those years of suppressing and denying my voice and my anger as an indicator of my voice and how I was being treated caused me to live in constant anxiety. But now that I got all of it out, these past few months, it’s like for the first time in my life I can sleep. I wake up and I don’t need coffee. I can just sit with my kids and frickin’ BE! It is the strangest thing. I have more than just the high gears. I have an idle and even an off switch inside. I’m so calm now, even though I get genuinely excited about things, now, too. This is so light and weird and cool and strong. WTF!?!”

Briana Comes Alive!

Briana had used fighting as a way to control Jon and maintain her own sense of self-righteousness. She had been so diminished and criticized as a child that she feared being wrong, being at fault, being small, or in any way being seen as not good enough. So, by her own admission, she realized later in her work with me that she desperately needed to always keep the focus on Jon as a bad person, even though she admits his only crime was not sticking up for himself (and his annoying habit of always wearing his shoes in the house).

As we began to identify how she came to dominate and diminish Jon, always making him the villain, always overpowering him, a guilt and a shame took over Briana that so overwhelmed her that she couldn’t stop crying for weeks. This had been the very pain she had been running from all her life, because it was not just the sharp realization of what she had done to tear down this man she so loved and ruin the family that was hers, but it was full awareness of the exact same shame she felt as a child every time her father called her out on every little mistake, every time she wasn’t pretty enough or colored the sky purple instead of blue. She remembered hating herself by age three or four, and mom standing back, because it was safer for her to protect herself than protect her child, which she fully understood, because dad was scary.

She had spent her life angry at her dad and denying that sadness was even an emotion, or admitting it was nothing more than a refuge of the weak, as her dad had drilled in. But when she was forced to see herself and lose everything, she saw her inner child too. She felt that little girl for the first time and gave herself permission to see sadness as a beautiful purging of the soul’s pain.

Further, she found her deeper anger. For the first time in her life she ran up and knocked that giant mom statue off its pedestal, screaming, “IT WAS YOUR JOB TO PROTECT ME, BUT YOU PROTECTED YOURSELF, YOU COWARD! WHAT KIND OF MOM ARE YOU!”

She faced and slayed the dragon of shame that was calling out her mother. She had always seen mom as a saint, but now saw her as just a coward who turned her back on her kids, rather than get them out of there to safety, which she realized in their city and family she could’ve effectively done. She never said any of this to her parents because she felt there was no need. And, while others choose differently, she chose not to confront them on it, because dad had dementia and it wouldn’t make a whit of difference with mom. So, she chose to just let the relationships be what they were. But her expectation of ever getting a real relationship with either was something she could finally let go of, because she had finally confirmed her own worth. Though the birth and delivery were painful, the new life she had come into – one of self-worth and affirmation – was glorious and new, and so much lighter and freer.

She atoned for a lot of what she had put Jon through and her mothering changed dramatically. She, like Jon, calmed down inside. She no longer sought approval through her successes and being perfect. But most importantly, she wasn’t a fight-picker anywhere near as much with her employees, her customers, or with her ex-husband. She could finally accept responsibility.

The Goal

As you can see, the soul’s voice is a tricky little devil. It demands to be heard. It needs to be heard. There is no health to a relationship or value in life if it is not heard. Jon, himself, admitted that he ruined the relationship, too, in his allowing his own voice to be silenced, and he flat out admitted it to Briana. He wouldn’t have those hard conversations of expressing his truth because he feared her flare-ups. But he admitted he should’ve pushed through her flare-ups to be heard, anyway. He didn’t do his part to find a way to a solution. He conceded that his silencing of his own voice – his fear – killed the relationship as much as her cheating and dominating him. He did not give quarter to his own passiveness and fear.

The goal in all of this is to begin to see your sadness and your anger in your relationships as indicators of where your own inner voice and self are not being heard or honored, where your fences and walls are being breached. They can also rise up inside you in the form of anxiety, frustration, lethargy, ennui, agitation, mopiness, heaviness, and several other feelings. These are all indicators that your own inner voice – your soul – is being suppressed by you and potentially by another in your relationship, in your conversations.

So, your task in your journaling is to use those feelings to point the way, pushing deeper to pinpoint what it is exactly inside of you that is not being expressed or perhaps not even being seen by you, so that you can begin to have more authentic agency in your life.

However, the other side of that is that the strong feelings and sense of fight can so very easily degenerate into fighting that goes beyond being heard, or that extends into protracted arguments, long hurt feelings, and more. That is, it’s not the ‘what’ of anger/sadness/feeling unheard and unseen but the ‘how’ those feelings are executed in the relationship. The goal is calm conversation, but that can be a high bar for many couples. It’s not unattainable.

What is required is the flushing out of the emotions that get us all charged up in the first place. See, it’s not the voice itself inside that needs to be heard that creates the problems. The problems are the feelings that go with the voice. So, the anger may be pointing an arrow to the fact that my wife isn’t acknowledging my views on how I believe we need to change the bedtime routine for our boys. The point or voice is my view on bedtime; the emotion is the anger over not feeling heard. What so easily happens is that the anger or some other feeling gets so hyper-charged up that it gets in the way. But the feeling was never supposed to be more than a sign, an indicator pointing the way. The anger is not the point, itself. The sadness or retreat is not the point, itself. But the voice gets lost amid the strong feelings.

So, if each person can commit to withdrawing to be alone to purge out their emotions, whether in the moment or daily as life goes on, there is far greater likelihood of soul’s being heard without the hyper-charges getting in the way and gumming up the equation.

But this requires discipline, self-discipline. And it’s so damn easy to NOT be disciplined in relationships, hell in life, in general. And that’s why sh*t goes awry.

Yet, it is precisely that lack of discipline that just cranks those emotions up even higher, bit by bit, over time. There has to be a committed effort in relationships to ongoingly decharge our own selves, in the best interests of the relationship. Otherwise, the fights become brutal and really quite unnecessary.

Sorry & Action

In addition to the commitment to constantly decharge myself, do you wanna know what the single biggest need is for good fighting and good feelings in relationships?

It’s not forgiveness. It’s contrition. It’s for each person to be an adult and own their crap. Own when they’ve hurt the other person. Own when they’ve gotten out of control. Own when they’ve chosen to passively choose fear rather than standing up for themself. Own when they’ve chosen dominance rather than self-discipline to purge their pain. Own their own shame. Own when they’ve shamed the other.

To truly own what you’ve done and who you’ve been to someone and to feeeeel what you’ve done is the definition of contrition. It is the natural humbling of self that comes when we truly see and feel what we’ve done.

That, accompanied by genuine apologies and changed behavior, even if it’s bit by blessed bit, make for real relationships.

Too often people jump to forgiveness without the genuine humility and contrition, without the open dialogue that comes with both people being heard. Too often it’s used to paper over a problem and move on, which is just one more way to avoid a conflict. Thus, it doesn’t actually solve a damn thing.

No, what’s needed for real relationships is I’m going to work the heck on me and getting out my crap and you’re going to work on you. And when we disagree we’re going to do our best to stay calm and just talk it out. I’m going to protect and encourage your right to be heard and make you feel so; and you’re going to do likewise. We’re going to build something real, NOT just something that serves me, my fears, and my childhood conditioning!

Got the guts?

Download my audiobook, There’s a hole in my love cup, or get the paperback or e-book, at BadassCounseling.com. If you prefer to heal and grow in a group setting, join the 48,000-member light group on Facebook, Badass Counseling Group. Or, for a fair monthly fee, join CMTY-PLUS! on the website, with direct access to me, multiple times per month, to get your questions asked and answered.

It’s time to build relationships that breathe life and energy into you, rather than suck it out of you!

Thanks for reading.

HAVE A KICKASS DAY!