Alina Liu :
I am in the line of work that sits on the premises of hope and human potential. I see enthusiastic couples embarking on the journey of love with ferocity and passion. I also see those jaded and disappointed, trapped in an unrelenting “groundhog day,” somehow finding themselves with different partners but the same conflicts. As therapists, we are not immune to the human condition. I, too, have tried to crack the code of love, the secrets to long-lasting relationships.
Born with a longing for emotional connection and security, each of us carries internalized relational templates from earlier relationships. How your caregivers interacted with each other, stable or volatile. How they disagreed with each other, with kindness or full of contempt. All the information gets encoded and translated into how we show up in relationships. Relational templates are often as intuitive as having a sweet tooth or craving pickled olives.
Take a moment to reflect on the last disagreement you had with your partner. Did you air out each other’s “dirty laundry” with one person storming out of the apartment? Did you seek comfort behind the wall of silence and let tension fester in the room? Or did you let feelings roam free, throwing emotional jabs at each other’s deep-rooted vulnerability and sensitivity for the sake of keeping scores? As the field of couple’s therapy continues to expand and grow, we now know that the secret to long-lasting relationships is not to eliminate any disagreements or conflicts, but rather how we disagree and reconcile differences.
Healthy disagreements can help strengthen your relationship and deepen your connection with your partner. Researchers from the Gottman Institute coined the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” four types of communicative behaviors during a conflict that could lead to destructive outcomes in a couple, including criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt (Gottman, 2008). Luckily, there are evidence-based antidotes to these entrenched communication patterns.
We are all familiar with criticism, both directed to ourselves and our partners. “You never do any chores around the house!” “You never listen to me!” Criticism can trigger a strong signal for others to defend themselves and decrease the other person’s willingness to engage in a conversation. According to Gottman, the antidote to criticism is “gentle start-up (Gottman, 2015),” a softened approach to bringing up disagreements in the relationship that de-escalates a potential argument. Try expressing how you feel instead of how your partner makes you feel, “I feel unheard when you shut down in conversations,” “I feel alone in the relationship when you walk away from these conversations.” Also refrain from using “absolutes,” such as “always” and “never.”
When feeling attacked, it is a perfectly normal reaction to want to defend your innocence. “You never take the dog out!” “That’s not true, I took him out yesterday! You never acknowledge anything I do!” In a heated argument, righteous defensiveness does little for restoring your innocence and may end up sending the argument into mutual destruction built on each other’s past mistakes. It is a tug of war, the more defensive we are, the more our partner will move towards the opposite end of this defensiveness teeter-totter to try to regain control. Instead, try taking part of the responsibility to soften up the tension and create room for collaboration and connection. “Yeah, I could try to take the dog out more often. It’s just been stressful at work this week.”
“I don’t even know why I’m with you. You are just so uninteresting.” Contempt is an expression of superiority, a costly emotional jab that is corrosive to one’s insecurities and sensitivity (Gottman 2008). Contempt often comes through hurtful comments that close the entry to reconciliation. Despite these comments may be true to your experience and liberating to let out, it is an emotional poison that pushes away anyone it touches. The antidote to contempt rests in fostering a culture of appreciation and respect in your relationship, as well as an honest expression of your feelings and needs without having to position yourself in superiority.
In the middle of a heated argument, our body enters the fight-or-flight mode, blood pressure and heart rate go up, and our ability to process information decreases as we prepare to react to perceived danger. To help down-regulate a cascade of physiological reactions, some may engage in what Gottman (1994) describes as “stonewalling,” emotional disengagement that shuts out the other person from having any emotional connection or access to the partner. During an argument or conflict, it can feel profoundly alone and terrifying to be shut out by your partner, and the antidote to stonewalling is actively maintaining emotional connection while working out your differences. For example, instead of putting up the emotional barricade, tell your partner that you are going to take a short walk to clear your mind and will be back soon to remind them that there is still emotional safety.
No relationship is perfect. To paraphrase what I once heard, to choose a partner means to commit yourself to a set of problems you are willing to have. We used to think that to restore a relationship to a healthy state, we need to help couples solve their problems. However, according to the Gottman Institute, almost 70% of conflicts in relationships are perceptual without concrete solutions. And as we peel away these individual differences, we begin to uncover deep-rooted meaning systems at the core of the individual’s existential foundations. For that reason, a disagreement about money may not be about money, after all: to one partner it may be access to freedom when work gets stressful, while to the other partner, money could provide a sense of security in a world filled with uncertainty. During conflicts, remember to hold each other with gentle kindness and to remind each other of your love and commitment.
(Alina Liu, Psy.D is a licensed psychologist in California. She received her doctoral degree from Yeshiva University and her Master’s in Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania).
