by Nathan Chua
I have heard it said before that couples who don’t fight, don’t talk either. The same thing can be said about families and friends. We can be so averse to conflict that we often opt out of talking about them. I often hear couples demand that their partners should have as similar wants as they do. My partner should already know what I want and asking for it will make me look pathetic. In our culture, it is quite common to see couples come to seek therapy due to the long periods where there have been so many bottled up emotions. In this article, I will share with you some things you can try to help you prevent conflicts that can either drive you apart because of a major fight, or make you imperceptibly drift apart.
Tune in to your feelings
In contrast to what most of us might believe, conflict can actually be healthy in close relationships. It’s really how we handle them that can make a difference. One way to avoid escalating conflicts is for us to tune in to the deeper feelings that are hidden in our efforts to protect ourselves from exposing our vulnerabilities. In many challenging situations, we are often unaware that we have mixed emotions. A good example to use is when we lose someone in death. Most of us believe that the only legitimate emotion that we should feel is sadness. Yes, that is true. Sadness would most likely be first on our list. But some of us end up unable to accept the grieving process believing that we are somehow defective for having other feelings like guilt, anger, or even relief at the idea that the burden of caretaking has been lifted out of us.
In relationships, it is legitimate to feel anger or irritation with our loved ones. Tuning into ourselves involves discovering the other feelings that we might be missing. Are there other feelings involved here?
See for yourself if showing just one side of you to your partners is helping you come to a resolution. If not, maybe it is time to let your partners see those other sides of you.
For some, the angry side is what the loved ones want to see. Maybe our indifferent attitude has made them think that they don’t matter. At least seeing our anger tells them they matter.
In case you lose it
Then there might be times when you just couldn’t help but go back to your old ways of handling the situation. You very well know that you’ve gone away from what you would like to be in the situation. Listen to your senses, if it doesn’t feel like you like yourself in those situations, then waste as little time as possible and make amends. Begin an open and honest conversation about it.
One thing I help couples to realize in the counseling room is that the work they do does not guarantee that they will never make mistakes. It is impossible to expect near perfection. They can accept that these are tendencies that the relationship will probably evoke in each of them when there are major challenges and changes. Couples and relatives can ask themselves one thing to recover from such ill-fated arguments. Has anything changed in what they value? Have their deepest aspirations for themselves in their relationships become different? Chances are they have not. Their values remain the same.
I recall one of Dr. Steven Hayes’ analogy of how we are in times of challenges. He reminds us of what we were like as toddlers. Toddlers fall down countless times experiencing, at times, excruciatingly painful wounds just to learn how to walk. Well, we’ve all been toddlers before. We can remind ourselves that before we had language, we kept on standing up when we fell. There were no rules that told us what we can or cannot do. The only thing we instinctively did was to stand up again and walk toward what matters to us.
Say you’re sorry and do it over again. We are all a work in progress. Perfection is not what we were built for. And that’s why we are all called simply, to be human.