Who's Running the Show in Your Arguments?
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Part of the ANATOMY OF INTIMACY Blog Series with Irene Fehr.
When couples fight, it's rarely about the actual topic. And it's rarely a mere exchange of words.
Whether it's about money, sex or the color of your next car, disagreements in intimate relationships trigger competing fears — the fear of losing control and thus losing yourself AND the fear of losing your partner.
It’s a competition between wanting to belong and wanting to stay true to yourself — the two things we need to thrive in a relationship.
Arguments are really about whether it’s truly safe to disagree with your partner and stay together, or will you lose them over your differences.
Will I be heard and seen for who I am?
Will I lose myself if I give in?
Will you love me if I disagree?
Am I safe with you as I am?
On the surface, arguments can look like "can I win and get my way?"
Deep down, it's "can I stay connected to you without losing myself and caving into something I don’t want?"
When we are activated into fear, our nervous system snaps into fight/flight mode, and we resort to our best-practiced and easily-accessible relational coping mechanism — the child response.
When we're scared, our adult prefrontal cortex automatically goes offline and our young (reptilian) brain takes over. We let our young scared parts rule our arguments and drive the bus. We fight or flee from threat.
That is a very useful survival mechanism when you’re a child — but not in an adult intimate relationship.
In intimate relationships, when we fight or flee, we make our partner the enemy, breaking the connection we deeply crave and destroying the kind of safety that allows you to come closer to each other.
In intimate relationships, we have to learn how to stay with the tension. Vulnerably.
The child re-acts out of fear.
The adult looks within to identify the fear and reveal it.
The child pushes away to reassert independence.
The adult vulnerably shares what's happening inside, speaks their needs and moves towards their partner.
The child runs from conflict.
The adult owns up to the impulse to run and stays.
CHILD: "Don't control me! I do what I want and you can't deny me of my right!" Pushes the other away and storms out.
ADULT: "There is a part of me, the rebellious teenager, that wants to scream at you "Don't control me". That's how I am used to dealing with conflict where I don't get what I want. As I tune into it, what's really happening for me is that I am scared that I don't have a say in our decision and that gets me even more scared that I'll end up doing something I do not want to do. And when I get scared, I push you away. I see how this pattern creates distance between us and keeps us stuck. Could we step back a bit? I need to hear from you that my opinion and needs matters to you."
CHILD: “I don’t want to talk about this. Leave me alone.” Walks away.
ADULT: “I just realized that I pushed you away and walked away from you. I am sorry. I realize that there is a part of me that knows that I need to say and discuss this, but there is a part of me that is terrified of seeing you so angry and frustrated with me. I shut down instantly because that’s how I dealt with my angry mother when I was a child — and that’s not fair to you. You’re my beloved partner and I abandon you when you most need me. I need time to recover and come back to myself. I promise I will come back to have a conversation with you about this tonight.”
CHILD: “Why didn’t you call me when you were running late? I know that I was waiting for you all evening for our date night. You never think of me. It’s always your work, your projects, your appointments. You’re so selfish!”
ADULT: “I just allowed the frustrated teenager part of me get a hold of me in that argument. I am sorry. I am very frustrated that you were late and I put in all that effort to prepare dinner for our date night. The truth is that it really hurt my feelings. It hurts my feelings as I take your actions to say that you don’t care about me or my efforts — and I protest by criticizing and shaming you. I am sorry. I need us to solve this together so it does not happen again. I don’t want to be in a situation where this happens again.”
In our intimate relationships, we can choose to act as children or as adults. We can chose to re-act in ways that we learned to react to our parents, or with the right support, we can learn to find words that convey what’s really happening for us and to advocate for our needs. We can settle on maintaining child-like relationships where we push our partners away or blame them in frustration, or choose the adult path and make them our partners.
The extent to which we can stay in the discomfort of intimate relating as adults is the extent to which we can grow our intimacy.
When it comes to your sex life, this is everything.
None of this is innate or a given. It takes a growth process to help us transition out of child-like patterns to ones that support our relationship goals. I help my clients “grow up” in their relationships all the time, so that they can access all that their sexual and emotional connection can offer.
Because when it comes to your sex life, emotional connection is everything.
At a very basic level, when you’re consistently antagonizing, pushing away your partner, avoiding facing the situation, or abandoning them altogether, it is very difficult to feel — and show up — as like lovers.
Emotional distancing is a common precursor to a sexless marriage or one that’s filled with obligatory going-through-the-motions sex; it is also one of the earliest signs of a forthcoming divorce, too.
Daring to be vulnerable is the answer. Knowing yourself and learning how to communicate what you feel, experience and need as well as advocate for yourself in a non-antagonistic way has the power to change the trajectory of your marriage and your sex life.
Dare to follow your heart. Dare intimacy.
P.S. When you’re ready to create a sex life that reflects the deep love for each other SCHEDULE a couples consultation call for you and your partner to explore personalized support.