Why are we having so much conflict in our relationship?

Sharing a life with someone involves resolving many differences. These range from small things such as who cooks dinner to big ones such as finances, libido, or preferred country to live in. What creates problems or conflict in a relationship work is not the actual differences themselves but rather the process we use to resolve them. We can have many differences, even really big ones, and yet can have the best of relationships. In fact, a relationship is often actually health because of the differences as they have the potential to balance out some of our traits and characteristics. An alternative to the differences concept, is to consider that conflict arises when people try to get their needs met from the relationship but struggle to do so effectively.

The reason that couples tend to not fight as much in the first few months of their relationship is that the differences may not have become as apparent or we are less impacted by them as less time has passed experiencing them, so we may be more willing to let them go in that early stage. On top of that, our brains are flooded with Oxytocin and other hormones from the process of falling in love.

When couples get stuck, it is because they do not have a good way to resolve these differences. So they try as best as they can to do so and usually they will either ‘dial up’ or ‘dial down’. This is either where they bring the issue up in such a strong way (volume, tone, etc) that it impacts the other. It is like the message is sent but it is ‘spiky’. The other tendency is to simply not bring things up or withdraw from the other person. We call this ‘dialling down’. That dial up or down will impact the other person who tends to respond to that by themselves dialling up or down. This is felt by the first person who themselves respond and the cycle continues. We call this a negative cycle. Most couples are getting caught up in their negative cycle a lot when they come to seek help.

For some couples, there may also be some emotional wounds from the past that are getting touched on by the other person, through either their words or actions. These wounds can come from within the relationship or they can have been created from before the couple even formed their relationship. Unfortunately, unlike physical wounds, time does not heal emotional wounds and so even if they were created many years earlier, they are likely to still exist within us.