Why You Can't Stop Fighting

Let's talk about why you can't stop fighting. You love each other, but you fight. Why can't you just stop it. It has to do with your emotions. That is what we specialize in at SoulCare Counseling. While, most counseling models do things like probe past relationships and experiences, teach communication techniques and negotiation skills, seek solutions for problems, in Emotionally Focused Therapy, we only have one focus: emotion. We are like a broken record. We play the same tune of emotion over and over. Why? Because emotion is the music to every couple’s dance of disconnection. To stop fighting, or to stay with the metaphor of music, to change the dance, you must learn to change the music.

You Stop Fighting Because You're Stuck In One Of Three Dances Of Disconnection

The Paso Doble – Attack/Attack

The Paso Doble is a ballroom dance which imitates a bullfight with partners constantly challenging and charging one another. This is the conflict style of some couples when they “get into it” with one another. They have a pattern of mutual blaming where each accuses the other in an attempt to find the bad guy in the relationship. This dance is hard to maintain, so eventually the Paso Doble transitions into…

The Protest Polka – Attack/Withdraw

This is the most common dance of disconnection. One partner pursues by attacking with criticisms, complaints, nagging, clinging while the other partner defends him or herself and eventually shuts down, goes silent, and withdraws. This agitates the attacking partner, so he or she escalates the attacks, causing deeper withdrawal by the other. Ironically, both partners are protesting their loss of connection with one trying to force the other closer and the other trying to mitigate the damage and keep connection from being lost altogether. At some point, both partners feel hopeless and the Protest Polka turns into…

No More Dancing – Withdraw/Withdraw

Finally, the couple gives up and both partners shut down their emotions and all they feel is numb. At this point, there is only distance between them. In order to escape the pain of disconnection, they become polite roommates. The next step is separation and/or divorce.

Changing The Music, Changing The Dance

Most couples are so focused on their own steps in the dance - the content of their arguments – that they never see the dance and how it is keeping them disconnected. So, the first step in changing the dance is to see that you have a dance and to see what your particular dance is.

The next step is to see how you are pulled into the dance. What do each of you do that draws your partner into their moves, which then draws you into your moves? What turns on the emotion-music and begins the dance? It goes something like this: “I attack you, and you defend yourself; the more you defend yourself, the more I attack, and it escalates and escalates.” The attacking makes it hard for your partner to be responsive to you, so he or she shuts down. His or her shutting down makes you feel disconnected and alone, so you respond with more pursuing and pushing. You both pull one another in to the dance, and you need to see how.

The third step is to understand what you really want. You can’t change the dance with problem-solving skills, or with compromising, or negotiating, or communication techniques. The only way is to what you both really want, what you are really asking for in your own clumsy ways. You are calling for connection and you become desperate when those calls are not answered. You respond to the disconnection by either pushing and pulling and doing anything to get a response, or you respond with going numb and shutting down so you don’t totally lose him or her.

The fourth step is to realize that you are not the enemy and your partner is not the enemy. There is no bad guy. The enemy is the dance.

Once you see the dance as the enemy, you’re ready to work together to slow down the music and learn to step to the side, give one another enough safety to talk about your needs and feelings and yearnings for connection and closeness, forgive and create a new dance of connection that gets better and better for a lifetime of love.

“Dance Me To The End Of Love” by Leonard Cohen

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

Dance me to the end of love…

I urge you to find out more about couples counseling, and then contact us to schedule a free thirty-minute consultation to get you started on learning a new dance.