Want to Stay Together? Learn to Fight
This story is part of Inside Love, our series exploring what it means to love through science and curious conversation.
If you’re struggling in a relationship, the last thing you probably want to do is fight more. It’s often easier to step around tricky conversations and chase some peace. But according to relationship coach Kim Polinder, avoiding conflict does not make a relationship safer.
“I’m very suspicious of couples who do not fight,” Polinder says. “And if there’s no fighting, that tells me that someone is probably suppressing their feelings. Now, that sounds noble, but given enough time, that suppression will turn into resentment, and that will take a relationship down.”
We talk to Polinder about how to get to the root of the conflicts that never seem to go away, how to recognize the neurobiology of a trigger and, once you’re in the thick of an argument, how to fight with grace.
Guest:
- Kim Polinder, relationship coach; author, Why We Fight: A Transformative Road Map to Healing Conflict in Any Relationship.
Lesley McClurg: You trace your own relationship to conflict all the way back to the very beginning of your life. You were abandoned as an infant in rural South Korea. How do you think that beginning shows up in the way that you love today or, potentially, the way you fight?
Kim Polinder: I’ve heard and read articles on how pivotal that first year is for a baby. I can only surmise that my classic abandonment wounds were rooted in being separated from my birth mother and then again being separated from my foster mother, which, based on the paperwork, I had grown quite attached to. So how I experience abandonment wounds as an adult is that I’m quick to perceive the potential of it at every turn. I like to call it a lens at how I looked at people, myself, love, relationships and attachment through. It kind of ran my life.
Lesley McClurg: Meaning that you would pull back in fear that you will be abandoned?
Kim Polinder: Yes. So any sort of tension, friction. “Oh, I hurt your feelings. That means that you may reject me at some point. I’ll just leave you before you leave me,” was a common outcome. Not really showing up authentically in a vulnerable way because that would be too scary. What if they hurt my feelings? It was a very arms-length way of relating to people.
Lesley McClurg: But I imagine the way we fight is also potentially shaped by the person across from you. I know for me, I’ve gotten very different feedback based on who I’m fighting with. I had one partner who told me that I had an anger management problem because I didn’t show enough emotion. I had another partner who told me that I go completely nuclear. I don’t think I go completely nuclear or that I repress, but probably the truth is somewhere in between those. So, the other person does play a role in terms of how the fight plays out as well, correct?
Kim Polinder: Yes. What we get in childhood and the family of origin is a seeding, a foundation. We get our values modeled for us — how to react, how to communicate, how to love and be loved. That sets us up for going into adulthood and having our philosophy of love and attachment either reinforced or opposed. So when you talk about how you got different feedback from different people, getting back to that lens, one person who’s perhaps hyper-vigilant might think, “Are they upset? Well, I saw you furrow your eyebrows, and your jaw is tense; why aren’t you expressing?” They may have grown up in an environment where they had to be hyper-vigilant and look out for potential danger. And the other person may have grown up in an environment where it was very calm and regulated on the outside, but then you being very expressive could have been very overwhelming for them because they weren’t used to it. So again, we all bring a lens to how we view other people and ourselves.
Lesley McClurg: So you’re saying these old roots are potentially going to play out in how we’re arguing over the dishes or our parenting style, or they’re going to come out in these fights that we have every day. But help me make the leap from these roots from when we were very young to the fights that we’re having on a daily basis with our partners.
Kim Polinder: I love that you use the dishes as an example. It’s such a common fight. I had one couple in particular where he took a picture of how the dishwasher should be loaded according to his wife and pasted it on the fridge because it was such a repeated argument. Now, while I love the dedication to solutions, if we look at what her core wound was, it was, “You never listen to me. My feelings don’t matter. When I tell you it’s really important to me that the dishwasher gets loaded in this way and here’s the reasoning behind it and you just discard it and you do your own thing, I feel invisible.” That could be traced back to a childhood where she wasn’t given emotional attunement. If she was upset, no one tuned in. If she was expressive, she was criticized and stomped down. So that perception of, “This is how people treat me, this is people see me,” is being reinforced by her husband not paying attention to her and listening.
Lesley McClurg: How do you know that? How can she know that her core wound is that no one’s listening to me? She may not have that awareness.
Kim Polinder: I love pattern recognition. I spent over 20 years in IT engineering, and I love a very structured, systematic approach. It’s possible to look at our personal experiences and conflict with a systematic lens. So when she looks at her life, I would argue for anyone who’s having similar experiences of, “I feel like no one listens to me. I feel I’m always invisible. Everyone’s feelings always trump mine. People always take up the emotional air in the room, but there’s no room for me,” you can probably trace that back to different scenarios, not just your spouse, it could be a coworker, family member, best friend, group situations. But if you notice that there’s a similar pattern being played out, now you’ve got something to work with. OK, yes, my spouse is annoying when they don’t load the dishwasher properly, but there could be something in me. Now we’re getting into the lens. There could be a wound that was created many years ago that I’m not accounting for. That knowledge and awareness is half the battle. Once I can see that my abandonment wound is creating this distance, that I’m not inherently a distant and cold-hearted and unfeeling person like I was accused of in my 20s and 30s, and it’s actually me being protective, now I can have more compassion for myself. Now I can sit with myself for where I’m at. Now I can start to take a look at different behaviors.
Lesley McClurg: You hear couples all the time say, “We just need to learn how to communicate better.” You can, I assume, learn how to communicate better, but if you don’t know these core underlying roots, maybe nothing will change, even if your language gets better.
Kim Polinder: People generally exist at a very global level of, “We need better communication. I want to feel closer to you. I want to be a bigger priority to you.” It’s a good start, but it’s not helpful to a person as far as what that looks like. You can say I want better communication and to you that means when we’re fighting you don’t storm out, you don’t start telling me that, “Oh, here are your mother issues coming out again, ”you don’t tell me to go to therapy whenever we argue. I may say, better communication to me is let’s take a 15-minute break so I can figure out how I’m feeling, what I’m thinking, and then let’s come back together. So when you say better communication, it’s really important to ask yourself, what does that look like?
Lesley McClurg: Let’s say that you’re getting into it. A fight is beginning to kick off. You know your core wounds, you’ve navigated that, and you’re understanding your inner psychology so you know what could come up. But you know you’re right, and you want to prove your point. What do you do then? How do I slow down enough? What is your advice to someone at the beginning of a fight?
Kim Polinder: It’s important to recognize the neurobiology of a trigger, and to know that if you’re in the heat of the moment and you hear yourself yelling and you’re not normally a very expressive person, or you’re calling your partner names, or just going to the place where, if you’ve been with your partner long enough, everyone knows the place, the button to push that will send your partner from zero to 60 in two seconds. And when we feel cornered, we will push that button. Things happen in the heat of the moment where we show our messy true selves. But if we understand that in the heat of the moment, my prefrontal cortex has gone offline and I’m in fight-or-flight, or freeze or fawn. I can lower my expectations and go to basic de-escalation skills. “Hey, I think we’re getting a little heated. Maybe we should take a break. Hey, I think that we just went to a really ugly place. Let’s take five minutes.”
Lesley McClurg: Is there language that might land better when you’re taking that break? Because I imagine that some people would feel abandoned. What is the right language to say? And then when you do take that break, what should you do in that five minutes? How should you try to re-regulate yourself?
Kim Polinder: Communication on the front end of the break is everything. I find that there is a dynamic that plays out in most couples. During high conflict, one person needs space to regulate because they feel flooded, they actually have difficulty talking, and they need that space to regulate. The other person needs engagement to feel safe, to feel connected, to feel OK. Taking space, to that person who needs more engagement, they’re going to be triggered into feelings of abandonment and rejection. What you can do on the front end is say, “I feel flooded; this is overwhelming. I just need 10 minutes, 15 minutes. I want to talk about this. I know this is important. I will come back to this.”
Lesley McClurg: What should you do during that time so you come back in a different place?
Kim Polinder: This is good old somatic exercises like box breathing, which is slow breaths in, hold it, slow breaths out, hold it, doing that repeatedly. It is bilateral stimulation, like walking, rubbing your arms in a soothing manner. It could be grounding techniques, splashing cold water on your face, shaking the body to shake some of that energy out. It could be progressive muscle relaxation techniques where you tense one area of the body, relax it, tense another area of body, relax it. All of these somatic exercises, the reason people give up on them is they think, OK, I tried this breathing thing, and I was still pissed off. It just didn’t help. The exercises are not meant to make you feel peaceful and zen. It’s to address what’s happening viscerally in the body and to help your nervous system regulate just a bit, just to take the edge off. There are also counting exercises you can do. I want to count all the brown things in the room. I want to count things I can see. I want to count things I hear.
Lesley McClurg: Let’s say you’ve gone around the block, you’ve rubbed your arms, you’re feeling more relaxed, you’ve taken a deep breath. How should you then, as you say, fight clean once you come back into the room?
Kim Polinder: This is where the flow chart can come in handy. The first step is to ask, “Is now a good time?” A lot of times, people will unload on their partner when the feeling is the strongest, and that may not be such a great time. They could have just come out of a big work meeting or work day. They may have just put the kids to sleep and are just tired and wasted. If it’s not a good time, say, “OK, I can respect that. What would be a good time? I think we really do need to still talk about it.” “OK, how about in three hours? How about tomorrow morning? We generally do better in the mornings.” Then once you establish the good time to talk, it’s coming in with a controlled opening. I love the Gottmans’ research, John and Julie Gottman. They are big in the couple’s space. A lot of their research still holds true today where in the first three minutes of a conversation, how you open it, how you come in and address the topic, over 60% of the time, it will determine whether you have a chance at a positive outcome or not.
Lesley McClurg: Let’s say both parties are feeling heard, OK, I’ve got you, you’ve got me, we’re getting each other here. What does a good solution look like? What separates a meaningful agreement or solution from, “OK, fine, I’ll just try harder next time.”
Kim Polinder: When it comes to solutions, you have to know what you need. I can’t tell you how many times I will ask a person, “What do you need in this situation? Put it up on a silver platter. What do you want? What do you need?” Often, people will look at me and say, “I don’t know, actually. I just know I’m upset.” And so, being able to put the ball back in that person’s court and ask yourself if there’s anything they could say or do that would help. What is proof that you feel understood? What would be proof that you’re a priority? Start working around that. I like putting proof on the person who’s bringing up the complaint. What would be proof that it’s happening? We’re getting into accountability and identifying needs, which is very important.
Lesley McClurg: What I’m hearing as a thread through all of this, the ultimate goal doesn’t seem to be to stop fighting, but to slow down as we’re moving through the fight, to be able to identify this core wound, to able to stop and take stock and maybe take a walk to come back in to hear the other person’s perspective and to slow down the escalation. At the end of the day, if you’re able to do all that slowing down, will you fight less?
Kim Polinder: I hope not. I’m very suspicious of couples who do not fight. When you have two people who, just by just proximity alone, you’re around a person so much, what are the chances you’re not going to have a bad day or have a different opinion or that they’re going to poke at some wound from long ago? Just by the amount of time you spend with someone, they are going to upset you. And if there’s no fighting, that tells me that someone is probably suppressing their feelings. Now that sounds noble, but given enough time, that suppression will turn into resentment, and that will take a relationship down. Learning to express needs and learning to protest when I lived a life of just being submissive and pleasing people and not taking up any air in the room, it’s still to this day very uncomfortable for me to express needs and be needy and fight for what I need and be an advocate for myself. But I push through it because I know that it will lead to a better place. That’s the only way that I can get closer to other people is to show them the actual real me and what I’m needing and what upsets me.
Lesley McClurg: But there are, I imagine, some conflicts that are unresolvable. How do you know when a conflict is unresolvable?
Kim Polinder: Generally, when we’re talking about unresolvable conflicts, we’re talking about a difference in values, things that are important. Things like, are we having kids or not? Things like you belittle me, you call me names. This is actually emotionally or verbally abusive. Values of how you spend your time. These are lifestyle changes. So when it comes to incompatibility, have you brought up the concern? Have you brought the issue? If they don’t agree that that’s an issue, they will do nothing to change it. So these are the kind of questions that people have unresolved fight after unresolved fight. You might have to break up. There’s no shame in acknowledging that we are not a good match at a values level.
Lesley McClurg: If there’s one thing you want to leave listeners with to do tomorrow in the relationship to make fighting or conflict easier, what is it?
Kim Polinder: There’s a deep value in getting triggered. It holds so much information about the times that you get the most upset. Instead of spending so much time trying not to get upset and telling yourself, “Why am I such an angry person? Why am I an anxious person?” Instead, focus more on getting curious. Why did I get so triggered? Why did I have such a disproportionate response to that situation? This is confusing to me. It’s an opportunity to really go deep on what still is driving that lens. The biggest thing that I can leave with people is: what kind of person do you want to be? If you want to shift out of a certain behavior or a certain way that you’re showing up in the world, get curious first versus judgmental. There’s a lot of information into why you get upset. I would argue that there’s probably a really good reason why you get so upset. There are really good reasons why you have that specific need. If you can come with more compassionate curiosity to that issue, it will create a better environment for you to then shift into something different.
Lesley McClurg: Stay curious, folks. Thank you so much, Kim. Kim, that was a really lovely conversation.
Kim Polinder: Thank you.
Lesley McClurg: Kim Polinder is a relationship coach and author of Why We Fight: A Transformative Road Map to Healing Conflict in Any Relationship. Inside Love is a production of KQED. Our engineer is Christopher Beale. Our producers are Susie Britton and Emiko Oda. I’m Lesley McClurg. Thank you for listening.