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Fighting with a partner: We’ve all done it—and most of us would say that, at times, we’ve done it badly. We’ve either said something we later regret or failed to say the right thing. A fight that starts about one person’s punctuality on date night escalates to a blazing blowup about your in-laws and childhoods, and neither of you is sure how you wound up there.
If this sounds familiar and you’re stuck in a cycle of conflict with a partner that isn’t productive or hurts you both, then couples therapist and best-selling author Esther Perel’s new online class, Turning Conflict Into Connection, might be for you.
Turning Conflict Into Connection is an online course that is an hour long, broken down into eight parts, along with a workbook with supplementary exercises to complete. The course can be taken alone or with your partner. Perel says it will put you on the path to new ways of dealing with conflict and help you gain the skills to build a more resilient relationship. I got to take the course in advance of its release. Here are five things I learned:
Conflict in a relationship follows a pattern.
According to Perel, the way we argue with our partner tends to be a paint-by-numbers exercise. While the exact catalyst for the fight might change, the structure or what Perel calls “choreography” of the fight is a pattern that repeats itself again and again.
At its most destructive, fighting is a cycle of blame, attack, or defensiveness (i.e. it gets very personal about the other person quickly, escalates to issues beyond the initial dispute, and becomes chronic). So far, so depressing. But don’t despair: What Perel also teaches here is that mapping out the shape of our relationship conflict is an opportunity. Once we spot the pattern, we can begin to break it down to its basic elements and start to change it.
If you’re always the person spoiling for the fight and your partner is the one who bails at the first sign of conflict, or you both go at each other hard, or you both bail, then recognizing that is the first step toward more constructive conflict.
When we are in conflict with our partner, we tend to have a prejudiced view of their behavior.
I felt personally called out by this one. When we argue with our partner, many of us adopt a reflex called fundamental attribution error. In layman’s terms, this is a distortion that occurs when we are angry with a partner: We will see all of our own behavior as circumstantial (“I was late because traffic was bad!”) and all of our partner’s behavior as a result of character flaws (“You were late because you don’t care enough about our anniversary”). Over time, we start to interpret everything our partner does through a negative lens and ascribe bad intentions to them. Soon our commitment to our assumptions becomes more important than our commitment to our partner. Watch out.
We learned how to fight in childhood from the way our families fought.
Your parents had fights so loud they almost blew the roof. Or maybe they would give each other the silent treatment for weeks at a time. Growing up, you remember your mom was allowed to get angry and shout but you were punished by her for doing the same back. We all learned how to conduct relationships, including having fights, in our childhoods by watching what the adults around us did.
Perel lays out some of the common strategies we employ in fights and the different ways each of us reacts to conflict. (Some will explode and then feel instantly relieved, while others need time alone to calm their nervous system after a conflict.) Getting to the root of why we behave the way we do in conflict involved exploring our childhood experiences, how people fought, and even who was allowed to fight.
You’re not fighting about what you think you’re fighting about.
There’s always a hidden dimension. It’s never just about the dishes or how often you’re having sex or money. Most fights we have in a relationship are about a feeling we are longing to receive from the other person. Sometimes it’s about control: who is making the decisions and whose priorities matter most. It can also be about trust—specifically, whether we can trust our partner to have our best interests at heart. Most conflicts are also about our need to be valued by our partner. Knowing the emotional experience that sits beneath the actual fight is key in order to begin to navigate conflict more constructively, achieve greater closeness, and have our emotional needs met.
Change comes from taking responsibility for yourself.
Taking responsibility for our own part in conflict and changing our own reaction to it is essential to finding our own freedom and agency. It can be a hard pill to swallow, but none of us can control or change what our partner does—only what we do. Accepting this fact is the beginning of learning a new way to reflect on conflict rather than simply reacting to it and getting stuck in the cycle once more. In Perel’s own words: “Nothing your partner does, by definition, justifies what you do.” It is also important to listen to your partner, even when you disagree with them.
The course provides couples with tools for stronger reconciliation after conflict by teaching each partner that they need to become more flexible around their coping styles and survival strategies when they’re in a fight-or-flight position.
Finally, lasting change comes when we acknowledge and appreciate the effort and positive changes in ourselves and our partner.
