Fighting between you and someone you want to get along with is miserable, sometimes devastating and can negatively impact all areas of your life. The fight you had with your partner last night left you drained, depressed and barely able to function this morning. You feel “dys-regulated” –meaning your emotional state is not peaceful, stable and cheerful, your mind is drifting into the fight every few moments, and while you may not be entirely aware of it, you’re believing (complying) with the negative things your partner said or at least implied about you, while you were fighting. Given that your mind is so busy obsessing over the details of words that flew back and forth, your energy level is quite expectedly down, not where it’s supposed to be. The problem is the negative thoughts that invade you the next morning until some kind of peace is declared and there is an end to the argument.
On the one-hand the negative after-effects of a fight with a partner or loved one is a function of your mind and therefore, with control of your mind, the negativity post-fighting also comes under conscious control. So one solution to fighting is to develop your daily mindfulness-meditation practice in which you learn to distance from negative thoughts, the kinds that run you down after a fight with your partner. With mindfulness training you see those thoughts as thoughts, not as solidly true statements representing the “truth.” Instead they become like clouds in the sky, here at one moment, gone the next. They may float above you for a while, but you don’t dwell on them or take them seriously. So gaining control of your mind through meditation practice is one way to cope with a fight –but it s a one-person endeavor and fighting takes two or more people mixing it up.
Getting into the dynamics of fighting with your partner is another approach, and one that has the potential to change your whole relationship for the better; it’s a two-person problem and a two-person solution. Fighting that escalates is almost always the result of the cycle of guilt and anger (or even rage as some psychologists call it although that might be hyper-dramatic). Lets look at an example; here’s what happens. You said you’d do something and you forgot to do it. Your partner fails to calmly indicate that she/he will help out, acknowledging that you were so busy yesterday it’s understandable why it slipped your mind. Instead your partner begins to blame you with suggestions that you are always forgetting things, breaking promises, not pulling your weight and may even subtly indicate that you are a lazy, parasitical character who expects everything to be handed over on a gold platter. You take in the character assassination and although you don’t want to believe it, you –under the level of conscious awareness—you fear that he/she may be right, and you deserve the accusations and blame heaped upon you.
Your defenses go up like a sheet of hard marble and in order to stop that horrible anxious feeling we call guilt –a fear that you’ve hurt someone (in this case your partner), you turn it around, you “externalize” to use the word psychologists use, and you tell your partner how the situation was in fact his/her fault. He left you no time to get paperwork together, or he is always shoving tedious tasks on you, instead of taking responsibility himself. You now get more into assassinating your partner’s character letting him know this is typical of him, he is thoughtless, unkind, a fundamentally selfish person. So now the blame is thrown on your partner, and like you, he listens, half believes every word you say, can’t stand feeling so much guilt and he turns it around again, externalizing the source of the problem, i.e., making it you. And so it goes back and forth with no chance of resolution.
The problem here is our tendency to feel guilty when accused of anything, and in response, to blame others, particularly people we love, for things that go wrong, even if unconsciously we’re blaming ourselves. In fact the more we blame ourselves, the more guilty we feel, and the greater is our need to externalize the problem by blaming our partner. The blame-guilt-blame-guilt cycle is what happens when you have a fight with your partner or roommate, or even a work colleague. You can see this without any deep analysis of your childhood experiences although it must be said that when a partner blames you in a tone reminiscent of the tone your mother took when reprimanding you, you’re likely to get even more upset, feel more guilt, and then turn it around and blame your partner with a greater sense of urgency and anger. So it’s not that childhood experiences are irrelevant entirely, but you can see this pattern without spending a moment thinking about the past
The good thing here is that you can actually interrupt the cycle without the other’s knowledge or cooperation. As soon as a fight breaks out, stop for a moment, and allow yourself to recognize that you feel guilty as if you committed a crime (although it’s most likely an imaginary crime). Just recognize it, feel it, don’t take it seriously (and mindfulness meditation can be helpful here). Then think of some way to avoid blaming your partner in return. An effort to refrain from externalizing and blaming the other will put an immediate break on the situation. The fight will end, your energy conserved and perhaps you and your partner will be able to discuss the contentious issue in the future. Ordinarily, the focus of these fights is an exaggeration of daily life problems anyway. Write down –in simple language—the heart of the problem. It’s often about allocation of chores or money. Or maybe you and your partner have been fighting about how much space either of you take up in social events, with a competitive edge. In the cool light of day the distribution of household tasks may be considered and negotiated successfully; the same holds true for the allocation of money, and for attention in a social situation.
You might not be able to stop the very next fight with your partner, but you will be able to step away from it and examine it, noting the blame-guilt cycle leading to more blame and more guilt, then to even more blame and guilt. Once you see this in action, in a real interaction, you’ll be able to change your fighting style or tactics. When you avoid blaming your partner, he or she will wind down quickly and refrain from blaming you once again. And you will see it, I guarantee you of that. It’s predictable, it’s a law of a two-person system.
I challenge everyone to write in the comments about a fight that didn’t amount to blame and guilt countered with more blame and guilt. There have to be exceptions, I’m looking for them.