In my early 20s, I lived in a flat beneath a married couple who fought loud and late. They were young university professors, and seemed pretty sophisticated and even glamorous to me. Their public arguing (they must have known the walls were paper thin) was more than just bad relationship behavior. It was an outgrowth of their philosophy.
They were living the “fully expressed” kind of life and relationship that was, at the time, considered ideal. One day, after some loud arguing and a crashing sound, I heard her footsteps rushing down the stairs into the garage. Through the front window, I saw her pull into the street and speed away, and that was that. She never returned. He explained to me later (in a pretty condescending tone, as I remember it) that relationships come and go, but that living inauthentically was not an option for him. You go for it in every moment, he said, and if conflict was the result, even if it cost you the relationship, it was just the price of living full on.
That was then. Since those heady days, psychology’s ideas about couples in conflict have passed through lots of new phases. In no particular order, here are a few of them:
» Conflict results when people have a deficit of “coping skills.” Under this idea, therapists teach people better ways to get along.
» Conflict is the product of “old wounds,” so that you confuse the way your partner relates to you with the ways you were hurt (unintentionally, in most cases) by your mom and/or dad. Bringing these old wounds into awareness is the way to stop the fighting.
» A similar but slightly different idea is that, as we reach out to connect with each other, we accidentally hit sensitive “triggers,” causing a spiraling effect that quickly moves us into a standoff. Bringing awareness to this spiral or cycle can allow us to unite against it (instead of each other) and put a stop to it.
» Acceptance: Conflict is just a part of life, and inevitable in a relationship. Don’t waste too much time resisting it. Partnerships can be high or low in conflict — neither one is a predictor of relationship satisfaction. Accepting this, while making meaningful attempts at managing and repairing the conflict later on, is the key to healthy relationships.
These are all useful and valid ideas, even the ones my upstairs neighbors relied on that said “go for it” when big emotions start to roll. Unfortunately, none of them works universally with all couples to limit the level of conflict, or mitigate the damaging effects.
Why not? Well, maybe it’s because humans are diverse and complicated beings, and a relationship between two of us is exponentially more so. So, what works for one couple often fails for another. More hopefully, maybe there’s a flaw in the thinking that makes each of these approaches only partially or temporarily effective. If there were such a flaw, and if we could pin it down to something both specific and universal to all couples, we might finally solve the conflict puzzle, or at least make these ways of working with it more effective.
Psychologist Dan Wile believes there is a flaw in these ideas. And he has a workaround that he believes allows couples to effectively manage conflict. Wile also believes that, by taking the flaw into consideration, couples can use their conflict as the most directly accessible path to intimacy. This is a big claim since, besides conflict, lack of intimacy is the major complaint couples express when they come to therapy.
So, two mints in one? A solution to conflict and a pathway to intimacy?
Wile’s ideas aren’t simple, and boiling them down to a few easy-to-understand principles (a PR must for self-help success) is not his primary gift. As an example, Wile’s summary chapter for his most recent relationship book lists not three or even 10, but 42 keys for transforming couples’ conflicts into deep couple connection. That is a lot of keys to remember, which may be why After the Honeymoon was the 187,456th bestselling book on Amazon last week.
But despite its middling performance, the book receives high praise from the “A” list of influential relationship theorists, because Wile’s thinking has so profoundly influenced the theoretical foundations of couples therapy over the past 20 years.
Wile himself agrees that his thinking is hard to boil down to a few simple maxims. In fact, the unusual structure of his presentation of ideas in this book is the result of his antipathy toward simple absolutes. All the rules, keys and steps so necessary for easily digested self-help solutions share the fatal same flaw: They each include an image of how couple ought to operate. Whether that means we ought to be expressive, be restrained, listen actively, communicate skillfully, think rationally, manage our impulsivity — each of these methods tells us mostly how we are doing it wrong.
As they read or hear about these prescriptions for dealing with conflict, in other words, partners are likely to see themselves as deficient. Too irrational, too uptight, too impulsive, too angry, too negative — these theories invite an unflattering comparison with how we actually behave in our relationships. So, while the conventional advice about conflict can provide us with helpful guidelines, in the long run these ideas may just add to our sense of inadequacy and our shame. And, according to Wile (and I think he’s very, very right here), shame is both the primary trigger for conflict, and the No. 1 enemy of intimacy.
So here’s Wile’s workaround.
Intimacy happens when you share the most vital and important aspects of your inner world with another person. In long-term relationships, negative feelings such as loneliness, fear of abandonment, jealousy and resentment constitute some of the most intensely felt experiences of our lives. So, while stuffing down these feelings is a barrier to deep connection, sharing them is, as Wile calls it, “the pathway to intimacy.”
Certainly this is the way it usually works in therapy, in my experience. When clients finally screw up the courage to speak their deepest hurts and fears — in a way that their partners can hear — hearts begin to open up, and problems begin to recede.
The Paradox of Complaining Well
The difficulty remains, of course, how do we complain — or share negative feelings — in ways that allow our partners to hear them with compassion, not anger or resentment?
Him: You were such a loudmouth at the party last night! Her: I feel afraid, abandoned and lonely when you speak to me like that.
I don’t think that conversation will be happening. Telling your partner about what’s wrong with her is a slippery slope. It usually leads to bad feelings between you, which makes it a very tricky thing to do. Worse, honestly and accurately describing your own unhappiness requires that you reveal your deepest vulnerabilities, and this is something that almost no one will do during a fight.
Wile’s answer — and this is where I think he makes an important contribution to the dialogue — is that there are no simple rules or solutions that cleanly and simply clear the problem away. This is because, paradoxically, rules create the judgments that lead to the shame that closes down connection and intimacy. So the answer lies, not with couples correcting their bad habits or learning new techniques, but in gently, patiently and creatively working together with their thoughts, feelings, resentments, desires and disappointments — all of it — to find what Wile calls “a joint platform from which to view their inevitable lapses into accusatory or self-accusatory thinking … in which we forget everything we know.”
Him (a few hours after the loudmouth comment, and hoping to reconnect): Honey, that comment was rough. I’m sorry. You know, I’ve said I’m way oversensitive to what people think at parties. You have a different style, and maybe I’m asking you to be oversensitive with me when we go out. Or at least try.
Her (still angry): Oversensitive doesn’t begin to describe it (softening). OK, I hear what you’re saying. I know I can be too out-there when we go out. I don’t like myself either when I hear myself that way. So it feels particularly brutal when you go after me like that.
Wile’s prescription, while recognizing that conversations about relationships are a minefield, encourages couples to cautiously pick their way across to that island of intimacy that occasionally and momentarily appears. When this happens, new levels of intimacy are reached, and new patterns of talking and being together are established that — once discovered — turn out to be half as painful and twice as rewarding as you anticipated.
— Russell Collins, Psy.D., is a Santa Barbara psychotherapist and divorce mediator. Click here for more information.
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