Sometimes, when we’re lying together, I look at her and I feel dizzy with the realization that here is another distinct person from me, who has memories, origins, thoughts, feelings that are different from my own.
—Barack Obama
Whatever your politics, this quote is phenomenal. I have used it time and time again in my teaching because Barack Obama’s words capture a vital aspect of love: honoring the space between self and other. In an intimate relationship, you are invited and challenged to hold on to yourself while connecting deeply with another person. In moments of peace, this is easy to do, but in moments of conflict and misunderstanding, this is no small task. But we must try to remember that love is a classroom. The space between self and other is a crucible, a container in which transformation occurs. Your words and actions shape me, and at the very same time my words and actions shape you.
The thing about conflict is that it’s 100 percent inevitable. As my friend and colleague, Dr. Anthony Chambers, says, “The central task of any intimate relationship is the management of difference.” Our experiences with our beloveds run the gamut from butterflies-in-my-stomach excitement to seeing-red angry. We simply can’t have one without the other. Love is too rich and complex to allow us to pick and choose our emotions.
Building a life with someone is multifaceted. The same person you have mind-blowing sex with turns out to be the same person you share a bank account and a closet with. And that stuff can get really irritating! The best we can ever do is learn to deal lovingly with the frustrating and painful moments so that we can return as quickly as possible to a place of intimacy and friendship. Being truly brave means also trusting that conflict has within it the potential to deepen intimate connection by granting us the opportunity to know ourselves and our partner in a more vulnerable and authentic way. That’s quite a dialectic: conflict sucks and conflict catalyzes growth. I don’t know anybody who can hold that perspective all the time, but being able to catch glimpses of that both/and can make fighting more tolerable.
The story you tell yourself about conflict shapes your experience of it. The stories that people tell about conflict are so vital that every couples therapist addresses those stories in some way, shape, or form with every couple he or she sees, always. Regardless of how couples therapists are trained, one of the goals they will have for every couple they work with is to help the couple tell stories about their conflicts in a way that maximizes intimacy and minimizes blame and shame. The goal is to move from linear conflict stories to systemic conflict stories. But what exactly is the difference?
When we tell a linear conflict story, we focus on cause and effect. “You did this to me.” “I did this to you.” Linear conflict stories tend to be simplistic and goal oriented, and the goal is usually to assign credit or blame: naming who the victim is, who had the worst behavior, whose fault it is. A linear conflict story is driven by all-or-nothing thinking, and the end result tends to be “zero sum,” meaning that there is one so-called winner and one so-called loser. All of us are at risk of slipping into this kind of black-and-white storytelling, especially when we are upset. It’s not altogether surprising. Our culture is full of examples of finger-pointing—from the endless tension between Democrats and Republicans to news stories that speak simplistically about victims and villains. We also are drawn to easy answers in an effort to conserve mental energy, as ambiguity and shades of gray simply require more work.
Telling a linear conflict story opens the door to a particular set of feelings, and that particular set of feelings tends to be relationally damaging:
Yes, we are responsible for our actions, always. And, blame and shame tend to be very corrosive elements in any relationship, including an intimate relationship. Let’s look at clients of mine, Marius and Scarlett:
Marius came into my office furious with Scarlett. He said to her, “I cannot believe you went into my e-mail to find out if I sent my résumé to that job posting! How could you do this to me? You are nosy, and you betrayed my trust big-time.” Marius’s story is blaming (Scarlett betrayed his trust by searching his e-mail) and it goes in only one direction (Scarlett did something to him). This is an example of a linear conflict story.
On the other hand, when we tell a systemic story about the conflict in a relationship, the storyline is much more curvaceous. The narrative moves in a back-and-forth way, more a circle than a line. Declaring who started the fight is irrelevant because the storyteller bravely and humbly holds the awareness that both participate in the creation of this cyclical dance, and both feel hurt and misunderstood by the impact of it. Sidestepping the language of blame and shame, a systemic conflict story opts for keen observations about “the degree to which I do ‘this’ is the degree to which you do ‘that.’” As Dr. Susan Johnson (2008) puts it: “The more I ________________, the more you ________________, and then the more I ________________, and round and round we go” (88).
In a systemic conflict story, the storyteller keeps an eye on the space between self and other. The space between self and other is the we, and it is a third entity. The we requires a story thick enough and wide enough to hold the nuances of “my stuff,” “your stuff,” and “our stuff.”
When we make the brave and difficult choice to stand in a systemic conflict story, we acknowledge that very little about intimate relationships is solvable anyway. A preeminent researcher and therapist, Dr. John Gottman, has found that a whopping 69 percent of the time, couples fight about a perpetual (rather than fixable) problem, so the goal is dialogue, not resolution (2011). Rather than simple fixing, most of the conflicts that a couple faces require navigation—skillfully and lovingly moving through in a way that minimizes damage.
Returning to the example of Marius and Scarlett, here’s how it would sound if Marius had told a systemic conflict story: “I feel awful and embarrassed about my current unemployment, which leads me to withdraw and shut down, avoiding your questions. The more I shut down and withdraw, the more you feel alone and out in the cold. The more you feel abandoned by me, the more you pester me or resort to sneaky things like searching my e-mail in order to get information. The more you try to dig for information, the more I feel embarrassed and paralyzed, and round and round we go. We both play a part in this and we both feel awful about it.”
Systemic conflict stories don’t give you the primal satisfaction of destroying, triumphing, and conquering, but they help you avoid the pain of being crushed, obliterated, and victimized. Systemic conflict stories have breath and space, as they are told from a stance slightly above the fray—what Dr. Dan Wile, creator of Collaborative Couple Therapy (2002), calls a “second tier in the relationship, an observing post, a metalevel, a joint platform, an observing couple ego” (287). Systemic conflict stories transcend and transform.
| Linear Conflict Stories | Systemic Conflict Stories |
|---|---|
|
Zero sum (I win/you lose.) |
What does the relationship need? |
|
Cause and effect |
Cycles/dances/circles |
|
It’s my fault/It’s your fault. |
The more I do “this,” the more you do “that.” |
|
I can only see one next move. |
I can see many possible next moves. |
|
Shame or blame |
Curiosity and sadness that we are fighting |
Northwestern University psychology professor Dr. Finkel and his colleagues (2013a) conducted a study that captures just how good systemic conflict stories are for an intimate relationship. Their so-called “marriage hack” experiment (2013b) involved recruiting 120 happy and recently married (for less than five years) couples. In the first year of the study, every four months, participants wrote about the most significant fight they had had in the previous four months.
In the second year of the study, the researchers divided the couples into two groups. The control group continued with the same plan (once every four months, they wrote about their most significant fight). The experimental group wrote a summary of their most significant fight as well, but in addition they wrote about the conflict from the perspective of a neutral third person who wants the best for both partners. They were asked to also include, if possible, a single positive aspect to the fight. The researchers wanted this second group to be able to keep this “outsider perspective” in mind all year long, so they also asked these couples to write about what might get in the way of them adopting this neutral third point of view during future fights and what they could do to keep that from happening. These additional writing prompts took each person in the second group about twenty-one extra minutes during the course of the year.
The results were amazing! Most studies about marriage unfortunately show that relationship satisfaction declines during the first year of marriage, and data from the couples in both groups showed that. But differences between the two groups emerged in the second year of the study. The couples in the control group, the ones who just wrote about their fights, continued to show declining levels of relationship satisfaction, whereas the couples in the second group, the ones who adopted the outsider perspective (a systemic conflict story), showed no additional decline and reported their fights were less distressing over time. Systemic conflict stories work!
My friend and mentor, Dr. Cheryl Rampage, has a great way of talking about how the shift from linear to systemic storytelling has helped her marriage. She says that early in her marriage, when she was in conflict with her husband, her story was about how much she couldn’t stand him. Later, she became able to tell a story about how much she couldn’t stand this moment. I have found this really helpful when I need to work with the story I am telling myself about the conflict in my marriage. Here’s an example:
One evening, I sat in bed stewing. I had conjured up in my head a real doozy of a linear conflict story, and I was going to let Todd have it. I wasn’t just angry, I was righteously angry. You know that kind of anger—the kind that makes you feel entitled and 100 percent sure you’re right. I don’t even know what triggered me—an unwashed dish or seeing him on his BlackBerry perhaps. What was in my head felt like a well-reasoned, logical argument outlining exactly how much I was doing around the house, how hard I was working, and how unappreciated I was. My story would show just how much he was wronging me.
He walked in, and I started up. My angry eruption put him on the defensive immediately. He managed to make some attempts to validate my emotions, to point out what he has been doing, and to remind me about the demands of his work life. Back and forth we went for a few minutes until our son, Brian, walked into the room. He had had a nightmare and wanted to sleep on the floor in our room. We made him a nest on the floor and headed into the bathroom to finish our argument.
The interruption had been enough of a jolt that I was beginning to view this fight a little differently. I was starting to see just how linear my conflict story was. It was simplistic, full of blame, and, worst of all, it was treating Todd as a threat that needed to be conquered rather than as the ally and friend I knew him to be. My righteous anger was starting to feel more like sadness. I also began to remember how unsolvable the problem really was. We were both busy. Life with two children was demanding, stressful, and tiring. We both were trying hard. Despite my initial cockiness that I had a new angle on an old problem, our fight was showing me that, in fact, this was a stale retread, and we were, as Dr. Dan Siegel calls it, “lost in a familiar place.” I still loved this man, but I didn’t love the moment we were in. I could see how the more I blamed him, the more he defended himself, and we were getting nowhere.
This shift toward a systemic conflict story was helping me, but what eluded me was how to make a graceful exit from this place neither of us wanted to be. My ego and pride were making it difficult to just express compassion for him, compassion for myself, and an apology for my harsh words and tone. So there we were, frustrated and confused, leaning against the sink, contemplating our next moves. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed our toothbrush holder. Despite the fact that we are the only two people who use this bathroom, no fewer than eight toothbrushes were crammed into it. Impulsively, I took the leap from frustration to curiosity, hoping that he would join me.
“Why the eff do we have so many toothbrushes?” We both smiled, and the tension began to melt. “Which one is yours?”
“The green one,” he said.
“That can’t be right,” I said. “The green one is mine.”
“I know,” he said matter-of-factly. “You usually wake up earlier that I do, and I like yours because it’s moist.”
And scene. I was done! I broke into peals of laughter, surrendering myself to the never-ending paradox that is love. Nothing was solved that night. No answer was the final one. And I learned that, almost twenty years into a marriage, you can discover that there is a “marital toothbrush.” No linear story can withstand this much nonsense, and through that fight, our relationship showed me, yet again, that the only possible story that can hold this degree of complexity is a systemic one.
Like all couples, Todd and I deserve gentleness, as we have valiantly attempted to work out a division of labor in order to meet the needs of our household—we need income, we need caretaking, we need to run the house, we need to be able to pursue our ambitions, we need to honor our individual passions, and we need time together. It will never be perfect, and it will never be done. I can advocate for my individual needs within the context of the “we,” and so can he.
The degree to which I slip into a linear conflict story in which I am the victim and he is the villain is the degree to which he becomes defensive and shuts down. The degree to which I can extend compassion for myself, for him, and for our situation is the degree to which he can stay open and connected to me. A systemic conflict story invites us to sit shoulder-to-shoulder and look together at the challenges before us.
As spiritual teacher and bestselling author Neal Donald Walsh says, “My perspective creates my perception.” Conflict is inevitable, but we have lots of choices in the face of conflict, including a choice of perspective. Because humans are emotional by nature, we will always be prone to slipping into a linear conflict story, but we can catch ourselves and course correct, reaching instead for a juicy systemic conflict story. From the perspective of a systemic conflict story, our perceptions change. Foe becomes ally. Conflict becomes a path back to compassion and curiosity…or at least humor and surrender.
Using a systemic (rather than linear) conflict story in the face of inevitable relationship problems is brave, helping you move through emotional pain and setting the stage for reconnection.
Blaming and Shaming
Your core issues (identified in lesson 2) likely dictate whether you tend more toward blame or shame, so let’s figure out what kind of linear conflict stories (blame-filled or shame-filled) you tend to tell when you are upset. The “Guide for Moving from Reactivity to Intimacy” (http://www.newharbinger.com/35814) will remind you about the differences between linear and systemic conflict stories. In order to get clear about where your stories fall on the spectrum of blame-filled to shame-filled, do the following:
Getting a better understanding of how you tend to talk to yourself when you are upset will help you in the next few lessons.
Love Hack
Whether or not you’re currently in a relationship, try out Dr. Eli Finkel’s “Marriage Hack” exercise.
Once you have written down your responses, reflect on how this exercise shifts your thoughts and feelings about the other person and about the fight.
Share the Love
Ask the person you had the fight with to complete the above exercise. Then, read each other’s systemic conflict stories and talk together about what shifted for each of you through the writing. After talking with this person, reflect to yourself about how this dialogue felt different from the fight. What do you notice about a dialogue that is committed to a systemic conflict story rather than a linear one? What feels different? Is there less defensiveness and more curiosity?