COUPLES THERAPY · SAN MATEO
You’re not having a hundred fights. You’re having one fight, a hundred times.
You know how the conversation is going to go before it starts. Twenty minutes later neither of you feels heard, and you’re both wondering how you ended up here again.
Maybe the subject changes. The pattern usually doesn’t.
Sometimes it looks like this
You can talk easily about almost anything until you get to the one thing you actually need to talk about.
One of you wants to work it out right now. The other needs space. The more one pushes, the more the other pulls away.
One of you says, “That’s not what I meant.” The other says, “But that’s how it felt.”
You keep score even though neither of you wants to.
Or maybe you aren’t fighting much anymore. You just don’t feel as close as you used to.
The argument usually isn’t the whole problem.
One of you moves toward and one of you moves away. One pushes for resolution now, while the other needs space. The more one pushes, the more the other pulls back.
Neither of you is necessarily trying to hurt the other. Usually, you’re both protecting something.
But protection can look a lot like attack from the receiving end.
We slow the sequence down enough to see what each of you is reacting to, what you think the other person’s reaction means, and what keeps the same cycle going.
WE MIGHT WORK ON
I’ll interrupt the pattern.
I’m not going to sit quietly while you recreate the same fight you have at home.
I’ll slow things down, point out what I’m seeing, and ask each of you to look at your part in what’s happening.
I don’t stay neutral to the point of uselessness. I’m not here to pick a winner, but if I see one of you doing something that is hurting the relationship, I’ll say so. I’ll do the same with the other person.
The goal isn’t to decide who was right about what happened Thursday. It’s to help both of you understand the pattern well enough that you can start doing something different when it shows up again.