As a couple’s therapist, I’ve been trained to prioritize my focus on how a couple interacts with each other during conflict over what their conflict is actually about.
In therapy speak, we call this focusing on the process of a conversation over the content of the conversation. The content is what people are talking about, whereas the process is how they are talking about it with each other.
Seems simple enough, but it’s incredibly hard in practice to not get lost in a couple’s content — and even harder to do so in my own relationship disagreements.
A couple’s process tells you a lot more about the strength and health of their relationship than whatever mundane content they’re fighting over. The process is where people get stuck in their relationships and what most relationships eventually fail over.
For example…
Let’s say a couple comes in to talk to me about their perpetual disagreements over their finances. We’ll bring the issue up in session and I’ll let them air out their grievances for a bit. As they do, I observe how they’re interacting with each other in the process of talking things out:
Who gets defensive? Who shuts down? Who escalates?
Who is more dismissive? Who more often defers to the other?
When one person does or says X, how does the other react?
I also explore what it would be like to be a fly on the wall when the conflict comes up at home:
Who normally brings the topic up first and how do they do so?
How does the conversation normally play out?
How does the conflict normally come to an end?
Do they tend to pull anyone into the middle of the conflict?
Do they distract themselves with work, hobbies, or friends?
Do they avoid addressing the topic altogether to keep the peace?
The How Reveals the Emotional Process
You see, couples are normally in recurring conflicts with each other about different things throughout the course of their relationship: finances, raising children, sex, relationships with in-laws, and so on.
How they approach conflict over one topic is likely similar to how they approach all of them, and this is why they get stuck. They repeat the same patterns of interaction over and over with each other.
At the surface it might look like these conflicts are about different things. Underneath the surface, however, there’s a common emotional process that drives their interactions with each other across all of those topics.
The emotional process is - quite literally - the subconscious emotional communication that’s happening between the two of them. It reveals each person’s unmet emotional needs, emotional sensitivities, and deepest emotional wishes.
In every criticism, there is a veiled wish. In every bout of anger, there is a hidden cry of pain. In every conflict, there is a set of unresolved emotional issues that express themselves in the physical world.
Money, sex, children, in-laws — we channel our deepest emotional needs through the external world. Our inner life manifests in our outer life.
For example…
I’ve worked with male clients who live an entire emotional life through their interest in sports. I have a strong suspicion that this is because it’s safer and more socially acceptable to do so.
In the world of sports, they can experience pride, excitement, and joy. But it’s also more acceptable for them to experience disappointment, fear, and even grief. I’ve seen grown men cry over their team losing a world championship, yet I know they would never feel safe to cry over their marriage.
All human beings - including men - have emotional needs and wishes that show up in everyday, mundane topics. If each member in a couple can learn to zoom out, they can understand the larger process and the deeper emotions driving the fight over the mundane topic.
As a result, when done well, conflict can actually lead you to a deeper connection between your partner.
Most Conflicts Are Unsolvable, Which Isn’t a Bad Thing
Famous couples therapist and relationship researcher John Gottman found that 69% of conflict in relationships is over what he calls unsolvable problems.
These are conflicts that will happen over and over throughout the life of a relationship. They stem from “fundamental differences in personalities or fundamental differences in lifestyle needs.”
Ideally, we partner with people who have shared values, but who are different enough from us that they complement areas of our personality that we lack.
For example, in my relationship, I’m the laid back one. I take life really slowly and like to think things through thoroughly before ever acting on them. But I’m so laid back and thoughtful that I can become lethargic and prone to inertia.
I’m lucky enough to have partnered with someone on the opposite end of this spectrum. He gets things done in the blink of an eye. This balance between us has fared out well for us for the most part. He inspires me to move, I inspire him to slow down.
But it’s also one of the biggest drivers of perpetual disagreement the two of us have. His action bias leads him to have a hard time sitting and being present with me — something I need deeply in a relationship. And my tendency to ask a million questions and analyze every thought and feeling often leaves him feeling anxious and groundless.
But this is exactly how it should go. This is what happens in a long-term relationship. Couples who have had enough fights over the decades — or enough failed relationships — come to understand that every relationship will have some version of this.
And this is because no two people are 100% alike, have exactly the same needs and strengths, and move through life the same way. And if you spend long enough with each other, and intertwine your lives enough with each other, you’ll eventually hit the limitations of your differences.
That is to be expected. There’s nothing to be solved in unsolvable conflicts. The only thing to do is to improve the process by which you approach and navigate those conflicts.
Differences in views on money can be a good thing. One person is a big saver, the other more of a carefree spender. Together, they bring each other to balance. But together, they can also drive each other nuts trying to bring the other to their side completely. They might eventually even decide that they’re not right for each other because of this.
Couples who last understand that differences can be a good thing. Differences can help each person grow and evolve. And the work of a successful relationship is to mature in the process of navigating those differences. It’s not about compromise, it’s about co-creating something greater than each of you could have done individually, through drawing on each other’s strengths.
A couple can succeed at their relationship while still having a million things they disagree on and see differently. They can have perpetual conflicts over them throughout the course of their entire relationship, yet still feel fulfilled in their partnership. As long as their process - or how they navigate these conflicts - is done with maturity, emotional savvy, empathy, and light-heartedness.
A Lesson From Stable Couples
The difference between stable couples is not that they don’t have conflict — AKA differences — it’s that they navigate them more smoothly. They simply don’t react or catastrophize their differences. They don’t see it as a sign of relationship failure. They see those differences as a normal part of being human trying to coexist closely with another human.
So, where a volatile couple looks like they’re fighting endlessly, a stable couple looks like they’re having a normal daily conversation over coffee. From the outside, it looks like stable couples don’t ever fight or have conflict. But they navigate differences and perpetual disagreements just as every couple does — they just take the emotional reactivity out of it and see it as a part of normal daily conversation.
They also see each other’s emotional process and can attend to it without getting caught up in the content and thinking the relationship is doomed. A volatile couple would be having the same conversation over differences but be highly emotionally reactive over it — in part because they are not attending to their own and each other’s emotional process — and it would look and feel like an endless fight.
Final Thoughts
In my office, I open space for people to talk about literally anything with me — sports, celebrities, work, social media, gaming, you name it. But in those conversations, I’m always exploring: What are the deeper emotions this person is playing out through this thing they’re talking about?
My ultimate goal when a couple comes in is to help them learn to see process and catch themselves when they’re at home, outside of the classroom of my therapy office.
So if you can learn to use my secret weapon as a couples therapist of seeing the emotional process during conflict, your relationships will benefit greatly from it.