How Do You Handle Conflicts In a Relationship? – EP 241

With us humans having our own thoughts we will inevitably have thoughts with our wives that do not line up. We will eventually have a disagreement, a heated discussion, an argument, or a fight. The emotions can often become very heated and the volumes of our voices rise. Other times the discussions will become more heated but both sides are calm yet the stakes are just as high.

WE have fights yet fights and arguments can and are actually good for a relationship. If done the right way. The problem many people face is that they take the discussions and disagreements to be something personal and their response is to go into panic mode and believe that the disagreement is a matter of life and death. We often let our emotions take control and suddenly the heated discussion can become physical or worse. Now if that happens then you are way past what this article can do for you, but you can come to understand why you act such a fool when you are faced with conflict.

What is meant by Conflict?

Conflict can be a scary word because we hear it and think of tanks and flame throwers and men with machine guns mowing other men down. Explosions going off all over the place. That same heightened sense of “We are going to die!” is also present in heated disagreements with our spouses. We like to have things go smoothly Our minds like to Let the Motivational Triad do its thing and when we can’t we start to stress a bit. We may feel some anxiety and start to tense up, especially when we get “We need to talk”.

Conflict in the normal term is a disagreement and sadly nice guys run away from conflict they try to smooth things over without our having any resolution. This doesn’t fix anything and just sweeps the problem under the rug. Conflict is healthy when you aren’t running from it. Conflict helps you have a bond with your wife. Yeah, it is scary and unnerving, but it also allows you to come to understand your wife better as a whole.

Questions you need to ask yourself

When it comes to conflict if you are able to stay present during the disagreement you can actually ask yourself some questions if you do find yourself in Fight Flight or Freeze you may have to work these questions out in your after-action review.

What am I making the circumstance mean?

Remember that your circumstance is neutral. It isn’t good nor is it bad until you apply a thought to it. So what is that thought? Why does that thought mean what it does to you?

We often want to make our circumstances or, the facts of the events in our life, to mean something. It may be a good thing or a bad thing, it just depends on our thoughts. This is one reason that conflicts happen. You may think a movie is good while your wife believes it to be horrible. So you make her disagreement to mean that you are a poor judge of cinema. That in turn may cause you to jump to a defensive response. From here you keep going back and forth till you’re hurling insults at each other and you sleep on the couch and your wife is in the bed texting her girlfriend.

Then again you may just see this as a silly discussion and so you make light of the disagreement and you get curious about her dislike of action flicks and so you have a let night talking again both scenarios are conflicts just one is a bit lighter than the others.

Then again the move discussion may get loud and you see your wife trying to retreat from the discomfort. So you start to try to understand why she took the discussion so personally and you find out that her stepdad was an action movie fan and he would fly off the handle and ground her if she didn’t want to go watch the latest Sylvester Stallone flick. So again you get more understanding about your wife and her past. You come to appreciate her point of view just a bit more.

Your wife made the circumstance of you disagreeing with her as meaning you were about to fly off the handle and stop talking to her for 2 weeks. Then again you may make the circumstance mean that your wife has no taste in movies all because she just doesn’t like action flicks. None of it is actually true they are just thoughts you have about the circumstance that your wife didn’t like the movie.

What I am feeling is <Insert Emotion>?

Now if you look at the model you understand that we have a thought about a circumstance and From that thought we have a feeling. From that feeling we take action. Our action creates our results. So what are you feeling will show you the result you are going to have.

It is good to know and to understand what emotion you have. For us guys it is much like colors there are eight primary colors and for women there are 4000 primary colors. So if we know the emotion we are feeling we can understand ourselves better. If you see that you’re scared or frustrated or ashamed you can examine why that emotion came up. No, it’s not easy at first but it is worth the effort. if anything so that you can come to understand what gets you worked up. The interesting thing is that it’s not what you blame it to be. It is a completely different thought. It is the thought of the thought that sets your teeth on edge.

How do I want to show up for my wife?

It helps before you even have a conflict with your wife to know how you want to show up. Do you want to be the grumpy sulking over grown kid, or do you want to be a man who is in emotional adulthood? Are you showing up as a man who is there to be present for their wife and kids or are you going to be all about you and everyone else be damned?

This is an important part to think of. How do you want to present yourself? How are you going to show up to the strife of a conflict?

Is this how I want to show up?

Many times we will find ourselves out of integrity with how we want to show up. We may claim that we want to show as a listening and thoughtful man but in the example we are using we get moody and grumpy because your wife didn’t want to see the action film. So you are not showing up how you would like. We often do this with our kids. We want to be the Ward Cleaver of our kid’s world but they accidentally put a hole in the wall and you blow up and start yelling. Why would they come to you for advice because they got a girl in trouble later on in life? You may blow up and disown them.

So you want to look at how you are showing up and compare that to how you would like to show up. This will help with the conflict. If you want to be the caring husband but you are showing up as the ogre why do you think she doesn’t want to open up to you? You have to be someone who can stand for your wife to have her own emotions and you are ok with her expressing those emotions. The same thing goes for you. You can express your emotions but don’t react because of those emotions. Keep who you want to show up as in mind.

What is the result I want to get from this interaction?

Also, pay attention to what the results are. Do you want to understand where your wife is coming from or would you rather be thought of as cold and uncaring? This depends on the thoughts you have.

Understand that it’s not personal (Even if they try to make it personal)

One of the big problems we have is that we will take everything personally. Yet none of it is. Even when our wife makes a comment that is meant to be taken personally. What she is actually saying is, This is what I am thinking right now. You have the choice to agree with what she said and allow that word to inflict damage or you can see that your wife is scared and trying to protect herself however she can she is in fight mode. She is deep in her emotions and not her thinking mind. So you can choose to have compassion and disregard what she said or you can take it personally and throw your own thoughts back at her and hope that she agrees with them.

Allow the emotions

Now society believes that masculine men don’t have feelings or that they stuff their emotions down. That is the farthest from the truth men have emotions. Men just don’t emote them like women do. We will often get to the other side of a battle and then process our emotions.

Yes, some men do try to apply what society says men do and try to stuff their emotions down. Yet the reason is for the very same reason that women turn to their coping mechanisms. You see men and women both try to avoid fear-based emotions or negative emotions. This is why people turn to alcohol, drugs, food, porn, video games, and sex. None of these are actually addictive they just keep people from feeling the emotions that are caused by a thought. The resulting emotions are not comfortable or fun to feel. So we avoid them.

Yet the best way to fix the Dis-Ease in your life is to face the uncomfortable emotions. allow those emotions to run their course and what you discover is that they do not feel nearly as bad as you believed they would. You start to get used to those emotions and they don’t have as much sway over your life as they used to. Anxiety is a big one many people believe they need to avoid yet when you face that stress it is just something you feel but has no power over you.

Dont react but do respond

This is something else that will take practice but when you master it you will help yourself be in more control. There are differences to reacting and responding. Reacting is emotional and responding is thoughtful. When you react to what is said you are giving a display of emotions. While your responding to a circumstance requires you to think first.

You never have a good outcome with a reaction while responses give a better outcome to the circumstances.

Understand your spouses

You want to seek first to understand before you seek to be understood. This is where the use of the pillar of effective communication comes into play.

• You want to understand that your wife didn’t wake up dead set on trying to hurt your feelings.
• Don’t dispute right off the bat.
• Seek to understand her point of view first.
• Don’t fall into victim think.

It can take a while to get to the bedrock of her shirt and fear. It may take several discussions before you find out what her feelings are from, but eventually, you do get to the problem and this is where you can turn on the compassion and caring to help her by letting her talk through the problem.

Stay present in the Moment

Listen to what she is saying and not so much what you are going to reply with.

Dont avoid the conflict

Different types of Attachment patterns are helpful for you to understand where your wife is coming from and why you act the way you do too. The interesting part is that you can actually change these because these actions are all based on the thoughts you have and the emotions you are feeling. I am just now trying to understand what attachment patterns are and seeing how they fit into our relationship dynamic.

Dismissive Attachment Pattern

This is the whole Well it’s better than a poke in the eye.

Anxious Attachment Pattern

When things go bad they anxiously seek validation on what they are feeling

Disorganizing Attachment Pattern

This is someone who will burn their farm to the ground to help you.

Secure Attachment Pattern

This is the solid rock in the relationship.

Why you want to work it out

The resolution is what you want out of any connection. many times people are in Conflict avoidance and so they run from the conflict and try to smooth everything over but as mentioned before they don’t ever get the resolution and the reconnection that comes with it that they need so they wonder why they feel so detached from their spouse.

If you can be with your emotions and allow them to just run their course and be present while the conflict os going on you will be able to have deeper discussions and better, and stronger connections with your spouse.