– Conflict as Energy; An Antidote to Boredom

Last Updated on May 24, 2019 by Chris Roberts

LEARNING HOW TO USE CONFLICT AS HEALTY CONNECTION IN MARRIAGE COUNSELING NASHVILLE TN

References “Passionate Marriage.  Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships” By David Schnarch, Ph.D.

Almost every human being is conflict avoidant, at least that’s what almost every person who’s entered my office for marriage counseling has stated.  Even the marriages with the most intense fighting and arguing you can imagine, they both will independently state that they don’t like and are not good at conflict.  As marriage therapists, we often scratch our heads at these comments.  It often appears they are EXPERTS at conflict!  However, what is revealed over and over again is that ultimately, they don’t want conflict and have no real idea of how to navigate through conflict to the other side.

Marriage therapy is full of conflict, both direct and loud, and covert and seething.  Conflict is inherent in any relationship.  It’s impossible to in a relationship with someone and not experience conflict.  As simple an example as, “Where should we go to eat?” often brings some sort of negotiation and compromise.  Perhaps, both partners will feel in the same mood for a certain food, but live with someone long enough and you will come to a “crossroads” of differing ideas for dinner on a Saturday night.  Usually, such innocuous examples of a dinner choice does not induce high levels of conflict, but if one partner continually gets their way with dinner there will be a bubbling unrest.   The connotation that “the two shall become one” never meant that partners will become of the same mind and desires, and therefore even their dinner choices will ultimately always be in sync.  To be in a long-term marriage means being willing to have continuous conversations about where to live, how to raise kids, when to start planning for retirement, AND where do we eat dinner tonight?

Because most people don’t feel they are good at conflict and most people don’t know healthy ways of dealing with conflict, almost everyone just simply wishes conflict didn’t exist.  This is a lovely wish!  The problem is that conflict is unavoidable.  Further, conflict creates tension which causes us to evaluate our circumstances and our lives.  In the midst of conflict, we are always (mostly subconsciously) determining how we got into this situation and what we can do to get out of it.  This is good, because it brings us back into the reality of living life with another person!  If we didn’t care about another person, we would always just do what we wanted to do and there would be very little room for conflict, because there wouldn’t be a dilemma.  Just like conflict, most people hate dilemmas.  However, like conflict, dilemmas ask us to wrestle with the notion of living life outside of ourselves. The solution may just lie in 20 love quotes that will melt your heart.

Most marriages fail because there becomes a gridlock of patterns that reduces each  partner to a predictable robot.  It goes something like, “When I do this, you ALWAYS do this.”  Just like putting a quarter in a parking meter, I put the quarter in and I get 20 minutes of parking.  The ultimate effect is boredom.  Even if there is constant fighting and yelling and bickering, usually there is a predictable pattern that just repeats itself over and over again.  When we become bored, we act out.  As humans, we can’t sustain a dulling sense of boredom for long periods of time.

Conflict can be an implicit means of keeping the boredom door closed.  However, we have to be continually learning how to become better at conflict.  One of the ways that marriages become stale and stagnant is through emotional fusion.  At its core, emotional fusion means that I am dependent on your feelings and state of being in order to know my feelings and state of being.  If you are unhappy, then I will be unhappy.

SELF SOOTHING TO STAY CONNECTED IN CONFLICT

In a seminal work about marriages by Dr. David Schnarch entitled, “Passionate Marriage,” he touches on this concept of being emotionally fused with our marriage partner.  He writes, “Self-soothing involves meeting two core challenges of selfhood: (a) not losing yourself to the pressures and demands of others, and (b) developing your capacity for self-centering (stabilizing your own emotions and fears).” (p. 173)  Ultimately, what Dr. Schnarch is referring to is being able to keep yourself calm and stable even if your spouse is mad or upset.  This is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and in one sense, it is the work of a lifetime.  Very few of us have had examples in our lives of people who are not emotionally fused.  Not only is being differentiated a very difficult thing to do, we don’t have much of a road map for getting there.  Differentiation means that even if your spouse is angry, and even if your spouse is wholly blaming you for their anger, you DO NOT HAVE to respond to your spouse with anger or an escalation of energy.  Often, people don’t believe they even have the option of responding in a different manner.

WHAT IS MARRIAGE COUNSELING?

Marriage counseling is about helping each partner realize they have control only over what they feel and how they respond.  Marriage counseling provides each spouse with new options for how to respond to conflict.  Marriage counseling creates the platform for conflict to be a healthy way for couples to re-engage and feel alive even in the midst of a long life.

HOW TO FIND HELP IN NASHVILLE, TN

If you are looking for marriage counseling in Nashville, TN for help with these repeated patterns of conflict and distance, Chris Roberts at Two Trees Counseling Nashville would love to be of help to you.  Chris Roberts is a Nashville marriage therapist trained at helping couples use the difficulty of conflict and turn it into a more healthy means for loving each other.