Do Healthy Couples Need Conflict? - Baya Voce

Both of us entered our previous relationships in therapy. As opposed to waiting for conflict to arise and then try to repair. You have been helping individuals understand conflict resolution in relationships. You've been researching this for a long time. You've been working with people about this. And I'm curious, do you think we need conflict in order to have a healthy relationship? Is it part of a thriving, harmonious, healthy relationship? Or is it better to just create resolution, agreements, acceptance, alignment from the beginning of a relationship, the first six to nine months, so that we can minimize conflict so we don't have to try to put all of our energy into repairing in the future, which sucks the life out of a relationship in my mind. What are your thoughts on this?

I mean, listen, I think it's a dance, first of all. And I look at relationships in phases. The first phase is the part where you're sort of enmeshed, you found your soulmate. The other half, the like, how have I not lived without you? My whole, like, I have not found you. I'm so, you know, and there is this way that you merge and this is where you feel like you're never going to fight about anything. We have so much in common. This is.

This person's perfect.

That's right. That's right. And then inevitably, because you are two different nervous systems with two different wounding patterns and different histories, inevitably at some point you enter into another stage, which I like to call the power struggle. The power struggle is where you're faced with a whole bunch of tension. This is where your differences start to rub up against each other. All of a sudden we start to individuate. So where we thought we were just one amoeba, now we're sort of like, you know, now we're, now we're starting to be like, wait, you're a. You're an individual with different desires and needs. And I am also. So, so what do we do? And so there's inherently tension in this phase. That tension is important. We have to. We have to find the areas of friction in order to move through them to where Actually in the third phase, you get to interdependence. You find a space in your relationship where you have more gentleness, you know, one another's wounding. And so you're able to work with that wounding a little bit more easily, you know, where there's gonna. Where you're gonna get caught. You know, you've been in the cycles, you know. But the tricky part is most people never exit out of stage two. Most people are in the Power struggle for the duration of the relationship.

What does the power struggle phase look like for most people?

So it can look like, first of all, it can look a lot of different ways. This is not one size fits all. For people who are a little more conflict avoidant, you might find that the power struggle looks just a little more like distance. Like, huh, they just did something that really bothered me. I think I'm just not gonna say anything about that. And I'll just act like that doesn't matter.

Like stuffing your feelings totally silent treatment.

It could look. Yes, yeah, 100%.

And you're like, that makes me feel uncomfortable, so I'm just not gonna speak about it at all. For some people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like the. I like the like stuff down, down. Oh, I can. A lot of it. Some. I can handle that. That's fine. It's quintessential.

I'm fine until two, three years later, you explode.

You're definitely not fine. Or two, three weeks later. And if you have two people who do that, you're going to end up, you know, you're going to end up walking two parallel paths and you'll be roommates before long who aren't talking about much and you're just living different lives in the same house.

Or would that power struggle phase also be. You don't say what's truly on your heart. You don't have the courage to speak to your partner directly, but you talk about it to other friends and family about what they're not g you 100%.

100%. And listen, it makes sense on some level, because if we have grown up afraid of what it actually means to bring our truth, if we have learned that bringing what's real for us creates distance or punishment, then we're adapting to that response. One of my mentors is Terry Real, and he's fantastic. And he has a line that I think is so profound, which is adaptive now. Maladaptive then, right? So what now is an adaptation that you have that you have figured out because your mom yelled at you and so. And your reaction to that when she yelled at you was to hide and then be good. Now what are you going to do in your relationship? Well, you're probably going to hide and be good. And so your partner might come to you and be mad at you and you might just start appeasing. No, no, no, it's okay. Oh, I totally didn't mean to do that. I can't believe. And meanwhile, you're over here fuming, but you're not going to say that because what do you think is going to happen? That your mom is going to yell, but it's your partner. And so we have to start learning what it actually means to grow out of our maladaptive responses into adaptive responses. So if you were yelled at as a kid, for instance, and your adaptive, smart response, by the way, smart response was to, like I just said, maybe hide in your room and cry. And that actually gave you attention from your dad. So when you cried your mom would yell and when you cry, your dad would come and console. So what did you learn? You learned safety is crying, having a big reaction, and then dad's gonna come console me. Now as an adult, you cry hoping for that same attention. And it might not even be conscious by the way. You just cry because that's the thing that comes up. It just comes out of you like that. It's so easy. And all of a sudden your partner doesn't actually respond to that. Your partner actually needs you to be in a little bit more of a regulated space for them to meet you. And where do you go? You go deeper into the pain, you go harder into the crying because that's the thing that got you attention before. So when we don't understand that there is this younger part of ourselves that is in charge when we're triggered. Now, you can call this the amygdala, you can call this your inner child. There are many, many people have had many, you know, in many traditions have called this different things. I like to look at it as a little kid as like your 5 year old self who's crying, begging for a parent to hold you and give you attention. And when that matches up, which it just tends to do in relationships with your partner's wounding, well, guess what, you're probably not gonna get your needs met. It's gonna lead to more tension. So this question of can we just deal with it at the beginning and talk our way through agreements and whatnot so that tension doesn't arise. I think that actually goes a little bit hand in hand with this narrative that we've all been sold and it's been steeped into our subconscious, that is from Disney and Hollywood rom coms and hashtag couple goals on social media around what a relationship should look like. And unless you're in self development, unless you're in therapy, unless you read relationship books or go to the workshops, there's actually nowhere in culture where you're learning that conflict is normal and that you have to, it's intimacy building. Now there are Plenty of unhealthy ways to do conflict. So I don't mean to say that yelling and abuse is. That's not a healthy way to do conflict. But if you can do conflict in a way that actually then lends to repair and then you complete the cycle, then conflict without repair is just pain over and over and over again. Yeah, but then conflict with repair is healing. I actually really like thinking about it this way. So you each come into the relationship with all of your relationships behind you. So it's your relationship with your caregivers. It's the relationship with the person who broke your heart or the 12 people who broke your heart before that. It's the pain that you did to other people, and it's the pain that other people did to you, caused to you. You walk into your relationship with all of the unhealed pain, and you basically walk to your partner and you say, heal me. Here it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Here it is. Yeah, yeah. But we don't know that's what we're saying. That's not why we get into. That's not why we think we're getting into relationships. But that to me, is when we're talking, when. When I get a little more kind of spiritual and woo and esoteric about it. I deeply believe. I deeply believe that we get into relationship to heal the parts of ourselves that nobody else could heal before. And when we find the relationship that is the one we decide to basically put on the altar as this is where I'm gonna do my work. This is where I'm. Then what you are saying as each partner is, I am signing up to be here to help you heal the parts of yourself that nobody else that came before me could help you heal. Like, I'm up for that task and vice versa. It's to me that lens is. It's a gift that we give each other when we sign up for relationship and say, it doesn't matter how perfect I want you to be, I know you come with unhealed wounding. And I have the exact recipe that's probably going to bump up against those wounds. But if we're responsible enough and we do our work enough, that what I also can do is support in the healing of those wounds.

They say the number one skill is emotional regulation.

And there is no way around it. You cannot escape this if you want to have a meaningful, intimate relationship. There is no way around this. There is no. No truth in relationship. There are just two people who are having their own experiences. And you live in your world and I live over here in my.