The Essential Ingredient for Healthy Relationships

 Rebuilding relationships begins with

rebuilding the relationship we have with ourselves.

Exploring and gaining understanding of our internal world, the relationship we have with ourselves and the contexts in which we experience conflict can help us to expand all of our relationships. Our internal world includes the understanding of how we perceive conflict, which influences the way conflict shows up in our relationships.
 

The most overlooked yet essential ingredient for a healthy relationship is to understand your own internal experience of conflict.

We begin our exploration of our internal experience of conflict by looking at the way conflict appeared in our family system as we were growing up.

We each grew up in a unique family system. Our family system is made up of the people who played a major part in our lives growing up. For some of you, your family system may be your mother and father and you. If your parents divorced and remarried, you may have two family systems in which you grew up. You may have grown up in a system of your mother, aunts, and siblings. Siblings, grandparents, cousins, and neighbors may have played a major role in our family life growing up.

Our experiences of conflict growing up within our family system continue to shape our beliefs about conflict today. 

Conflict is a necessity.

Internal and interpersonal conflict are necessary experiences.

If your experiences of conflict involved abuse, chaos, yelling, and screaming you will have been influenced in one way. If your experiences of conflict involved pushing concerns or anger under the rug followed by avoidance and passive aggression, you will have been influenced in a different way.

Take time to remember your experience of conflict growing up.

 Once you gain a strong sense of how you experienced conflict growing up, observe your own response to your experience of conflict now.

As you have moved through life, have you tended to repeat the conflict patterns and styles of your family system or acted in ways opposite to what you experienced growing up?

Acting opposite to painful experiences of conflict does not necessarily mean healing. 

 As an example, Audrey grew up in a family where family members fought regularly. Despite the regularity of family fights, Audrey became very anxious whenever there was conflict between family members. She would freeze inside as voices were raised and chaos ensued. Audrey wanted to be invisible so that she didn't create more stress or chaos for the family. She took care of herself by being busy away from home so that she didn't appear to have needs from anyone in her family.

Audrey despised her family conflicts and the way family members were harmed by the fighting and she told herself that she never wanted to repeat the patterns of conflict she experienced growing up. Audrey saw the impact her father's aggression took upon her mother and the toll it took on her younger brother, who was often at the center of her father's anger. Never wanting to repeat these patterns in her own family, she acted opposite of how she perceived her family acted.

For Audrey, the path of opposition to her family experience of conflict meant she didn't  fight or argue with her partner.  Audrey acted autonomously and did not want to appear needy to her partner. Her relationship appeared peaceful from the outside. Audrey never shared when something upset or bothered her. It was too threatening to give voice to her feelings because she associated what she felt in light of the trauma she experienced growing up.

Audrey internalized the anger that she vowed not to share. She did not know how to share what was bothering her and lost her voice whenever her partner's behavior brought feelings of anger or disappointment. The avoidant experience of conflict, though opposite to her family of origin's aggressive approach, was also not healthy. Audrey's avoidance was a defense mechanism.

Both the path of repetition and the path of opposition hold us within unhealthy patterns of conflict known as defense mechanisms.

The Four F's

fight,

flight,

freeze, and

fawn.

Fight, flight, freeze and fawn are defense mechanisms we employ in conflict because we perceive they keep us safe. Unfortunately, sometimes that defense mechanism actually blocks us from healing, from connection with another, and from a possibility of repairing a broken relationship.

FIGHT

The defense mechanism of fight, appears to bring us to safety by giving us the feeling that we have power and control in the family or relationship. Fight often includes an attack and raising our voice in anger or in needing to prove our point and that we are right.

FLIGHT

When we're in flight mode, we perceive fleeing and getting away from the situation will creates safety.  Flight looks like busying the self with something else, becoming productive in other areas to avoid feelings and interaction on the subject of conflict.  

FREEZE

When we're in freeze mode, we perceive that isolation and dissociation will create safety. The distinction from flight is that in freeze we don't become productive, we dissociate from feeling and doing, and we become numb inside. We may look like a deer in headlights.

FAWN

When we are in fawn mode we agree with others and attempt to meet the other's needs, wants and demands in order to create safety. We try to be helpful to the other and forget our own needs. We attempt to defuse the conflict at expense of ourselves.

Understanding includes gaining insight into the defense mechanisms that you employ when you experience conflict.

When conflict arises, what creates the greatest sense of safety for you?

We may have one or two defense mechanisms that we often employ. We may use all of these defense mechanisms. Sometimes we use different defense mechanisms with different people.

Remember how you protected yourself from conflict growing up.

Inquire within about how you protect yourself in intimate relationships now.

What do your defense mechanisms protect you from?

What information might you be missing by engaging in defense mechanisms?

 Conflict always contains important information. The experience of conflict is a red flag alerting us to the fact that there is something here calling to be understood. 

Healthy conflict provides the opportunity  to learn something new about ourselves and about another.

Conflict gives us the opportunity to deepen intimacy, deepen connection, to heal and to experience transformation.