How can we break repetitive cycles of relationship conflict?

Our early childhood attachments often form a template for our future adult relationships. Specifically, they inform how we receive and express love and what we expect love to feel like. As a result, we may find ourselves attracted to partners whose personality, behaviours, or love languages feel familiar. However, this familiarity can also mean that we are attracted to partners who activate some of our deep-rooted triggers.

 
What does this look like in practice? Let’s use our abandonment example. Our partner may be busy at work, leading to late nights in the office and a cancelled date night. Our abandonment trigger gets activated, evoking feelings of perceived rejection. When this happened in childhood, we would try to protect ourselves from these feelings by seeking reassurance. Therefore, we may increase our communication by texting or calling our partner. Our partner, who is already feeling pressure at work, may be triggered into interpreting this contact as further expectations or criticism. To cope with resulting anxiety, they may engage in protective modes they learned in childhood, such as avoidance and withdrawal. Our text messages remain unread, or worse, blue-double-ticked and unanswered. In a vicious cycle, this increases our fears around abandonment and our desire to engage with our habitual protective behaviour of reassurance-seeking.

Trigger-driven conflict patterns can seem challenging to break due to the intensity of the feelings involved. However, some steps can help to reduce their occurrence and mend the relationship post-conflict.

It is crucial for us to become aware and familiar with what our triggers are and where they originate from. This can help us assume part of the conflict responsibility by understanding that some of the anger, anxiety or hurt we feel in response to our partner’s actions may be residual from our past negative experiences. It can be helpful to find concrete memories that correspond to some of these triggers.

For example, when our partner cancelling date night triggers abandonment fears, we can be aware that some of our feelings may be unprocessed hurt from our father walking out on the family when we were a child. This awareness can help us to reality-test whether our current reaction is proportionate to the context and whether some of our feelings need to be reattributed to the past. This does not necessarily reduce the intensity of the emotion but makes it easier to manage our responses.

It is equally important for us to acknowledge that some of our protective behaviours may be unhelpful or damaging to our relationship. Acknowledging what drives such behaviours is the first step to changing them. Problematic behaviours are best replaced with actions that align with our values and meet our core needs.

For example, it is common to try to reduce abandonment insecurities by seeking reassurance through excessive approach behaviours. Specifically, we may increase contact, call our partner multiple times a day, and demand to know where they are and who they are with. This can trigger distress in our partner and strain the relationship. Our need here is a sense of security. However, if our partner responds with their own unhelpful protective behaviours, such as withdrawal, we will not meet this need. Therefore, it can be more beneficial to identify behaviours that would meet the need for security and reflect our relationship values. Needs can be met internally by making a list of how our partner makes us feel secure, or externally, by sharing our needs with our partner and exploring ways to meet this within the relationship.

Conflict happens even when we have the best of intentions to avoid it. Communicating our triggers, experiences, feelings, and needs proactively can help limit repetitive cycles of conflict. Beyond this, communication can also help us mend breaks in the relationship after a conflict has occurred. Self-awareness of triggers and protective behaviours can guide us in labelling different parts of our experience and expressing our needs. It is key also to hear our partner’s triggers, experiences, feelings, and needs. This can give us some space between the argument and our reaction by highlighting that some of what happened was driven by our partner’s past experiences rather than a personal attack. De-personifying arguments with the person we love can reduce some of the hurt we experience.

If you have been struggling with repetitive conflict cycles in your relationship and wish to improve your understanding of underlying causes, please get in touch and book your appointment with Dr. Esslin Terrighena here.