I believe we’re going to find that respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. John M. Gottman

All couples have a common conflict dance, even if they take to the dance floor only occasionally. This is because we can all have our buttons pushed sooner or later, and the way we manage this and the way our partner interacts with us sets up a dynamic which Emotionally Focused Therapists call The Cycle.

Have a look at the options below to see if any of these are familiar to you. Possibly your dance is not quite any of these but similar to one of them. Detecting, understanding and then stopping The Cycle is the first goal of therapy and this book.Check below to see if any of the conflict patterns described here are similar to your own. Detecting your Cycle is an essential first step to bringing love back into your relationship, and putting the ego battles to bed.

Conflict Avoiders

“We don’t want to rock the boat.”

1. Conflict avoiders put a great deal of energy into being nice to each other. There will be a tendency to over-ride feelings and related needs in order not to rock the boat. They will like the calm within their relationship, and may well think their relationship is good because it is mostly chilled out.
2. Conflict avoiders risk being a Victim to not expressing their own needs or getting them met, and in Rescuing their partners or conflict situations so as to maintain connection and general agreement.
3. There is a risk also that this will mean they will be skewed towards independence rather than interdependence. The latter would require high levels of negotiation which is not a feature of those who wish to avoid disagreements.
4. Because each can have Recuing tendencies, they can be quite good at getting on well whenever they practice interdependence. They have a high level of respect for each other usually, and respect the other’s needs, wants and desires.
5.  In general, their relationship will be good enough, until one realises that they compromise their own interests and needs too much, and they feel a Victim to this aspect of their dynamic. When they turn up for therapy, it’s because one partner at least wants to get more real about what they want from life and their relationship.
6. Some variants to this description occurs when one person is more strongly doing their own thing, perhaps a little self-focused, and the other is backing down and compromising too much leaving themselves feeling resentful that it is they who seem to do most of the compromising. This is common when one party feels burned out through living out their chosen role.
7. This could be the anxious insecure person feeling tired of doing all the caring, or the breadwinner (most likely avoidant insecure) who feels tired of doing all the working. Their dilemma is that these roles create calm cooperation, but also possibly burnout and/or unmet and even unexpressed needs.

Debating couples

“We simply can’t stop arguing about who is right”

1. These couples love to argue. They both want to be right, and can be very emotional in the process of determining who has the logic high ground. They seem to want the other to acknowledge that they have the facts sorted correctly, so there’s a lot of insecurity in regards to being correct.
2. Ironically, there is a desire for honesty here, because being correct requires that the correct facts do the talking.
3. This anxiety about how ‘right’ they are may stem from fears about being good enough, being adequate, being successful, not failing. Otherwise, shame will be exposed, and so there’s anxiety that this must not happen. If their partner does not acknowledge how right they are, either or both partners can slide from insecurity into anger.
4. This couple want to persuade their partner to adopt a different viewpoint. Different isn’t good for them. Everyone agreeing with one another would be good, despite the impossibility of achieving this. This couple sees difference as something that must be resolved, not as something to embrace, celebrate, and work with.
5. Frequently they argue respectfully, with no nastiness, but boundaries are trampled over. The other’s opinion instead of being honoured as a viewpoint, gets corrected, talked down, diminished. At worst, if tempers raise enough, nastiness may be thrown by one or both partners, but this is a last resort because what matters to this couple is that they agree about who is right.
6. This couple don’t recognise that being right rarely matters, and that their desire for good connection is about feeling good with one another, and not about being better.
7. Sometimes just one partner gets caught in having to be right, while the other has given up on this game and refuses to engage in such unproductive conversations.