Why You Keep Having the Same Fight

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 00:00

Have you ever been halfway through a fight with your partner and had this weird moment where some tiny part of your brain steps outside of your body and goes, oh my god, we're having this fight again. Like, you could hand each other the script at this point. You know what they're going to say. They know what you're going to say. You know which thing is going to piss them off.

other said at Thanksgiving in: 2019

It's the same fight.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 00:59

I think this is one of the most demoralizing places to be in a relationship. Because you've already tried to solve it. Maybe you've talked about it when you were calm. You've explained your perspective. They've explained theirs. Maybe you had a really good conversation. You both apologized. You agreed on what you would do differently next time. And you walked away thinking, okay, good, we figured that out.

And then three weeks later, you're standing in the kitchen at 9:30 at night arguing about a completely different thing. And somehow you ended up in the exact same emotional place. So eventually you start making some pretty big conclusions about what that means. Maybe we're just really bad at communicating. Maybe my partner doesn't listen. Maybe they don't care enough to actually change.

Maybe I'm the only person trying here. Maybe we're fundamentally incompatible. And maybe healthy relationships just aren't supposed to be this hard. And I get why people come to those conclusions. Because from the inside, it really does look like you're fighting about the thing you're fighting about.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 02:24

If we're fighting because you've been on your phone all night, then clearly the problem is the phone. If we're fighting about chores, the problem is chores. If we're fighting about money, then obviously we need a budget. So you keep trying to solve the thing. And to be clear, sometimes the thing really is the problem. I'm not going to spend the next 10 minutes trying to convince you that your partner can contribute absolutely nothing to your household. And the real issue

Is that you need to heal your attachment wound around dirty socks. No. Sometimes somebody needs to pick up the socks. But here's what I want you to start noticing. If the topics keep changing, but you keep ending up in the same emotional place, there may be another layer of the fight that you're not seeing. And that's the part that I'm much more interested in. Because what I see over and over again.

is that couples think they're having 10 or 20 different fights when really they have something more like one or two core patterns that keep putting on different faces.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 03:37

So let's take something stupidly ordinary. Your partner is sitting on the couch looking at their phone. You've been sitting next to them for half an hour. They're scrolling and you're watching television. Nothing dramatic is happening. And eventually you say, you've been on your phone all night. Now those words don't tell me very much about what actually is happening. Because underneath, you've been on your phone all night.

might actually be something much more vulnerable. Maybe you've been sitting there getting progressively more hurt because somewhere inside this has started to mean you don't actually want to be here with me. Or you've been waiting all day to spend time with them and it feels like they don't even notice you. Or it could mean I'm just not important to you. And that's what I call your relational alarm system.

Your

brain isn't simply registering person holding rectangular object sitting approximately 18 inches to my left. It's assigning meaning. And we do this all day long. We're constantly trying to figure out what other people's behavior means, particularly the behavior of people who matter enormously to us.

So the phone isn't just a phone anymore. The phone becomes evidence. I'm not important. And once your alarm decides that, you don't just sit there neutrally observing this fascinating piece of information about yourself. You do something to protect yourself.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 05:25

Maybe you get critical. You've been on your phone all night. And maybe your partner looks up and says, What? I just picked up my phone like 10 minutes ago. Okay, now watch what happens. Because from your chair, you're thinking, are you fucking kidding me? I finally tell you that I'm upset and your first concern is whether my timeline is technically accurate. Now, your alarm has more evidence.

See? They don't care that I'm hurt. And you push harder. That's not the point. You're always on that thing. It's like you don't even want to spend time with me.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 06:08

But let's move over to your partner's chair for a second. Because they may not have heard, I miss you and I want to feel important to you. They may have heard, you're fucking up again. one of the really tender places in their alarm system is I can never get it right. Nothing I do is enough. And so they protect themselves too.

They explain. I've been working all day. I answered two texts. I haven't been on it all night. Which, of course, you experience as more evidence that they don't care about how you feel. So you get louder, more specific, and start bringing in the receipts. You were on it during dinner, too. And now they're thinking, Dear Lord, nothing I say is going to fix this.

So maybe they shut down or put the phone down dramatically and say, fine, whatever. And there it is. Your alarm goes, see, I knew it. I knew I'm alone in this relationship. And their alarm is going, see, I knew it. Nothing I do will ever be enough.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 07:32

And this is the part that fascinates me. Both people experience themselves as reacting to the other person. If I asked the first person why they got so upset, they might say, because he got defensive instead of listening to me. And if I asked the second person why they got defensive, they might say, because she came at me criticizing about everything that I do. And they're both right about part of what happened.

The problem is when you're standing inside the interaction, it's incredibly hard to see that what you're doing in response to your partner is also becoming the thing that they're responding to next. That's how you get a loop. Something happens, alarm decides what it means, you protect yourself from that meaning, your protection hits your partner's alarm.

They

assign their own meaning to what you're doing, they protect themselves, and then their protection comes back around and confirms exactly what your alarm was worried about in the first place.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 08:46

So now, this thing has its own momentum. And six weeks from now, you might not be talking about the phone at all. Maybe now it's the dishes. You come downstairs and the kitchen is a disaster after your partner said they'd clean it. Your alarm goes, I can't rely on you. Everything is on me. You criticize, their alarm goes, nothing I do is ever good enough. They defend.

You

hear, here we go again, I'm alone. You push. They withdraw. And suddenly you're in the same emotional place you were during the phone fight. It's a different set, but the same script.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 09:34

I don't think recurring relationship problems are always best understood as communication problems. Communication is absolutely part of it. we're actually going to talk more about that later in the series. Because I'm not anti-communication skills. I'd be a pretty bad relationship therapist if my official position were words, who needs them. But if you only focus on the words,

You can spend years trying to find a better version of the exact same script. What I want you to become curious about is what keeps making the script necessary in the first place. What does your alarm keep deciding is happening? What do you do when that particular thing feels threatened? And what happens inside your partner when you do that?

Because the thing that looks completely rational from your chair can look very different from theirs. If I believe that you're abandoning me, pursuing you makes complete sense. Of course I'm going to come toward you harder. I'm trying to get you back. But if your alarm experiences my intensity as criticism or failure, my attempt to pull you closer.

May actually make you want to pull further away. And then your distance makes me pursue harder. And around and around we go. Nobody sat down and chose this. Nobody said, you know, it would be fun. Let's build an incredibly efficient interpersonal system for repeatedly activating each other's deepest vulnerabilities. And yet.

Here

we are.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 11:32

Now I want to be careful about something, because this is where attachment language can get used in a way I really don't like. Understanding the pattern does not actually mean the content of the fight doesn't matter. If your partner repeatedly agrees to do something and doesn't do it, that's a problem. If you're carrying 90% of the household and your partner is carrying 10,

I am not going to tell you that your resentment is merely your alarm system having a little moment. If somebody is cruel, chronically dismissive, dishonest, unwilling to take responsibility, or simply unwilling to participate in making the relationship better, understanding why they protect themselves that way does not make the behavior okay. The pattern is not an excuse.

What understanding the pattern can do is help explain why the two of you have the same conversation about legitimate problems 15 times and somehow never actually get anywhere. Because by the time you're supposedly discussing the dish the dishwasher, one person is fighting about whether I matter, and the other person is fighting about whether I am.

Fundamentally

failing you. And good luck solving dishwasher logistics from there.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 13:06

And I don't actually want you to do very much with this today. I'm resisting my own therapist urge to give you six steps in a worksheet. Because I think there's actually real value in simply seeing this differently at first. If you recognize yourself in what I'm describing, just starting to get curious about the fights is important. Not what are we fighting about, but where do we always end up? Maybe.

Your fights repeatedly end with you feeling alone. Maybe they repeatedly end with you feeling like you're failing. maybe one of you ends up feeling controlled and the other ends up feeling abandoned. Or maybe you always end up feeling like you don't matter. No matter what the original argument was supposed to be about.

Because

if you start seeing that, then suddenly you may realize you don't actually have 20 completely different unrelated relationship problems. You have a pattern. And patterns are important because patterns are something we can start to understand.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 14:18

So if you take one thing from this, I want it to be this. The fact that you're having the same fight over and over doesn't necessarily mean nothing can change. It may mean you've been trying to solve the argument without ever seeing the pattern underneath it. And one of the really annoying things about relationship patterns is that they're usually much easier to see when you're outside of them.

I can show you the phone example and the whole thing looks almost ridiculously obvious. But when it's your partner and you're hurt and you're standing inside the pattern while it's happening, usually all you can see is the thing they're doing that's making you react that way. That's part of what makes these patterns so hard to untangle on your own.

Dr. Rachel Orleck (: 15:11

And once you do start to see the pattern, of course the next question is, okay, great, that's lovely, but when I'm standing in my kitchen and my heart is pounding and my partner just said the exact thing that makes me want to lose my shit, what am I supposed to actually do? Because recognizing, look, we're doing our pattern while continuing to do the pattern isn't terribly satisfying. So that's what we're talking about next.

How do you interrupt a fight when you're already in it?