I read every book, cover to cover, dog-eared them and highlighted the relevant sections. I did this because I was trying to get a marriage back on course. I believed I could save it single handedly, and that if I was determined enough, the right information would be enough.
I spent ten years in couples therapy with my husband, in a marriage that had real joy in it, but more rancor, hanging in there longer than I should have. We tried nearly every technique available to us. Some helped in ways I didn’t expect. All of it taught me something that I still bring into every relationship since then, including the one I’m in now.
Here’s what none of them taught me until the last one made it impossible to ignore: sovereignty was never in whether the marriage survived. It was in what I refused to abandon of myself when I was in it.
Seven ideas got me there.
Before any technique works, you have to know what you’re fighting about, because it is almost never the thing being argued.
Harville Hendrix was the first to name why I’d chosen who I’d chosen: we unconsciously choose partners who activate our oldest emotional wounds, because some part of us is still asking to be healed.
I saw one of Harville Hendrix’s Imago-certified therapists for two years, learning to mirror what my husband said, validate that it made sense from his side, and offer empathy for how he might feel, before I ever tried to defend myself or fix anything. It sounds simple. It was the hardest discipline I had ever practiced.
Terry Real gave me the shape of what was happening underneath: most conflict is not about the subject being argued, it is about position. One partner moves into grandiosity, one-up, contemptuous, always right. The other moves into shame, one-down, collapsed, apologizing before the sentence is finished. Real’s claim is that healthy repair does not happen from either position, and once I could see which position I defaulted to, I could stop reenacting it mid-argument.
John Gottman finished the diagnosis: most fights are not about the stated topic at all. They are a protest against disconnection, an unconscious question underneath the argument asking, are you there for me? Once I could hear that question under the noise, a portion of my old fights stopped being about the dishes or money.
These three ideas changed how I fought, though they did not save the marriage. What came next is why.
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