Turning Fights into Growth Conversations

Every relationship will have its challenging moments, but how we approach these moments can shift them from being fights that leave us feeling disconnected to conversations where we can actually learn, grow closer together, and feel more connected.

In this blog series, we’ll dive into why we fight and how we can transform these conflicts into truly growth-oriented conversations.

Why Do We Fight?

Fighting in a relationship doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong.

We are two different people with different backgrounds, childhoods, experiences, and perspectives, which naturally leads to disagreements and misunderstandings.

Here are five main reasons we fight:

• Fear: This can manifest as a fear of feeling unimportant, vulnerability, or abandonment. Often, these fears stem from early childhood experiences and can unconsciously cause us to mess things up in our relationships.

• Unmet Needs: We all have fundamental needs such as safety, belonging, and love. When these aren’t fully met from within ourselves, we look to our partner to fulfill them. It's crucial to learn to meet these needs ourselves first before asking our partner to do so.

• Ego and Self-Protection: Our ego desires to be right as a form of self-preservation. Recognizing that our need to be right is just our ego in action can help us ask ourselves whether we would rather be right or happy.

• Past Traumas: Traumas from our past can be triggered in our current relationships. While it may seem negative, this can be a beautiful gift as it brings unresolved issues into our conscious awareness, allowing us to address and process them.

• Lack of Emotional Regulation: If one or both partners struggle with regulating emotions, simple disagreements can quickly escalate. Emotional regulation involves recognizing and feeling emotions, using mindfulness, and understanding what these emotions need from us.

How to Stop Fighting in Relationships and What to Do Instead

All right, next - bullets for How to Stop Fighting and What to Do Instead

Do any of these things sound familiar when it comes to the fights that come up in your relationship?

• "Let's agree to disagree."
• "Let's just let it go."
• "I can't talk about this right now."
• "You Win"

If you often leave fights without resolution, then over time this starts to lead to more and more distance between you. This is why I have people that come to me and say, "I don't know how we got here. I just want to get back to how things used to be." Maybe that's where you are right now—looking back and seeing this chasm that's developed one unresolved fight at a time.

Or maybe you're in a really good place right now and you want to be able to, 10 years from now, look back and say, "It just keeps getting better." Wherever you're at right now, you can learn to turn those challenges into opportunities for growth.

What is the Antidote to Fighting?

It's truth.

When we fight, we're believing that something is true that isn't 100% objectively true. That might be our perspective about something outside of ourselves, a belief about our partner, or a belief about ourselves.

First, we need to understand that we can never truly know the truth about our partner's feelings or experience.

We also can't rewind time, go back to the past, and know for 100% certain who said what when. So instead of trying to prove a perspective that you can't really know is even objectively true, focus instead on your present moment experience.

A really wonderful book, Conscious Loving by Gay Hendrix and Kathleen Hendrix, calls this the microscopic truth. The microscopic truth is your own experience that can't be argued. As they say, the microscopic truth refers to the deepest and most subtle truth that you can see and feel.

If what you say gets an argument response, use this as a signal that you need to go to a deeper level of your truth. In a close relationship, the truth is most likely to be a clear statement of feeling, body sensation, or of what you actually did.

Expressing the Microscopic Truth

Expressing the microscopic truth helps us to avoid blaming or projecting onto our partner. For example, let's look at the statement: "When you did that, it made me feel awful." Is that really the truth? Well, no, because somebody else can't actually make you feel anything. It's your own relationship with what they did or said that is causing you to feel the way you're feeling.

Somebody else can't make you feel anything. This is also why two different people could say the exact same thing to you—one of them you could feel nothing about, and the other one it could really make you upset. That's because it's about your perspective or your relationship with what they said.

So instead of saying, "You made me feel awful," which is blame, the truth might be something like, "I'm feeling nauseated as we speak" or "My body feels like it's closing up, and I'm feeling sad."

Here's another example: "I feel like you don't care about what I'm saying."

Is that the truth? This one's tricky because the way it's worded sounds like you're expressing your own feeling, but this is a really common trap. "I feel like you don't care about what I'm saying" is actually a perspective, not a feeling.

Can you truly know that your partner doesn't care about what you're saying? You will never be able to know with 100% certainty what your partner is feeling or experiencing. In this situation, the truth might be something more like, "There's a part of me that's really scared because it's believing that you don't care about what I'm saying."

You see the difference?

I'm getting to the real truth of things. What I'm actually feeling is scared, and it's not because you don't care about what I'm saying. It's because there's a part of me that's believing that you don't care about what I'm saying.

There's a big difference here because now we're not blaming or assuming that we know what's true about our partner. We're identifying a belief that we are holding about our partner, which is causing us to have the emotional response of fear.

A really wonderful tool for helping you discern what's really true and what's just an opinion or perspective is the work by Byron Katie. I've done a podcast episode going into this whole cool framework in the past, so I'll link that in the show notes. It's really worth it; I also highly recommend her book, Loving What Is.

When you tell the microscopic truth about your present moment feelings and experience, there's nothing for your partner to fight with. This automatically starts to lower defenses and helps your partner to really understand and empathize with your experience instead of feeling attacked.

Applying This Practically in Your Relationship

Now let's talk about how you can apply this practically in your relationship. This is a framework that Matt and I developed and continue to use to help us navigate those more challenging conversations. We created this framework after having a communication breakdown. We have a philosophy: never let a fight go to waste; always learn something from it.

Because we've managed to do this, this is why we've only had really maybe four or five true fights in our 15 years together. After any communication breakdown, we look at how we can do that better next time. The MASTER Framework is a result of all of that exploration and discovery.

The MASTER Framework

The MASTER Framework has six steps:

1. M for Moment

This step is the most important step because it is the pattern interrupt. It's also the hardest step because first, you have to become aware that the conversation is taking a downhill trajectory and you need to interrupt it in that moment.

In this step, the moment you notice that you're starting to get emotional and the conversation is taking a negative turn, pause and take a moment. This means taking some space from each other if necessary, taking some deep breaths, maybe going for a little bit of a walk—taking whatever time that both of you need in order to come back to a calm state.

Why this is so important is that when we start to get activated and that conversation starts to get heated, we're actually going into fight or flight mode. In fight or flight mode, the part of your brain that's responsible for creative problem solving, empathy, and cooperation—all of these things—is gone offline.

When you're in fight or flight mode, you're just focused on "I need to survive," and your vision narrows, your perspective narrows. So in short, it's really not a good time to have a constructive conversation. But as soon as that starts to happen, that's the moment you need to take a pause, take a little bit of space, until you feel ready to come back and actually have a productive conversation.

2. A for Acknowledge + Allow

This step you do while you are taking a moment. As soon as you have taken a pause to be by yourself, bring your awareness inward and just acknowledge whatever emotions and sensations you're feeling right now and allow yourself to feel them. What happens is if we don't pay attention to our emotions and give them the space to be felt, then they come out sideways in our interactions in the form of blame, criticism, and projection. So it's really key to let yourself feel.

3. S for Sorry

So, this is after you both had a chance to take your time to cool down and to acknowledge and allow yourself to feel what you're feeling. Now, when you come back together, this is where it's time to make an apology.

So, you're not apologizing for the situation that you're arguing about, but instead, you're apologizing for your part in the communication breakdown or your part in the rupture that led you to getting emotional. For example, if you raised your voice, you can apologize for yelling.

If you started to blame your partner, you can apologize for that. So the invitation here is to take responsibility for your part in whatever rupture you experienced and apologizing for that. That's really going to help you lower defenses as you come together to talk about this and feel like you're on the same team.

4. T for Talk

So, this is where you get to share the microscopic truth. This is where the gold is. There are more communication frameworks and tools that I teach my clients, but if you just practice sharing the microscopic truth and seeking to understand your partner, this itself is such an improvement on the unconscious blaming and projecting that you might have been doing in the past.

So share the microscopic truth back and forth, really listening to your partner, trying to understand their perspective. Also, make space for your emotions to be felt and witnessed and give space for your partner's emotions to be felt and witnessed by you. If things start to get heated again, then that's your cue to take another pause. That's where you go back to the start of the framework, take a moment until you cool down, and then come back together again.

So continue talking it out until you feel like you really understood each other fully and like you really come to some kind of resolution together.

5. E for Embrace

This is where you get to hug it out, have a nice big hug. There are a few reasons that we do this. First of all, just to start to feel connected to each other again. Second of all, when you get really close like this and have that physical contact, your nervous systems—your body—is actually co-regulating, and this helps you feel more calm, more open, more loving. And the third reason is that if there's anything that’s still left unresolved between you, you're gonna notice it when you embrace each other in this way.

So pay attention if it still feels like there's something between you. Don't just let it slip by.

Acknowledge it, speak it out loud, go back to talking and sharing the microscopic truth until you feel like you've truly worked through all of it.

6. R for Resolutions + Requests

This is a step that I find often gets missed, and this is why we can keep having the same conversations over and over again. Once we've talked it through, we need to wrap up the conversation by making some clear resolutions and commitments for how we're going to change moving forward.

So, resolutions and requests will be about the situation you've been talking about and also about how you've been communicating. Resolutions can look like agreements that you're going to make with each other. Can be apologies. It can be commitments for how you plan to show up in the future. It can be boundaries and requests can be ways that you would like your partner to help support you or things that they can do to remind you of your commitments. And like I said, you don't wanna let a good fight go to waste. So make sure that you also take the time to reflect on how you communicated through this conversation: what went really well, what did you really improve on this time, and what can you do better next time.

Remember, you're probably not going to get this framework perfect on the first go. It's so natural to slip back into old patterns, so just use every one of these conversations as a learning opportunity truly, so that next time you have a moment of friction like this, your conversation goes even more smoothly.

Then, after all of that, go do something fun together. Have some great makeup sex, go dance or shake it off, do whatever you need to do to just release whatever energy residue is left over from that interaction.

You can do all of these steps in just the most simple basic form, and that alone is going to be such an improvement over the unconscious fighting. The beauty of this framework is that for each of those steps, you can go so much deeper. There are so many levels of mastery that you can work toward in each one of those steps. So the MASTER Framework truly is something that you can continue to master over a lifetime.

I hope you found this episode helpful. I really encourage you to share it with your partner and commit to learning this practice together. That way, you can be on the same team about it and support each other in applying this in your relationship. Also, give each other permission to remind each other of the steps and to help each other through the process of learning this framework.

Remember to give yourself some grace. You're not gonna learn a new framework and get it right on the first time, and never fight again, or never fall back into your old patterns. It’s a process and it definitely takes some practice. Celebrate each time that you interrupt your old pattern and apply this framework even just a little bit. Give yourself grace as you continue to practice and learn.

My hope for you is that this framework will help you learn more about yourselves and each other, and help you grow closer with every conversation. And hopefully, sometime from now, you'll be able to look back and realize, hey, we’re not really fighting anymore. It’s possible. I believe in you; you can do it.

And that's a wrap! If you want to save this in an even easier way, just catch it again by listening to our podcast episode or checking out our YouTube channel. Until next time, lovers!