Are you and your partner trapped in the same arguments, cycling through blame and withdrawal without ever reaching a resolution? These destructive patterns aren’t just bad habits—they’re symptoms of a deeper issue: the breakdown of emotional safety that fuels an endless feedback loop of conflict and disconnection.
In this article, we’ll discuss three different methods of conflict resolution in relationships from the books Hold Me Tight, Nonviolent Communication, and Difficult Conversations. Then, we’ll wrap it up by looking at how to end a conflict and move forward with advice from Powerful Phrases for Dealing With Difficult People.
Table of Contents
Hold Me Tight‘s 3-Step Method
In Hold Me Tight, Sue Johnson explains that the first step of repairing your emotional connection with your partner is stopping the feedback loop of conflict: Feeling unsafe leads to conflict, which leads to feeling even less safe, which leads to more conflict, and so on. This feedback loop is fueled by negative communication patterns—defensive and unproductive ways of talking to one another that create tension and exacerbate emotional distance.
While every couple has moments of bad communication, Johnson says that negative communication is the norm in relationships lacking emotional safety—and escaping this norm is the first part of repairing your relationship as a whole. Here are Johnson’s three steps for addressing negative communication patterns:
- Identify when and how you and your partner communicate negatively.
- Identify the vulnerabilities that cause you to communicate negatively.
- Resolve a conflict with your partner in a healthier way.
Step #1: Identify Negative Communication Patterns
Johnson states that first, you and your partner must articulate what your conflicts tend to look like and identify the harmful communication patterns you use. Having an awareness of your harmful tendencies, she says, will make it easier to spot them in the future and shut down the pattern early.
Johnson details three negative communication patterns partners commonly identify with:
1) Confront and Retreat
The first negative pattern involves one partner confronting another who then withdraws or shuts down. It plays out in the following way:
- Partner A communicates their emotions in a way that seems aggressive to Partner B.
- Partner B retreats emotionally out of fear of conflict and aggression.
- Partner A interprets this retreat as emotional unavailability. This triggers anxiety and fear of isolation, causing them to communicate even more aggressively.
- A’s increased aggression makes B feel more under attack and withdraw further, continuing the pattern.
This pattern causes a breakdown in communication because neither partner feels like they’re able to share their emotions.
Johnson recommends that you and your partner identify a moment when you got stuck in a similar pattern. But, she urges, don’t get caught up in the specific details of your dispute. Instead, take a step back and consider the ways your conflicts fit the “confront and retreat” pattern overall. Identify who usually confronts and who usually retreats, then try to empathize with the emotions that lead to both reactions—wanting connection and feeling attacked.
(Shortform note: Differences in “attachment styles,” or ways of forming emotional bonds, can contribute to the “confront and retreat” pattern Johnson describes. Psychologists Amir Levine and Rachel Heller (Attached) explain that some people have an anxious attachment style, strongly desiring attachment to their romantic partner and fearing anything that could disrupt it. Others have an avoidant attachment style, strongly desiring space and fearing a potential loss of independence in a close relationship. These two attachment styles can easily clash, with the anxious partner frequently reaching out for reassurance, which makes the avoidant partner feel suffocated and want to pull away.)
2) The Blame Game
The second communication pattern Johnson says you may identify in your relationship is “the blame game”: Partners enter a cycle of blaming and accusing each other of various perceived offenses. Johnson explains that people use blame as a way to regain control when they feel hurt and vulnerable. When Partner A blames B for an issue, Partner B feels vulnerable. To regain control, partner B criticizes A, making them feel vulnerable—and restarting the cycle.
This blame game leads to a breakdown in communication—if you feel that anything you say could expose you to a counter-attack, it will feel impossible to share your emotions and feel safe with one another. To stop this cycle, recognize that no one has to be the “bad guy”—the real problem is the pattern itself. Reflect on a time when you got into a fight with your partner and focused more on “winning” (or being in control) than on working through the issue. Acknowledge how that made you view your partner as an adversary.
3) Full Disconnection
According to Johnson, the final pattern occurs when both partners in a relationship completely shut down emotionally. They feel that the love is gone and there’s nothing left to fight for, so they each retreat into a state of emotional numbness and shut off all communication. This makes both partners feel unlovable, further contributing to the feelings of hopelessness that led them to disconnect in the first place.
To unpack your roles in this pattern, speak to your partner about the things they do that make you feel like you need to pull away—and let them talk about the things you do that make them feel the same. Then, acknowledge what this distance has taken from your relationship and recommit to making it work.
| Men vs. Women In The Man’s Guide to Women, authors John Gottman, Julie Schwartz Gottman, Douglas Abrams, and Rachel Carlton Abrams point out that men and women experience different emotions during conflict. They provide two tips to overcome the differences: 1. Regulate Your Emotions: Pay attention to your physiological response during conflicts. Men especially often experience a state of emotional flooding when in conflict, characterized by a need to defend, an emotional shutdown, and an inability to self-soothe. In fact, research shows that men tend to become more overwhelmed than women in conflict situations. If you feel overwhelmed in a conflict, try using self-soothing techniques such as deep breathing or taking a break from the conversation. However, you should communicate your need for this break to your partner to avoid them feeling abandoned or rejected. You can do this by explaining that you’re feeling overwhelmed and making a plan for when you’ll come back together to finish the conversation. 2. Listen and Ask Questions: When a woman brings a problem to a man’s attention, it’s often a bid for connection rather than a desire for immediate problem-solving. She wants to be heard and understood. Rather than viewing conflict as a problem to be solved, you can approach the situation with curiosity. Ask open-ended questions to better understand your partner’s perspective, feelings, concerns, and needs. This active listening approach can go a long way in resolving conflicts and strengthening your connection. |
Step #2: Share Your Vulnerabilities
After you and your partner identify your negative communication patterns and how you fit into them, Johnson advises that you each talk about the emotional vulnerabilities that tend to set these patterns off. Vulnerabilities usually stem from past experiences in important relationships where one of your emotional needs was neglected or dismissed, making you feel sensitive about it in the present. When something your partner does hits on one of these areas of sensitivity or insecurity, you may strongly and automatically react with anger or withdrawal.
For example, Maggie felt ignored by her parents as a child and developed a vulnerability around feeling unheard. So when she feels like her husband Joe isn’t listening to her, she’s likely to get particularly upset and start a fight with him.
Find Your Vulnerabilities
Johnson provides a series of steps you can take to pinpoint your vulnerabilities:
1) Think back on a moment when something small your partner did prompted a sudden, strong negative reaction in you. For example, Maggie got angry and yelled at Joe when he forgot to take out the trash.
2) Note what you thought was going on in that moment, or what you thought your partner was doing. In this situation, Maggie thought Joe was ignoring her on purpose because he didn’t care about her or what she wanted.
3) Using your response to step two, see if you can identify the vulnerability your partner triggered with their behavior. For instance, Maggie’s vulnerability around feeling ignored was triggered by Joe forgetting to do something she asked.
4) Once you have an idea of the vulnerability your partner touched on, think back to your past for a potential source of this vulnerability. Is there someone in your life who regularly made you feel that way? In Maggie’s case, her parents regularly made her feel ignored.
Express Your Vulnerabilities
Once you and your partner have each discovered your vulnerabilities, Johnson suggests you tell each other about them. This is often a difficult process, as it involves sharing some deeply personal feelings. But Johnson emphasizes its benefits, pointing to three in particular:
- Sharing vulnerabilities with your partner can lift a huge weight off your shoulders—emotional distance is a much larger source of stress than dealing with negative emotions together.
- You and your partner will have a better idea of what sets each other off and how to avoid those triggers.
- You’ll be able to approach relationship conflicts from their source—emotional vulnerabilities—instead of making assumptions about each other’s behaviors and getting trapped in a negative communication pattern.
Step #3: Resolve a Conflict Together
Once you have a clearer picture of the negative communication patterns you and your partner fall into and the vulnerabilities that often trigger them, Johnson suggests talking about a recurring conflict in your relationship—something that you’ve argued about multiple times.
This discussion requires you to use the tools you’ve developed so far: You’ll share your feelings and recognize your role in these recurring issues rather than placing all the blame on your partner. By using this new approach—working together to resolve the problems—you and your partner can start to rebuild your emotional safety and improve your connection.
Johnson’s Conflict Resolution Process
Johnson outlines a four-part process for getting to the root of your conflict, recognizing how you both contribute to it, and coming to a resolution.
1) Each partner acknowledges the role they played in the conflict. For example, Tyler recognizes that he started nitpicking Frank about how he was washing dishes. Frank acknowledges that he got defensive and, by telling Tyler to calm down, he brushed Tyler’s concerns aside.
2) Once you’ve discussed the behavior on both sides, explain how you felt during the conflict. For instance, Tyler says he felt underappreciated because he’d expressed before why washing dishes a certain way is important to him—so by ignoring his advice, Frank made it seem like he didn’t care about what matters to Tyler. Frank shares that he also felt underappreciated because he was trying to help, and it seemed like it wasn’t good enough for Tyler.
3) Acknowledge how your actions affected your partner emotionally. In our example, Tyler admits that approaching Frank with a critical, irritated tone when he was doing a chore might make him feel defensive and underappreciated. In turn, Frank acknowledges that by brushing off Tyler’s concerns, he sent the message that he doesn’t care how Tyler feels about it.
4) Once you’ve finished talking through the conflict, reflect on how it feels to work together with your partner on these issues. Find some way to reconnect and restate your commitment to them—even if it’s something as simple as showing appreciation for the conversation you’ve just had. For example, Tyler and Frank agree to do their best to be considerate of each other’s preferences when doing chores. And, because each person knows their partner is trying their best, they’ll refrain from criticizing tasks done the “wrong” way.
If you recognize that you’re returning to a negative communication pattern during this process, pause the conversation instead of getting caught up in the back-and-forth.
Nonviolent Communication’s 5-Step Method
Like Sue Johnson in Hold Me Tight, Marshall B. Rosenberg in Nonviolent Communication lays out his own five-step method for conflict resolution. The key premise of the NVC conflict resolution method is that behind every conflict are unmet needs. Identifying the unmet needs underlying the conflict helps you empathize with the other person because human needs are universal.
Effective conflict resolution requires that people on both sides of the conflict come to appreciate that their own needs and the other person’s needs are equally important. Therefore, the goal of the NVC conflict resolution method is not compromise. In a compromise, neither party’s needs are fully met, and those remaining unmet needs will only cause further problems down the road. The NVC conflict resolution method is about finding a way to resolve conflict in a way that meets the needs of all parties.
The 5 Steps of NVC Conflict Resolution
As you go through the NVC conflict resolution process, the key thing is to focus on giving everyone a chance to express their needs before moving on to solutions. Therefore, the first steps are to understand the unmet needs of all parties involved. In total, there are five steps:
Step 1: Express your own needs.
- Be careful to differentiate between needs and strategies. For example, the statement “I need you to leave me alone for a minute” is a strategy, not a statement of need, because it references someone doing something. A true statement of need would be, “I’m feeling overwhelmed and I need to rest for a minute.” It’s sometimes difficult to tell needs and strategies apart because we’re not used to openly and vulnerably sharing our needs.
Step 2: Identify the other person’s needs (this step can also be done first).
- If the person you’re communicating with isn’t practicing NVC, they might express their needs in more indirect ways. Silence, rejection, and judgmental comments are all veiled statements of need. By recognizing these and translating them, you can keep the conversation flowing nonviolently even if the person you’re talking to isn’t using NVC.
Step 3: Verify that both of you accurately understand each other’s needs by repeating the other person’s needs back to them and asking them to do the same for you.
Step 4: Provide empathy by focusing on their unmet needs.
Step 5: Propose strategies that meet everyone’s needs.
- Propose solutions using present language by requesting what you need in this moment in order to move forward. This gives the other person the chance to either agree or refuse right in the moment. For example, ask, “Would you be willing to tell me if I can borrow your car tomorrow?” instead of “Can I borrow your car tomorrow?”
The Difficult Conversations Method
According to Difficult Conversations, conflict often arises due to differences in perception, in which case, the only truth is that there’s no truth. Both parties have their own “stories” that make perfect sense to them, but the stories are in conflict. When people focus on arguing their own “right” story, they lose the opportunity to explore the other person’s story and understand why they think they’re right.
How Our Stories Get Built
- First, we all take in information. But there’s so much information to take in that we can only take in a fraction of what’s being offered to us in a given moment—what we take in can be vastly different from what another person takes in, even if they’re sitting right next to us.
- Secondly, after we take in what information we can, then it’s up to our brains to interpret what that information means. This is yet another fork in the road where people can diverge.
- Two factors that influence how we interpret information are 1) our past experiences and 2) the rules we learned about how things should or shouldn’t be done.
- People’s actions and why they make sense only make sense in the context of their past. All our strong views are extremely influenced by our past experiences, and what we learned from our family or other early influences.
- Usually, we’re unaware of just how much our past affects our present interpretation and judgment of information.
- Our past experiences lead us to different conclusions that become “rules” to live by—the shoulds or shouldn’ts that get us into trouble in arguments. Difficult conversations occur when two people’s rules clash.
- However, our conclusions and rules usually reflect self-interest: they support our view and interpret the information favorably based on our conclusions.
- Lastly, we draw conclusions about the information we’ve gathered and how we’ve interpreted it, and we make judgments.
Only we have access to our past experiences and information that form our conclusions. We know ourselves better than anyone else knows us. So we should assume that other people know themselves better than we could ever hope to. We shouldn’t assume that we know what others’ stories are or how others’ stories were built. We should aim to understand each other’s stories enough to see how the opposing perspective also makes sense. Understanding alone won’t solve the issue, but it’s the first step toward actually getting to a resolution.
Test Your (Differing) Hypotheses
Once both parties’ stories have been heard, the next step is to come up with some test options that might help solve both sides’ issues.
At this stage, it’s important to identify the underlying assumptions that the differences in perspective stem from. We usually keep these assumptions to ourselves, or we might not even know they’re assumptions. If you can identify what the conflicting assumptions are, then you can come up with a fair test to see whose assumption is more valid, or how much more valid it is.
For example, your neighbor’s dog has been keeping you up with his barking. You talk to your neighbors and discover they just had a baby and have been keeping the dog outside at night because they’re afraid he’ll hurt the baby. It’s not a fair test to propose they get rid of the dog—it only really addresses your issue. It could be a fair test, however, to propose keeping the dog inside for a few nights and shutting the door to the baby’s room, which addresses both parties’ issues.
How to End the Conflict
In Powerful Phrases for Dealing With Difficult People, Renée Evenson provides advice on how to end a conflict, providing two final steps in the conflict resolution process. She states that, after both sides have proposed potential fixes, you must definitively decide how to resolve the issue. Ideally, someone will propose a solution that both parties gladly accept, ending the conflict.
Let’s discuss two important steps of ending a conflict: Confirming a decision and affirming the relationship.
#1: Confirm Your Decision
Evenson suggests that once you’ve identified a solution that makes both of you happy, repeat it to ensure the other person fully understands and accepts it. For instance, say something like, “Great. I’ll stop leaving dishes in the sink if you’ll take the trash out twice a week.” This added clarity helps prevent misunderstandings and future conflicts.
(Shortform note: A common piece of advice in business management is that if you want your employees to remember and act on important information, you should repeat it as much as you can, in different forms. This approach may be helpful after conflict resolution, too: Instead of just recapping the final decision once, find different ways to repeat and reinforce it to make it more likely that the other person will remember to comply. For instance, stick a chore list to the side of the refrigerator.)
#2: Affirm the Relationship
Finally, Evenson recommends ending your conversation by expressing how happy you are that you were able to come to an agreement and how much you appreciate your relationship with the other person. For instance, you might say, “I’m happy we could work this out! I’m excited to see what we’ll be able to accomplish together next.”
This kind of conclusion leaves a lasting positive impression on the other person and makes them feel a stronger bond with you.
Learn More About Conflict Resolution in Relationships
If you found this article interesting and you want to dive even deeper into resolving conflict within relationships, you can read the full guides of the books mentioned here, plus more, below:
