It’s still October, and posts are free. This one is free almost entirely. I’ve included a little travel story from my hiking adventure in the mountains around Melnik, Bulgaria, and pictures from this striking region below the paywall for my paid subscribers.
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Before you say, “Yes, Captain Obvious,” look at your life for examples of challenges you’ve been trying to solve in your relationships for a long time without success. We all have them, and this is why.
As the saying goes: “Your energy flows where your attention goes.” So clearly, you need to be precise and judicious about where you place your attention if you don’t want to waste your energy. When it comes to relationship conflicts and challenges, we often focus on the wrong thing, so we naturally waste our energy and never get the results we want.
(I will be talking about couples here, but I want you to understand that these same mechanics apply 100% to you personally and all your unsolvables, even if you’re single and what you are struggling with has nothing to do with another person.)
Imagine a couple that fights over the same thing over and over. Let’s call them Don and Dawn. Don wakes up at dawn every day, turns all the lights on, turns on the news, and goes about getting ready for his day. Meanwhile, Dawn still has two more hours before she needs to get up. For the life of her, she doesn’t understand why Don wakes Dawn up at dawn. They’ve had a thousand conversations about it. The hair on the back of her neck stands up as soon as his alarm goes off. She literally wants to kill him every morning.
No matter how many times she tells him to be considerate and quiet, and no matter how many times he’s promised to be so, it only takes a few days before it’s back to the same routine. He tells her to cover up, use earplugs, and not pay any attention to him if she wants to sleep in. He says his routine helps him get going and wakes his brain up. He also tells her that if she gets up with him, they can spend a little more time together in the morning, so why waste it in bed while complaining that they don’t see each other much?
She even tried to sleep on the couch to avoid his morning bedroom noise, but it didn’t help her back, and did not help her avoid The News Hour on TV. Meanwhile, all other serious arguments somehow end up in a discussion about their ongoing morning contention.
One way they explain the situation is: “We fight because we want different things.” It is a true but shallow explanation that feels like understanding the problem. As with all surface-level, low-hanging fruit explanations, the investigation ends. Most people, in most situations, stop at the first thing they can tell themselves about a difficulty they struggle with. And most of the time, they focus on a familiar problem rather than the real problem.
Unfortunately, for Don and Dawn, this level of explanation raises the question of who will get their way. There will be one winner and one loser, and clearly they are not prepared to end it at that. So, they continue the power struggle. The resentments grow. They’ve locked themselves into a two-losers situation.
They focus on minimizing friction between them, managing morning routines, avoiding each other, and avoiding another fight before 8 am.
In relationships, the bias is to A) assume the other person sees and feels things the way we do, and B) assume the only way to fix a situation is to keep working on ourselves. A) means that if you like jalapeño ice cream, surely the other person feels the same about jalapeño ice cream. B) means that you want to attribute all relationship problems to your shortcomings and accept full responsibility for fixing everything all the time. You can like jalapeño ice cream and still have things to work on yourself, but that’s not the whole story, and it’s definitely not the only story.
Basically, these two assumptions are limiting your perception and options. Most importantly, they can leave you feeling absolutely stuck.
How does this show up in life and relationship dynamics
Living with a narcissistic person:
You work on your communication for years while the real problem is someone else’s missing empathy. Better words can’t fix what no one is there to hear.
The marriage with perpetual imbalance:
She spends years “working on the marriage” when the real problem could be that her partner is never going to meet her effort.
Waiting for an apology:
You think you need closure and will get it if you only, finally, get an apology. The real problem might be that you’ve outsourced your healing to someone else’s mouth.
The “betraying” friend:
You feel betrayed and keep reaching out to try to fix it. The real problem might be that the other person, or both of you, have drifted apart but still assume that loyalty is expected. Did the friendship change? Did you, did they?
The person who feels behind:
They think they wasted years and made mistakes. The real problem might be that they won’t name what they actually want now. You can’t fix the past. You can only stop using it as an excuse for not making the right decisions now to gain ground.
From working with people, I’ve seen how much effort they put into what they want to say vs. what they actually want to get. They rehearse conversations in their minds before they even consider what they actually want. The problem with that is that your partner may hear you but still not know what you really want, and no matter how many adjustments they make, even if they follow your words to a T, you will still feel unsatisfied and triggered. The fights will still happen. The other person will get defensive.
When people keep fighting over the same things, they turn the thing into a parking space for their resentment. The original complaint may be perfectly legitimate. Dawn wants to sleep without being woken up by lights and the news. That doesn’t require digging into her psyche. Don could turn on fewer lights and use headphones.
But after a thousand conversations and a thousand broken promises, the lights carry more than light. To Dawn, they’ve become another reminder that Don gets to decide what’s reasonable, and she gets to adjust. Every morning, she wakes up to the same message: what she needs matters less than what he wants.
Don, meanwhile, keeps bringing up how little time they spend together. Is he asking for company? Does he resent her working late? Does he think getting up early is somehow better than sleeping later? They haven’t explored any of that. He tells her to get up. She tells him to be quiet. They get nowhere.
They’ve never asked each other anything deeper about the situation. The morning routine needs fixing. So does whatever keeps turning a practical request into a contest over whose way of living should count.
They can do specific things to figure out what they are really fighting about so they have a chance to solve it.
How to solve the fight
Pay attention to what triggers you. Eventually, you will notice that similar things trigger you similarly. But you need to pay attention to yourself and catch it in the moment. If you wait to think about it later, all you will remember is that you felt upset. You need to remember the specific triggers: words, actions, situations, tone, etc. Just the facts.
Notice what you tell yourself about the situation. You will make some meaning out of it. The meaning will be the surface-level explanation, something familiar, your habitual way of explaining things to yourself.
Notice what you did next. Based on what you told yourself about the situation, you acted in some way. You likely have a well-established chain of reactions, so this might be what you always do in these situations.
Observe yourself for a few days or weeks, so you have a well-documented dataset. No excuses. No explanations. Just facts, your interpretation of the facts, and your actions as a result of your interpretations.
Look for alternative explanations. Ask yourself if there is another way to interpret the facts you experienced. What could be other perspectives? Whenever something happens, or someone does something, and you react, you’re also making assumptions about why it is happening to you. Is your anxiety a psychological problem or a medical problem, or a side effect of a medication? Is your partner careless or overworked, overwhelmed? Is your co-worker constantly late because she’s lazy and doesn’t care, or is a single mom having to take three kids to three different schools every morning and can’t afford a car so she has to take the bus?
Other possible explanations could untether you from your entrenched, habitual patterns of interpretation and reaction.
Study the bright spots. Occasionally, things go better than usual and sometimes even better than expected. What happened this time that didn’t happen the other 100 times before? What made it different? These exceptions are good clues for you to ponder.
Going back to Don and Dawn at dawn. Suppose they pay attention for a week.
Don notices that he gets especially irritated on mornings after they’ve barely seen each other the night before. He tells himself she always has time for everything except him. Then he turns her sleeping into evidence that she doesn’t care. When he finally asks whether she misses spending time together, he discovers that she does. Being dragged out of bed two hours early just isn’t her preferred way of doing it or the preferred hour.
Dawn notices that she’s already preparing her argument before his alarm goes off. She expects another broken promise. When he tells her to use earplugs, she hears, “Your problem. You deal with it.” She explains that meaning to him, but she also needs uninterrupted sleep so she can function.
Now they have two problems they can actually work on. They need time together that works for both of them. And Don needs to stop waking Dawn up. So, how about she agrees on a couple of evenings together? He agrees to get ready with a small light and listen to the news through headphones. Then they see what happens.
Understanding what’s underneath the fight gives them a better place to start. What they do next tells them whether they’re getting anywhere. The important discovery may be that a new arrangement works, or that understanding each other hasn’t made them willing to change.
Below, for paid subscribers: my hike in the mountains around Melnik, and a bit of Bulgarian lore and photos. Paid subscribers also get the voiceover of every post and all Perks free.
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