The way I work is systemic, which mostly means I'm not interested in deciding who's right. The relationship is what I'm here for, not either of you against the other. So I won't referee, and I won't quietly hand one of you the win when the other steps out for water. What I'm watching is the move and the counter-move, that small automatic exchange that keeps carrying you back to the start. Once we can both see it on the table, we can interrupt it somewhere it's actually possible to interrupt. Underneath nearly everything on this page is the same thing: the talking and the negotiating that used to work between you have stopped working. That can be learned again. I've watched it happen with couples who were sure it couldn't.
When one of you pursues and the other withdraws
One partner pushes for more. More closeness, more reassurance, some kind of answer tonight. The other one pulls back to get the temperature down. And then the trouble starts, because the pulling back reads as abandonment to the first person, who pushes harder, which lands as pressure on the second, who retreats further, and the two of you can run that loop for years without either of you choosing it. Relationship researchers call it the demand-withdraw pattern, the pursuer and the withdrawer, and it's one of the steadier signs that a couple is genuinely struggling rather than just tired. What's usually sitting underneath is a relationship that's quietly gone out of balance: one person not getting the thing they keep asking for, the other with no idea how to give it without feeling like they vanish in the process. We slow the whole thing down until you can both feel the moment it starts, and then we put the negotiation back together so both sets of needs are actually in the room.
When the scorekeeping turns into contempt
When the goodwill gets low, couples start keeping books on each other. You begin tracking who did what and who still owes whom, and the tally runs in the background of every conversation, and left alone it sets like concrete. John Gottman's research is blunt about where that leads. He names contempt the single most corrosive thing that can get into a marriage: the eye-roll, the little curl of sarcasm, the sense that's crept in that one of you has somehow become the lesser of the two. I want to catch that drift while it's still a drift, because it's much easier to turn around early than late. We name it out loud, plainly, and then we go looking for what the scorekeeping was standing in for, because nobody starts running the numbers on the person they love unless something else stopped getting through a while ago.
Stonewalling and the silent treatment
If conflict frightens you, going silent can feel like the responsible choice. You shut the door, you wall off, you wait for it to pass. The problem is that the silent treatment doesn't actually close a fight. It builds a wall around something that never got handled, and the something just sits there behind the wall, still alive, waiting for next time. So I treat stonewalling as what it really is, which is a way to survive tension rather than a way to end it, and an understandable one. Plenty of people learned it young, in homes where speaking up cost them. Then we work, slowly, on finding the door back into the conversation the silence was keeping you safe from.
When you try to fix it yourselves and it keeps falling apart
Almost everyone tries to sort it out alone first, and there's nothing wrong with that. When it doesn't hold, it's rarely for lack of love. More often it's that one of you keeps agreeing to terms you don't really agree with, just to make the bad feeling stop for the night, and then the resentment quietly reloads and you're back at it by the weekend. A third person in the room who has no stake in who wins can hold that conversation more evenly than two people negotiating from inside their own hurt. Insight isn't really the goal in this room. Doing it differently is. So we run the conversation live, you get it wrong a few times in front of me, which is fine, and we keep reshaping it until it holds up on an ordinary Tuesday with nobody refereeing.
When the fight pulls in friends and family
When you can't find fair ground as a couple, it gets very tempting to call in support. A friend, a sibling, your mother, whoever will reliably take your side. The catch is that they were never neutral and were never going to be. They only ever hear your version, told by you, on a bad night, and leaning on them tends to wear those relationships thin over time while the actual decision between you and your partner gets no closer. I'm the one person in your life who's genuinely paid to stay out of it. That's worth more than it sounds.
When the fight about the dishes isn't about the dishes
The argument over the dishwasher is hardly ever really about the dishwasher. When something larger has gone unsaid for too long, and saying it straight feels too exposing to risk, it has a way of leaking out sideways through the small daily stuff. Here are the ones couples name to me most:
- the chores fight, the dishes and the laundry and whose turn it really was
- the same argument for the thirtieth time, almost word for word
- the fight that flares over something tiny on a perfectly normal evening
- the long silence after, where nobody quite remembers what started it
The quiet aim of these fights is usually to make the other person feel the same disturbance you've been carrying around by yourself. So we get underneath the proxy and back to the real sentence, the one that's been waiting a long time to get said out loud, often longer than either of you realized.
Around session ten, by the way, we stop and look at it honestly together. Is this helping. Is something actually shifting between you. If it isn't, I'd rather say so and talk about what would. Book a free 20-minute call.