By Lissa Carter, LCMHCS
My client had ‘come in hot’ (her words). She put her tea down forcefully on the table and leaned forward, her eyes expressive.
“Want to know why I’m late today? I was sitting out there in the car, in an argument, again, and to be honest I don’t even know what we were arguing about. If I were with the right person, it wouldn’t be like this—fights, misunderstandings, shutdowns, all the time. It shouldn’t be like this, right? Two fights before noon? It just really, really shouldn’t be this hard.”
I hesitated a moment and she started laughing. We’d been working together a long time, and she could read me pretty well. “What are you about to say?” she asked. “I’m not going to like it, am I?”
“Yeah, I think you’re not going to like it,” I said. “But I back what I am about to say with the full weight of my education and the confidence of years of counseling experience.”
“All right,” she said, sighing. “Sock it to me.”
I leaned forward.
“It depends.”
When I was training as a counselor, I was pretty sure my professors had a manual of how to correctly practice therapy that they were purposefully withholding because they thought the Socratic method would be a more effective teaching tool than just handing us the answers outright.
Now I find myself in the position of being the one who can’t for the life of me give a clear yes or no answer. The world of counseling, it turns out, is rife with maddening ambiguity. Because humans are complex. And the only thing more complex than a human is two humans trying to relate to each other.
“You’re right,” she said, settling back into the couch and crossing her arms. “I don’t like it. What a cop out.”
“Honestly, I would feel the same way if I were sitting where you are. But will you give a moment to redeem myself?”
As I said, this client knows me pretty well, and she knows all my tricks. She reached into the drawer where I keep my fidgets and pulled out my sand timer, which she dramatically flipped on the table between us.
“You have two minutes,” she said, and resumed her crossed-arm position.
Gauntlet accepted. I now present to you my two-minute condensed complexity-of-relationships spiel, as elicited by my wonderful, saucy, take-no-prisoners client.
Here goes.
Imagine that you could design the perfect little hermit house for yourself. It has everything you need to be wonderfully comfortable—your favorite books, games, foods, your favorite landscape surrounding you, access to all of the activities that bring you alive. You have everything you could possibly need or want.
Imagine yourself, now, after ten years of that life. I imagine you are pretty content. I imagine you have lived a relatively conflict-free life in which you could do all of the things (go to bed when you want, get up when you want, eat when and what you want, flow with your own rhythms and timing) that get logjammed when you have to navigate other people.
Now ask yourself: am I basically the same person I was ten years ago? Or have I grown?
When I do this little thought experiment, I have to admit to myself—dedicated introvert that I am—that I would not have grown much. I would have read A LOT and might be more knowledgeable on certain (predictable) topics. But I wouldn’t have grown. I would have been too comfortable to necessitate much growing. So—maybe—not all conflict is bad.
IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION: I am not in any way arguing that people who live alone aren’t constantly growing and changing. It’s not the alone part that causes the lack of growth. This thought experiment is about dwelling in a state of comfort and content, everything just as you like it, without any challenge. I have friends who live alone and are some of the most evolved people I know, because they’ve designed their lives to challenge them regularly.
Let me add as well that I am not arguing against the joys of long periods of contentment and calm! These are vital. As with everything else in counseling, it’s that maddening, maddening middle ground that we are going for. Enough safety and comfort to be well-cared for and rested, enough challenge to be activated and growing.
For example, we could do this the other way—if you are in a high-conflict relationship, you might imagine ten years alone and ten years with the person you are currently with—which version of you do you like better, ten years later?
The point I am trying to make is not that alone is bad and relationship is good. It’s that you can’t judge the ‘good’ness of a relationship by how easy it is. Not all conflict is bad. And all relationships, inevitably, contain conflict.
Most humans, when offered the chance to opt out of growth, will take that option every time. Change is hard and dangerous and we prefer homeostasis. So we tend, when left to our own devices, not to change. Even when we cognitively believe that we really value feedback, flexibility, and change--we’re up against our organismic design. Our default wiring is to prefer ease to challenge in most scenarios. But this doesn’t always lead to the best outcomes.
Enter: THE HUMAN RELATIONSHIP.
(To be fully transparent, the little sand timer had run out by now, but I was on a roll and my client kindly allowed me to continue speaking.)
Humans generate friction and drag on other humans. They like different music than you do and they put the wrong amount of spice in their food and they get up at categorically the worst time of day and they seem to deliberately misunderstand what you mean and they eat the last egg and put the empty egg carton back into the fridge.
And, as we balance our inner world with their inner worlds, as we learn to navigate our differences and our frictions by interacting with others, we will be challenged and changed. And it will often feel awful, because we would prefer the ease of homeostasis.
Now here’s the “it depends” part.
If, in the friction and drag of your relationship (and please be aware that I am not talking about the glorious, luminous limerence phase in which your brain chemistry medicates you to not notice the drag, and which does eventually abate no matter how right your person is) the misunderstandings and terrible fights*** don’t FEEL good but over time seem to be trending you upward into a kinder, more resourceful, more intelligent communicator who is finding ways of getting closer and closer to your own values—then this relationship is the generative kind of hard. You might still want to take the occasional well-deserved month in your hermitage, and you might benefit by some couples counseling or communication training to lessen the wear-and-tear of your fights, but overall, the pain of your arguments is not evidence that you are with the wrong person.
If, in the friction and drag of your relationship, the misunderstandings and terrible fights*** are making you feel less and less resourceful as a person, or eroding your (or your partner’s) confidence, or you are drifting farther away from your values and don’t like the person you are turning into—this conflict is damaging. Take a really thoughtful look at the way you are showing up in your relationship and the way your partner is showing up, think about what needs to change, and get the support you need to do it. Whether you end the relationship or choose to stay and make supported shifts in the way you interact, something does need to change.
***I’m talking about misunderstandings, here, not physical or psychological violence. If you are experiencing either, please get support—here’s a list of resources to explore. If you are having trouble discerning whether what is happening in your relationship is physical or psychological abuse, please talk to someone—one of the dynamics of abuse is that it messes with our ability to think clearly. Here’s a post on how to find a counselor.
Notice that there is not an option three in which the relationship is not hard.
Conflict in relationship is inevitable. I can say this with relative confidence because I have lived alone in the woods for long stretches of time and had difficulty getting along with myself. Additionally, I have a partner who has been scientifically rated by objective bystanders to be the most understanding human on the planet, and I’ve found ways to quarrel and suffer even so.
If you find that there is no conflict in your relationship, I would hazard to guess that one of four things is happening.
1) You may be collapsing your reality to avoid conflict with your partner, which is not healthy for you.
2) Your partner may be collapsing their reality to avoid conflict with you, which is not healthy for them.
3) You may be in a position where you and your partner are not communicating much or in depth, in which case you are paying for low conflict with low intimacy.
4) You are the enlightened being we are waiting for. Please stop reading this blog and run for office immediately.
So –respectfully—
There is no right person with whom a truly intimate relationship will not be difficult.
But it’s important that relationship is difficult in the right ways.
“Okay,” said my client. “I think I get it. I’ll give you the ‘it depends’ this time but you are running up against your monthly limit of therapyspeak.”
“Fair.”
“But are you saying I should just accept all this constant fighting?”
“Not at all. I’m saying don’t be too quick to decide you’re with the wrong person just because there’s conflict. It’s still entirely possible you’re with the wrong person. But you’re using the wrong criterion.”
“So how do I know if we should stay together?”
“You’re the only one who can make that call. But, if you’re game, bring me two lists next week: things you love about your partner and your relationship, and things that are completely not working. And write up one of your arguments so I can see what it’s like. We’ll go from there.”
“And what’s YOUR homework?”
Which is how this blog post came to be.
Thank you to my client for the willingness to share this story. Details have been changed to protect privacy. (But that thing with the sandtimer absolutely happened. Well played.)
If you like to learn through stories, you might appreciate the depth storytelling events I’m offering this year. The next one is April 30th, 2024, and you can attend online (from anywhere in the world) or in person ( in Western NC). Details below.
Music, poetry, conversation, community, and story