SOS I Keep Arguing with My Partner

28:35Even though men can be combative and they can scream, it is extremely uncomfortable for them. And for men to be able to, a man to be able to say to a woman, I'm feeling flooded right now, I need a timeout, but please, please add and I'll come back. That's the problem. People leave. They just need to know you're going to come back. That's all. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I've been in arguments before where the person storms out and you're just like, it doesn't feel loving and it doesn't feel like a solution. But if someone said, and I have one of your cards here, and it's like, I'm frankly confused about what's going on between us right now.

29:14And I just need a little time to sort this out. Is that okay with you? It's allowing people to know that you aren't oblivious to the fact that they have feelings and that they want to have this conversation as well, but you're also respecting the relationship. And it's actually a respectful thing to say, like, I'm not my best version right now. We're not going to get somewhere because I'm going to take accountability that, like, I can't, something is not working for me where I'm having a hard time. Can you just give me some time? I don't think that's negative at all. I think that's a healthy version.

29:50Well, I love that you chose that card. I mean, what you're describing is really what I've been pointing to. The card holds two realities. It holds my reality. It's your reality. I'm being respectful. Is that okay with you? It's holding what I would call a relational vibe. from my own experience in therapy i've learned the power of taking responsibility in a situation and saying sorry but why don't the sorries and apologies always land like what are people getting wrong when they're just saying sorry oh i love i love that you're asking me that question it's one of my favorite topics so let everybody listen to this we're going to imagine that right now, unbelievably, Alex Cooper has hurt my feelings.

30:37Okay. And I'm going to respond to Alex in two different ways. And we're going to see the difference and Alex will see the difference. Alex, I am so sorry. I am so sorry that I hurt you. Did I say you hurt me? Well, that I hurt you. And I'm going to be apologizing right now. I am so sorry that I hurt you. I, I wish I hadn't done that. Okay. That's the, I'm sorry. And that's the apology. And then we have this one. I am so sorry I hurt you. I can understand why you'd want to get away from me. What am I doing in that second one that makes it more appealing? I'm doing, I've been talking about, I'm entering your reality.

31:21And so what happens is who hasn't heard? I said, I'm sorry. What else do you want from me? I apologize. And you feel guilty because the person did apologize, but something still isn't feeling good. Why? Because you're not just wanting the apology. You're not needing that person to say, I'm a bad person who did a bad thing. What you're actually wanting is for somebody to care to enter your world and feel what it's like. I told you what I do, how I often begin a couple session. I'm going to tell you how I often begin any session, an individual session, very quickly. And everybody listening to this, you can do this.

31:58Imagine you're 10 years old, you're in fifth grade and somebody who you really like, the same sex kid having a birthday party you weren't invited to and you're crushed. Do you go to your mother and tell your mother you're crushed? That already can tell you light years if you wouldn't have gone to your mother. Most people would have gone to their mother. Not all boys, but most girls would. Think about what your mother would say. You go, mommy, I'm so upset. Brittany was having a birthday party and I thought we were close and she invited the other kids and she didn't invite me. Almost universally, what parents will do, a parent might say, oh, honey, I'm sorry.

32:38Or even that that might hurt. But what most parents do immediately is they want you to feel better. So they recontextualize it. There'll be other parties. Maybe she could only invite six kids. I knew she wasn't a nice kid. I never liked her mother. That was my mother. the apple doesn't fall apart from the tree. That would be, that's where this comes from. But the parent, what is the parent doing? The parent is trying to make the child not feel what she's feeling. It is a very rare parent who does what we're all craving, which is that must really hurt. I know how important to you she was. That must have been confusing and embarrassing or whatever, to be with the child in the misery rather than want the child to see it differently.

33:29And again, I want to be a spokesperson for people not turning away from childhood wounding because their families seem more or less normal. Unfortunately, this is the innocence of the wounding. A mother who says, oh, honey, I feel badly. Let's go to the movies. That is not a toxic mother. But it's still help. It's still creating a child who doesn't know that someone really entering her reality is what's going to hit the mark. So then you grow up and your partner just says, I'm sorry. And you don't have the ground inside of you because of your childhood programming to say, I just need you to say to me, don't even mean it, but just say to me, I can see what you wanted to get away from.

34:15You don't even know you're allowed. Right. It's like the validation of whether whatever the situation was, whether it was rejection, whether it was something they said was hurtful, whether it again, abandonment or embarrassment or shame or whatever it is. It's like allowing your partner when you feel like you've hurt them by just saying you're sorry, half the time it's like, well, what are you sorry for? And a lot of times people are like, I don't know, but I know I'm supposed to say this. When really, if you have a partner that can be thoughtful, it's like, I'm really sorry. I know I hurt your feelings and I feel awful about it.

34:56And I understand why you then wanted to get away from me. Yes. And now I'm coming to you and I want you to know that like, I really am sorry that I did that. Yeah. Do you feel better, Nancy? I do. I do. We can keep going with the interview. You're not going to cancel out because I heard you're going to. But if I said, sorry, Nancy, get over it. Right. Which is what most people, which is what most people, not most people, what a lot of people do. People do. Really a lot of the time. What if someone feels like the norm in their relationship is that they are always the one who apologizes first in order to fuse the arguments?

35:36Like, how does someone go about shifting this dynamic? Oh, it's very common, actually. It's very common. If I were that person, the immediate apologizer, I might do this. And again, I'm being a little strategic, I must admit, but we're wanting to create some change. I might say to somebody, the next time this happens, I said, I noticed something. I was just about to start to be conciliatory. I can't stand the distance between us. And I'm aware I've done this so often. It kind of makes me feel I'm in a one down position. So I just want to share with you right now, a part of me can't stand that we're so far apart, but it's starting to feel a little humiliating that I'm the one who always initiated.

36:25It would make me feel cared for if I felt you were caring for the relationship. Nancy, you're good. You're like, I know. Oh, wow. Well, I want to say something to you about me being good. First of all, I want, I can't believe I'm saying this properly. My ex-husband, with whom I'm on friendly terms, is a psychiatrist. And he tells me that I am always supposed to tell people this. sometimes Nancy is brilliant and sometimes she's just having a notion. Okay. Okay. So I want to give you the warning bottle, the warning label. Okay. But the other thing that I want to say about me being good is when I was a teenager and you've heard enough, you know, about my, my family, I would watch couples that I thought were normal, like the cool couples.

37:19And I would actually have the thought, how do they know what to say to each other? Is there a book somewhere? I had no idea. So I had a, to the degree that I am good, it's simply like anyone else, Alex, I had to learn it. Yeah. There's a lot of work that goes into it. Right. I had to learn it. I knew I was in, I knew I was in trouble. No, and I appreciate you sharing that. That's similar. It's, it's interesting hearing your experience. It's very similar to the way that my mother describes her upbringing. And it's like almost exactly the same with her mother and her father. And, and it, and it, then everyone always looks at my mom now and is like, how does she know all this?

38:02And my mom's like a lot of work. Like I did a lot of therapy and a lot of, you know, and I wasn't always perfect, but it is nice now though, obviously that you're able to share this like wisdom with, you know, the younger generation, because it is like you now do see it more clearly. So I appreciate you. You know, I would like to share something with you along these lines, how my growth process got started, because I'll be brief. This is a second career for me. I used to be a journalist. And I was in what I wouldn't have known at the time was in a me too situation. I was 21 involved with a 50 year old well-known writer and he was going to further my career.

38:50He was a New York writer. It was all very exciting. We would go to showings, but it was in this day and age, it would have been a me too situation. And surprise of all surprises, he was a critic. he began being abusive with me he was quite abusive and that's what got me into therapy in fact he hit me once because I disagreed with a review and I said what's a nice girl like me doing with in a situation like this so I started therapy and this may sound a little controversial maybe not when it was pointed out to me why I would be in such an abusive relationship I had a mother who was a non-stop critic and a father who never talked to me so a little girl looking for a father figure.

39:34And when I realized it was abusive, I actually wanted to confront him, report him, which eventually I did confront him. But I want to tell you what my therapist told me and what my therapist did with me. And I, I had unwittingly shared something that was a little embarrassing that I loved. I'm even a little embarrassed now telling you. I loved elevator music. You know, the kind of music people roll their eyes like Muzak. It's like, it's just like homogenized, uninjured. It was soothing for me. I grew up with chaos. Now I can tell people I like new age music, but we didn't have new age music then.

40:14And this is what my therapist said. Someday you will confront him, but first you need a self. And he told me my first therapeutic therapeutic assignment was to tell three people who I thought would judge me, who had defined musical tastes, that I loved elevator music. Are you ready? The rock critic of the biggest newspaper in Philadelphia, a cellist in a jazz quartet, and somebody in my gang who saw herself as the second coming of Joni Mitchell. Three people who were really into music. I had to tell them I loved elevator music. I wanted to run out of the office and I thought he was crazy. By the way, I did it with all three of them.

40:57None of them said to me, oh, Nancy, we so admire your transparency. They all looked at me like I had two heads. But he said something to me that was profound. And I say this to anybody who might be in a similar situation. He said, if you had more self-love and you accepted yourself more, you wouldn't have been a match for this man. What I first needed to be able to do was to love all parts of me. That was my first therapeutic assignment. And then when I confronted him, which I did, to be able to say he took advantage of it was a few years later that, you know, certain ways I felt used. It wasn't confronting him.

41:40It was just sharing with him what my truth was because it wasn't a battle because there was more Nancy in the soup. Wow. I really appreciate you sharing that because it's so interesting to hear, like, I'm sure people that maybe aren't in therapy are like, wait, like you had to go and talk about music. How does that have to do with like a me too situation? But it's like finding it within yourself of like, who gives a fuck what anyone thinks about your taste in music if you like it. But again, we now know your taste in music because of the chaotic household you were brought up into. And so then as you do work, not to say that you couldn't love elevator music when you were all, you know, whole and in therapy, but you may be interested in a couple more genres as you do the work on yourself because it won't be so triggering.

42:28But again, it's like that step towards loving yourself and accepting yourself. Then you're able to walk into a room to someone that was essentially abusing their power over you and you were able to advocate for yourself in a different way than maybe had you had. Thank you for appreciating that. There are a lot of people who are standing up for themselves in a way that's not coming from their strength. It's coming from weakness or self-doubt or even self-hatred that they are avoiding. I think it's also something to be said, especially for women of like, you are not less than or weak if you need to take time in order to like confront something in your life it still can be so powerful if it takes you five years 10 years 20 years down the line like you're not stronger if you face it head on in that very moment or the next day like make sure you're good with yourself before you move forward with something that could potentially be very triggering to you and also make sure you're good with yourself because you'll feel that much better about it when you have the knowledge that like, oh, I can do this and I'm going to be okay no matter what that person's reaction because I'm good with myself.

43:41So I think sometimes people get shame of like, well, why are you bringing it up 10 years later? Because I need the time. I wasn't able to do it then. I love, Alex, I love what you're saying. Besides the fact that I feel understood right now, I love what you're saying and you're appreciating why I would even think to share that story with you. I feel, I feel very lucky that that's what he had me do because it put me, it put me very much on the path of self-acceptance. And when you're really, really accepting yourself, you don't have to be strident. Yeah. And it does go back to what we're talking about today.

44:19Again, it's like everyone listening, like you're in these relationships and, and if you're having a hard time and you're in these fights with your partner and you feel like you quite literally are like disintegrating in moments because you don't know how to act you don't know what to say you don't know how to go about it you feel stuck you feel like the same issue keeps coming up a lot of times not to say that your partner is not doing something wrong but a lot of the times a lot of this can be solved by you just looking inward and really trying to connect the dots for yourself and then all of a sudden you're going to be able to be a different better person in that relationship because you're going to be mature enough to own something that you did.

44:57And then you could actually in a great way be the person that's the catalyst towards a healthier relationship. Because if your partner sees you constantly owning things, naturally, as human beings, they're going to try to replicate what you're doing, because they're going to feel like, wow, you're being so vulnerable, you're connecting this to your childhood or to an insecurity or whatever it is. Now I want to share. And so I really appreciate you sharing that, because it is very intertwined into the conversation we're having today. And I think a lot of women, And unfortunately, but fortunately, you being here, like probably can relate to that situation, Nancy, and are going to be like, well, shit, like I've got work to do.

45:34But it's exciting to know what's on the other side, which is clarity and a voice for yourself. I love you're making a big deal about it because it isn't an easy thing to confront an abuser. But sometimes it's harder to tell somebody something you feel embarrassed about. Such a great point. when you're in dynamics in relationships and you get to this place where you're like you have it's a post argument standstill let's say I'm sure we have all been there where both sides have said sorry everything is technically fine but you're sitting on opposite sides of the couch not really speaking it's like oh we got over it like we we talked it through we're fine How do you regain intimacy and closeness after an argument that clearly doesn't feel resolved?

46:31That is so human. We've all been there. That is so human. You know, one of the things I say about my book and my thinking is how easy it is to go from cozy to crazy. Like you can be in the most loving space. with someone, I promise you, I'm going to address your point. You can be in the most loving space with someone and they just look at their cell phone for like a nanosecond. And the evening is ruined. I mean, it's the unbelievable, the speed, it's the speed, Alex, from which we go from cozy to crazy, or the person is telling a story and they've gotten a detail wrong. and every, okay, it takes so long to go back from crazy to cozy.

47:20And some of that is really because our fight or flight response has gotten activated. And so I am a big believer that the fastest way to get where we want to be is to also be where they are. So I might say to a partner, I've certainly been in the situation and you can see I have a number of tricks on my sleeve. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I can't tell you I immediately have the trick from going from crazy to cozy. I just say I'm not completely back yet. I would say maybe 71%. And then he says, I'm back maybe 72%. And you join with each other around your not being back so that you just be with what is.

48:03We just, where I might say to my partner, we're not back yet. We got pretty activated. My nervous system has not calmed down. Is there something I could say to you right now that would make you feel cared for? What could I say right now that could be soothing to you? What could I say right now? I love that because most of the time there's something either A, lingering, that you can just speak up and it's like, well, I guess I'm just having a hard time because this keeps happening and you keep doing this one thing that's hurting me and I'm trying to understand like how is this like there's going to be something that you're holding on to that then maybe and now that it's more settled and you're now more you're in a better place where you're both kind of not activated that then you're maybe your partner then can really say, I hear you.

49:01And I'm really going to be more conscious of when it can get to that place that I'm going to make an effort. And then maybe they because it's like, almost like I find when you're post fight, you're sitting on opposite sides of the couch, and it's awkward, you then both want to fix it. But that's also kind of a beautiful place where weirdly, the conversation can become what you wish the initial conversation was. Yes. Where you're both more relaxed. You're both willing to be like, okay, how are we going to sit here all night and do this? Like, let's connect. Let's find our way back. Those are kind of the most beautiful moments.

49:41But I agree. You have to make an effort to say, I don't feel like I'm fully back. Right. I am not a believer. I'm probably there. I know there are exceptions to what I'm going to say. I'm not a big believer in fake it until you can make it. Sometimes, but in general, it's not a great policy. So simply to be able for both of you to bond. I remember once my partner said to me, I know you hope I'll never do this again. I know that in itself was coming. I know you hope I will never do this again. I cannot promise that. I'm sure I will do it again, but I'm trying. And that was coming for me. It was real.

50:22him saying I will never do this again wasn't as common take it in him saying I will never do this again which is really about see me in a good light see me in a good light right I will never do it again wasn't as common as I probably will do it again but I want you to know I want to get better at this wow yeah it's just like meeting your partner and again that does again validate Like they know that you're stressed, that they're going to do it again. And we're human. We can't ever make promises that we won't do something again. That is a behavioral thing that's been kind of ingrained in the relationship.

51:01But you can tell them you're going to try your damn hardest to make sure and to not try to hurt your partner again. That feels pretty good. I like that one. What if someone is listening, Nancy, and is thinking, this all sounds great, But my partner and I never, ever, ever fight. Is that at all a red flag for you? It is. It is. And I must admit it's a prejudice. And I am sure there are some very, very evolved something couples. I don't buy it because what that says to me, that that's a couple that's actually at some level terrified of difference. I would say in general, that is a couple where they're living in a sense of fusion, emotional fusion, where we have to be aligned.

51:54I'm sure there's some exceptions. I just have never seen them. Yeah. No, I agree. I feel like naturally as human beings, we're individuals. Even as you can be the most in love and a great partnership, like as human beings, we have just different needs and wants and interests and reactions and emotions and traumas and history. So it's like conflict is normal and it is natural. Actually, you're making me think of something about it. What a relationship is, is a container to be known. and if we're not having any conflict it's not important enough for me that you know me and it's not important enough to you to be known and that that makes me nervous it's a great point yeah it's like it to not be known it's like why aren't you because this if as you grow and change as human beings especially in a partnership you're going to have to adjust because one person may be growing at a different rate than the other one person may be seeing things about their past and their childhood that they're working on that the other didn't recognize.

52:56And so there's like a constant push and pull that's happening where naturally as human beings, we're trying to fuse our lives together, but it never should actually be fully fused because the beautiful part of a partnership is it's a partnership where there's two people that are complete individuals that come together and bring things different to the table. Naturally, there should be conflict in moments. I guess my next question, though, is when it comes to fighting, I know there's no number that you can give, but like, how can a couple evaluate if the number of arguments they get into is unhealthy?

53:32I would have to say some of the happiest couples I know, myself from time to time, there's conflict. This is the question, not how much conflict, but how much goodwill and positive interactions do you have? So that it's a, it's much more of a ratio. It's not how much conflict is there five or six times as many interactions where you just crack up or you make kind of shared eye contact over some private language or some private symbol or moments of intimacy. And if you have that, the conflict is not so scary. I really appreciate you coming on today I feel like I could have gone for like a whole nother hour two hours because and I would love to have you back on I think you obviously have such a great way of talking about relationships with yourself with a partner and I think that a lot of times breaking down specific instances like we did today sometimes you're like oh my god where are we going with this?

54:36But it really is so ingestible for someone listening, even the horns coming out of your head, Nancy, like it now all makes sense of trying to be a better person for yourself and a better partner in your relationship starts with you taking ownership. And that also then forces you to look inward of like, why are you the way you are? What happened in your childhood. And that is a really big path to begin on. If people are not in therapy, like I understand why people are hesitant to begin opening that Pandora's box of what happened when you were younger? Why are these your triggers? But what I can say, and what is is helpful, what we talked about today is, it's the beginning of you taking ownership and not being fully affected by just what your parents did when you were younger, you can now have autonomy over your life the minute you start to recognize.

55:31So I can't thank you enough for coming on. This was like such a beautiful, great conversation that I think is gonna help. No, I totally enjoyed it. One of the things I was a little nervous about in the spirit of vulnerability, you know, we're different generations. You're very hip. I'm a recovery bookworm. I was worried I would sound like Eleanor Roosevelt, but I don't think. no that's what I was worried about oh my gosh Nancy that makes me like I think that's also the beauty of what probably I mean you do and I do like in different capacities like it makes us better people when we meet people that maybe we don't know we're going to be like minded or similar or we're going to be a little insecure like in my point of view I was nervous because I know how much of an intellectual and how smart you are and how much you have done in this field.

56:24And I'm just beginning and trying to keep up. So like, I appreciate you giving me the space to have a conversation where like - Oh, thank you. It would be a pleasure. It would be, it was just lovely talking to you. I feel really received and I look forward to take two. Yes, we should. Maybe we can be in touch again and we can come up with even just like more specifics. Even if I tell my fans to write in specific things they're going through with their partner, and we could just come back on and do another episode to just keep the conversation going. Yeah, I have an idea about it. I'll let you know.

57:00Oh, great. Okay. Nancy, thank you so much. You are so welcome.

57:17Thank you.