My wife and I consider ourselves very fortunate. Since 1997, we’ve spent one week each year in New York, in “The City.” Kitty-corner to Carnegie Hall, two blocks from Central Park, we “encamp” at the Manhattan Club, a stone’s throw from the marquee glow of Broadway’s theatre district.
Within walking distance, an array of ever-alluring restaurants, museums, and art galleries beckon us. But we’re especially drawn to the plays on Broadway, often hungrily devouring two a day: an afternoon matinee, topped off with an evening performance. For us, it’s the equivalent of dying and going to heaven.
Recently, we saw Art, a play whose premise centers on three sophisticated, middle-aged friends who descend hell-ward in a bitter fight that tears the otherwise resilient fabric of their friendship. The trio’s scorching verbal combat ignites when one of them acquires a “work of art” consisting of a contentless, blank-white canvas, which he purchased for the profligate sum of 300,000 dollars!
Beyond baffled by this purchase, one of the friends raged, “It’s incumbent upon the two of us, the sane, to restore sanity to our beguiled friend and connoisseur of non-art!” As the three waged war over what constitutes art, we, the audience, in stark contrast, laughed uproariously at the go-nowhere folly of their torrential fighting.
Soon, emotionally spent and spun out in a wasteland of irresolution, the three combatants finally lay down their arms as the play resolves in an awkward but peace-restoring truce that tacitly acknowledges the priority of their friendship over the futility of fighting over who is right or wrong.
When the performance ended, we shot to our feet in a standing ovation. And as my hands turned red from vigorous applauding, the glaring contrast between the fighting on stage and the audience’s uproarious reaction to it recalled what I often observe in couples therapy—the ludicrous mindlessness of fighting.
Fight Follies
In couples therapy, it can be helpful to ask partners to resuscitate a recent fight, especially a recurring one, then parse it for its causative underpinnings and replace these with conflict-preventative strategies.
As we begin these efforts, I often hear partners make remarks like, “We can’t remember exactly what we fought about,” which draws a head-scratching blank. Others laugh at themselves, like the audience’s reaction to “Art,” as they look anew at how their pettiness morphed into stagnant embitterment. A few assert, sometimes defensively, “We fought, but afterwards we had a great conversation,” or I’ll hear, “When our fighting stopped, we had passionate make-up sex.”
Responding tactfully, I’ll ask, “So, to have a good conversation or passionate sex, you must first pre-stage it with a fight?” Or I’ll ask, “Have you ever had a great conversation or passionate sex that wasn’t prefaced with fighting?” Their answers are predictable.
Our Brain on Anger
Nestled bilaterally and subcortically within the temporal parietal area of our brain is an almond-shaped cluster of neurons called the amygdala. Its job is to help us vanquish or flee from danger. Under perceived danger, the amygdala’s volume of neural activity can dominate, even blink off higher brain functions, monopolizing them. Thus, the slower, more complex reasoning of our higher brain is quickly replaced with emergency-like reactivity.
These fast-acting adaptations are reflected in our speech and language patterns. For example, as I write this blog, my words form grammatical, rule-following, or complete sentences, called syntax.
However, if my “emotional temperature” were to rise with intense feelings, my speech would change correspondingly, stripping me of my vocabulary. Now, two or three words must do the work of delivering a sentence’s worth of meaning, as syntax abbreviates into telegraphic speech. I am at a disadvantage, especially when expressing complex ideas.
As my feelings escalate, my speech turns holophrastic. One word now shoulders the heavy burden of expression; I am at an even greater disadvantage.
Difficult Problems
Conflicted couples face difficult problems, frequently complex ones that require their best thinking and the words to capture and convey them, which, of course, become increasingly compromised by intensifying emotion. Imagine the absurdity of experts at a think tank trying to improve the quality of their “thought products” by arguing and fighting with one another.
A Helpful Prescription
I encourage couples to do everything within their maturational powers to abolish arguing and fighting. Granted, this is a tall order, but one worthy of their effort. I’ll add: don’t ignore the needs and feelings that are generating your strong feelings, but learn to “deconflict” by regulating your feelings to keep your higher brain “online” and fully functional for keener problem-solving.
Deconfliction Procedures
I recently stumbled across a military term, deconfliction, which refers to procedures designed to prevent soldiers in the same fighting unit from killing one another with “friendly fire.” Certainly, coupled partners, at least theoretically, are on the same side; shouldn’t they, too, have deconfliction procedures to prevent emotional bloodshed?
A Preventive “Cognitive Vaccine”
Consider a flu vaccine, where an engineered protein is injected across the cell membrane to rally antibodies in the event of exposure to an infectious virus, which otherwise would incubate in its victim who’d become symptomatic within two to 12 days.
Now, consider the stunning virulence of an “emotional virus” by picturing a belligerent partner angrily attacking their significant other. The angry partner’s emotions have an incubation period measured in nanoseconds—the time it takes the targeted partner to become symptomatic or negatively reactive. This is the length of time it takes for neural impulses traveling at a speed of 286 mph to traverse the synapse, a junction site a fraction of the diameter of a human hair.
In a nanosecond, we can be “infected” by our partner’s emotional contagion. In short, what if arguing and fighting are like highly infectious emotions or diseases?
So, if there were a vaccine to prevent arguing and fighting, would you take it? And what would it look like?
Need Management Therapy (NMT)
NMT has a built-in cognitive vaccine. It presupposes that all human or partner needs are valid at their most basic, irreducible levels. Fighting directs attention away from the basic legitimacy of our needs and focuses it instead on the flawed means by which they are mismanaged, thereby escalating couple turmoil. Would two neurologically normal partners argue and fight with each other if this were not the case?
Given this prescience, arguing and fighting are foundationless. Again, we fight because we mismanage our individual needs. The antidote: Learn good personal need management. Arguing and fighting are indeed preventable.