How our nervous systems affect how we navigate relationship conflict

Romantic partnerships can be places of great growth and vulnerable hardship. And a lot of those experiences come through how we communicate with our partners. For the vast majority of us, communication with our partners can be quite challenging. It’s incredibly common to find ourselves in familiar cycles of arguing, defensiveness, shutting down, or just good old-fashioned emotional withdrawal. But here’s the thing a lot of us were never taught about communication with our partners: it’s not the content that makes conversations harder, it’s how we share it that often makes the difference.To understand that concept better, we first need to understand our nervous system and brain. When we’re able to have centered, vulnerable conversations that feel more collaborative, it means our prefrontal cortex is online. But when we fall into cycles of defensiveness and shutdown, it means our amygdala has taken over, which means we’re in survival mode – fight or flight. When we enter fight or flight, we aren’t relational partners anymore; we’re mainly in self-protection mode. Why relationship conflict can take us to that survival mode really fast can be for a multitude of reasons such as our upbringing, past traumas, and social messaging about what conflict means (such as getting into trouble).There are many cues our body gives us when we’re in fight or flight. Here are some common ones:

•   Heart racing
•   Feeling physically fired up
•   Defensiveness or feeling “armored up” in your body
•  Anxiousness
•   Dissociation such as feeling emotionally shut off or disconnected. There are many other cues as well, such as finding yourself being overly critical or dismissive, but what’s important is figuring out what your unique cues are. Once you do, the next important step is learning how to calm or regulate your nervous system so you can show up more relationally and collaboratively in those conversations.Self-regulation techniques can look like a lot of things, but some of the most common ones include:
• Taking a step away from the conversation to get a breather
•   Calm-place visualization
•  Deep breathing

Moving your body or shaking out your limbs to release that fight-or-flight energyHowever you choose to self-regulate, it’s always helpful to ask for a pause in a challenging conversation so you can take a moment to calm your nerves and then make an intentional effort to return to the conversation with an emphasis on collaborating and trying to understand each other, rather than trying to win over the other. Always remember that vulnerable, hard conversations with our partners require us to lead with vulnerability instead of impenetrability