James Cordova

And that feels like a fundamental rejection of who I am as a person.

And so I fight back by trying to get you to change so that you can just love me the way that I am.

And you're wanting that change.

And my rejecting that and validating that is in some ways also a fundamental rejection of who you are as a person.

So we end up feeling rejected by each other.

And our, again, our reaction to rejection is some version of fight or flight.

We either fight harder or we just start to give up.

It does.

It is so challenging because the trick, if it's a trick, is to seek to understand more than to seek to be understood.

And that is needed in a moment when the thing we are most desperate for is to be understood.

But if we can, if I can take a deep breath, hold my own wanting with some compassion for a moment and prioritize understanding what you're asking of me and prioritize empathizing with what you're asking of me.

then what naturally occurs is that I start to feel more compassion for where you're coming from and when I start to feel more compassion for where you're coming from then I want to help but if I'm stuck in a place where I need you to understand me I can't access the compassion that naturally makes me want to collaborate with you

and this is something that I work with couples on often, that if the only way for me to feel better is for you to do something differently, then I'm trapped in a place where I'm in a sort of self-justifying passivity.

I don't have to do anything.

I can't do anything except maybe complain and hope for you to change.

and especially when it comes to perpetual issues, but I would say that this is true for almost all areas of conflict.

The way that we can reclaim our agency, the way that we can reclaim our power to have a positive effect on our relationship and to deepen the intimacy in the relationship is to be the one who moves first.

And oftentimes, that's simply...

Let me make sure that I thoroughly understand where my partner is coming from.

And the cultivation of that skill I talk about as developing a soft front and a strong back.