James Cordova

And it became clear that in our studies of different types of couples, that it's really not the presence of unsolvable problems that is the problem that is corrosive, but how couples approach and relate to those perpetual problems.

And for some couples...

they can bring a kind of sense of humor to their perpetual issues and they can maintain a sense of hopefulness as they confront yet again, what are we going to do on Friday night?

And for other couples, they get stuck in a place where they are trying to coerce each other to change.

And the coercion just becomes more and more exaggerated.

And rather than

collude with the couple in their ongoing efforts to change each other, we began to shift towards what does it look like to accept these naturally occurring differences between partners?

What does it look like to become intimate with the parts of our relationship

the friction points in our relationship that usually make us turn away from each other.

Can we actually find a way to use those points of friction to create deeper connection rather than disconnection?

So often the toxicity in the relationship arises right out of that sense of you're trying to change me in a spot where I can't change.

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.