Why You Keep Having the Same Fight with Your Wife/ Mark Groves

Every couple has a dance, and most men have never seen the steps written down.

One of you closes the distance and gets louder. The other creates distance and shuts down. What makes it a loop rather than an argument is that each one's way of coping is precisely the thing the other cannot tolerate. Mark Groves names it, then takes it apart: Gottman's four horsemen, why men stonewall more than women do, and the single sentence that breaks a defensive pattern even though saying it feels awful.

Then the harder half. Groves admits he spent years in a relationship with someone who needed exactly the skills he teaches, and asks the question underneath it: what if you need the problem to be there? What if the fixing is the point?

 

IN THIS EPISODE

• The dance: the distancer, the escalator, and why the loop holds
• Gottman's four horsemen, and why men stonewall
• "I can see some truth in what you're saying," and why it tastes terrible
• Behind every criticism is a desired behavior
• "Our defense strategies live beside our greatest wounds"
• The kitchen, the deal breaker that kept moving, and what he said instead
• What happens to the fixer when the addict gets sober
• Why nobody should be 100 percent in with someone who is 99
• Unconscious commitments, and needing a battle to fight
• Jon on creating problems at home to have something to bring to the room

 

FULL EPISODE

How to Co-Regulate: The Science Behind Relationship Harmony: https://frontrowdads.com/474

 

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