Save Your Relationship: Stop Talking
Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 08:17AM Good Long Talks: An Oxymoron
Over the past fifteen years, I’ve seen couples from all walks of life make the same mistake: they keep talking about their problems.
Contrary to popular belief, when you’re having trouble with your partner, endlessly picking over what’s wrong rarely provides anyone with a sense of relief. First, by the time you’ve arrived at the conclusion that the same problems keep plaguing your relationship, you’re probably not in the best state of mind to discuss them. Second—and perhaps more importantly—talking about what’s wrong isn’t the only (or even the best) way to improve your relationship. How often can you recall moving past an impasse or negotiating a solution with your partner by talking about the same problem again and again? Is a three hour conversation really what made you happier?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a couple’s therapist (and one that’s still married, too). I know the importance of good communication skills in a relationship. Use “I” statements, by all means. Assert your needs and make clear requests. I, myself, do all of those things just about every day with my daughters, and most of the time, it works. They now understand, for example, that daddy feels anxious when they swan-dive off the living room couch. Trouble is, however clearly I assert my need for them to stay alive, asking them to comply with what I see as good, old-fashioned life-preserving strategies never seems to be enough to do the trick.
I was reminded of this, one particularly hectic Sunday, when one daughter threw my own, tired psycho-babble back in my face by standing on tip-toe at the top of the stairs, swaying back and forth, and mercilessly taunting me. “Look daddy”, she said, singing. “It’s safety issue…it’s a safety issue, oh yeah, oh yeah!”
True, as a psychologist, I should have known better than to use cliché language like “issue” with a four year old. (I try very hard never to use the word at all. It’s one of my issues). Nevertheless, there we were, in a stand-off.
To my mind, this was completely unfair. I’d done my part. I made my request— clearly, I might add— and still, the dance continued. So I did the only sensible thing a parent could do: I asserted myself by putting her in timeout.
Am I suggesting that you use timeouts when you’re having fights with your partner?
Why, yes. Yes I am.
How to End an Argument That’s Going Nowhere
There are any number of reasons you should call a timeout when things get heated—first and foremost among them, when you’re in an intense, angry or upset state, all your reasoning powers pretty much go off-line.
Evolution, it seems, has it in for us couples. Human biology is ruthlessly efficient. Turns out, you really don’t need to think about a whole lot when a bear is chasing you, apart from, “Run!” Neural activity takes energy, and when your life is on the line, the shortest path to survival is the only one that makes sense. No time to sit around planning. Biology takes care of us by sending panic signals straight to our animal brain (the amygdala, in this case)—and off we go.
All this efficiency makes perfect sense when a bear is actually chasing you. It’s mostly a hindrance when you’re having a heated discussion with your partner. Unfortunately, your fight/flight (sympathetic) nervous system isn’t very good at distinguishing one emergency from another.
As your adrenaline rises (and your blood pressure with it), nature, in all its efficiency, takes control and robs you of the very powers of creativity, complexity of thought, and empathy you might need to find an exit to your argument (sadly, since empathizing with a bear rarely saves your life, that useful capacity won’t stick around either).
The end result of all this is that the angrier and more upset you get, the less likely you are to have a useful conversation at all. At that point, your best strategy is to stop talking.
Easier said than done. The same mechanisms that set you off in the first place might keep you saying and doing all kinds of useless thing just to win the fight. Since you’ll need some tools to stay on track with the whole not-talking thing, here’s a simple three-step plan:
1) Know your danger signals: What happens when you’re about to reach the boiling point? Do you clench your jaw? Do you feel your blood pressure rising? Do you make fists, or start to raise your voice? Pay close attention. This is your cue. Move to step two.
2) Call a timeout. That doesn’t mean storming out. It means saying something like, “I can tell I’m starting to get ticked and not thinking clearly. I need to take some time to calm down or I won’t be able to talk about this usefully. Let’s try again later.” Cue step three.
3) Time yourself out.
If you’re like most adults, you probably don’t use a timeout properly, even with your kids. A timeout isn’t a punishment. It’s a chance to calm down (sometimes called self-soothing). The strategy here is to shut down your fight/flight response so you can start thinking again. To do that you have to know a little about how your nervous system works.
Fight-Busting Tip: More Thanksgiving, Less Bear
For the purpose of stress management, we can roughly divide our nervous system into two halves: 1) the sympathetic nervous system 2) the parasympathetic nervous system.
Remember the bear? Your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is what kicks in when that bear is after you. That’s your fight/flight response. Your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) is what kicks in when you’re feeling calm and sleepy, the same way you do after a big Thanksgiving dinner. Each system reciprocally influences the other: when the PNS (calm, sleepy mode) goes up, the SNS (panicked, beary mode) goes down—and vice versa. This leads to a famous axiom in stress management: You can’t be relaxed and anxious at the same time.
It also leads to my standard recommendation for timeout: More Thanksgiving, less bear.
Your job in timeout is to use tools like slow breathing, listening to relaxing music, picturing yourself on the beach away from toddlers dancing on the edge of stairs— whatever it takes to fire up your PNS (Thanksgiving state) and power down your SNS (bear state).
Do all that—then try talking again. I guarantee it’ll go a lot more smoothly.
You’ll notice this particular post is about when to take a break from conversation. While timeouts are certainly an important tool in the art of wordless relationship-improvement, they’re not the only one.
Be sure to check back soon. In the posts to come, I’ll be sharing more ways to improve your relationship that don’t require any conversation at all.
If you like my posts, let me know! Let's connect on facebook and twitter. I frequently respond to comments and questions there. And feel free to check out www.drcraigmalkin.com for more tips and advice, as well as information on my book in progress.
Reader Comments (13)
Thanks so much for this info. It's nice to know of ways to avoid the marathon fight, and that it's actually better for the relationship. thanks too, for the laughs!
Thanks for all the great advice!
The time out works well, but initially I had to have my husband call timeouts on me (that I'd agreed to ahead of time). I'd get too worked up and invested in a fight to observe myself. After he called time outs for a few months, I was able to call them on myself.
@Lisa
Hi Lisa,
Sounds like you guys worked out a great plan. I often recommend agreements a ahead of time. They avoid the feeling of someone telling you what to do (which generally makes things worse when tempers are high). With a mutually agreed upon course of action, you're just following through on what you already said you'd do.
Hi! This is the great-aunt of the toddler on the stairs. Love reading your words of wisdom! Love, Laura
[...] can’t make all your problems go away—you might even have good reason to be angry—but it can reduce your rage (and stress), and even help you put things in [...]
This is great to read, because it explains (and validates) a strategy that my boyfriend and I are learning to use quite successfully. When things get heated, we have different temperaments. My emotions spike ("fight") and his retreat ("flight"). Of course, our reactions then reinforce each other's fears -- my high emotion triggers his discomfort with anger and aggression, and his retreat triggers my fear of abandonment. So, you could see where our fighting could spiral to a bad place quickly. Of course, when we're both in a better state, we talk through things well and feel generous and empathic toward each other.
I used to get extremely upset in arguments when he would say abruptly "we aren't talking about this now" and end the conversation. It felt unilateral, and worse, like abandonement. When we've talked through the issue, though, I had to realize that I do in fact get so caught up in emotions that it is hard to have a constructive conversation. I don't realize it in the moment, though. So I grew to realize that his impulse to talk later is not something to resist. I have been able to accept this because we *really do* have constructive and warm conversations later, usually the next day. And I am able to bring myself down in the meantime -- and have learned that bringing myself down is *my* job, not his. And he's grown to understand that when we abort an argument (and it's usually him who does it), it needs to have softened edges. If I'm feeling extra anxious I'll ask when we'll talk about it, and we'll agree on a time. That assures me that it's not abandonment. When he proposed that we talk later, he now says it calmly, and just points out that we've gotten to the non-constructive zone and I increasingly am hearing this in a positive way and not as threatening or shameful.
We still sometimes let it go on too long; when I'm in the heat of the moment, I honestly have the notion that continuing to talk will help. In those moments, he feels hammered. I am trying to realize sooner in these moments that it's actually a positive and good thing for our relationship to come back to it later. We're getting there! This post really helps to understand that the strategy is a good one!
Hi Sarah--
I'm really glad you found the post helpful. It sounds like you and your boyfriend instinctively arrived at a great strategy for ending the typical spiral; and you've done a great job of owning responsibility for calming yourself down (not always easy). I'm also impressed that you both continued to craft your words and soften the edges. Great work!
[...] assertiveness straddles the two approaches, combining self-change strategies (you might need to calm down before you say anything at all) with a clear request for [...]
[...] an earlier post, I wrote about the importance of knowing when to end a conversation. Sometimes, more talk isn’t the best solution to your romantic [...]
I took the time to read all the comments, but I really liked the article. It proved to be very helpful to me, and I believe all the critics here! Always good when you cannot just be told, but!
Is really very impressive post. Keep it up.
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