Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope that you and your loved ones are gathered around food and love. I think about the current political landscape and how it interferes in family gatherings. It can be so hard to maintain ties with people who disagree on really fundamental things. I’m going to focus this conversation on differences in couples and relationships and how I think about de-knotting difficult relationship dynamics.

I help couples change their process of relationship. Whether it’s around seemingly simple things as fights over loading the dishwasher to iciness in relationships because of political differences, the struggle can be boiled down to this: How do we stay connected despite the roiling feelings underneath?

Irritability, Iciness, Withdrawal, and co-dependent soothing: They’re all fights to me.

All of these reactions- irritability, iciness, withdrawal, and co-dependent attentiveness- are likely indicators of people getting into their “4 F’s": Fight, flight, freeze or fawn. I cover what fawning is in another post. All of these share a characteristic: they are a result of a survival mechanism that helps us get out of danger.

Here’s something I use to get people to understand what kind of danger these behaviors help with. Imagine you hear bushes rustling and then a bear jumps out. You can respond by getting tall and banging pots, you can freeze and act dead, you can run, or you can feed the bear food from your pack. All of these behaviors are driven by an adrenaline boost, and rapid thought loops.

When you get in one of the 4-F’s, your heart rate ramps up, you tend to sweat, your thoughts run faster, your pupils may dilate - all of thse things help in taking in more information and reacting faster. But the reactions tend to be coarse and can be very abrasive to intimate relationships.

The Challenge: Having disagreement but still staying connected.

This is the challenge when people get into their fights - staying connected even while being challenged in their relationship. imagine two people ice skating in smoothh figure 8’s. Now imagine they link arms. Now imagine they spin around an axis. Now imagine the bumps and cuts on the ice getting them to lose balance. This is a physical metaphor for how challenging it can be for couples to stay connected while fighting.

Here are some feelings or thoughts you get in a fight:

• hurt

• resentful

• the other person is the enemy

• abandoned

• unheard

• alone

The key here, if you get into a fight, is to slow things down and getting into a more grounded, calm state. If the other person seems like the enemy, it’s not the right time to have the conversation. You have to pause and do active calming.

I hope that you are able to connect with your loved ones this Thanksgiving. I leave you with this thought: Much like those skaters spinning faster and faster around, if you want to stay connected, slowing down is the key.

Take good care. I’ll see you after Turkey-Day.