Everyone who goes to law school learns very quickly to separate two very distinct areas of law: Procedure and Substance. If your neighbor’s dog tears up your garden, your neighbor owes you money to fix it. That’s substance. That’s the issue. Taking your neighbor to court is how you make him pay you (assuming a knock on his door or a letter do not do the trick). That’s process. That’s the way you handle the issue.
Somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of my clients at any given time are couples, who come to see me when they are unable to resolve various issues between them which result in either expressed or unexpressed conflicts. We identify the underlying issues that are causing the conflicts and the unsuccessful patterns they have been using to try to resolve the issues. We identify the substance (the issues) and the process (the patterns of interaction and communication) that lead to the conflict. This process also works for individual clients who are trying to resolve either current or past conflicts with important people in their lives, although the changes may be limited to what my client can do to change their processes because the other person is not in therapy with my client.
My experience with couples confirms that almost every issue is resolvable as long as everyone is safe; but only if both people are willing to change their processes for resolving the issues. I don’t mean that in every situation both people are “wrong.” Patterns of interaction are always the result of two or more people doing things in response to each other. When these patterns of interaction lead to unresolved conflict, everyone involved in the interaction needs to understand their own contribution to the conflict and why it has not been resolved.
Most of the time, it is not the underlying issues that make it so difficult to resolve the conflict. It is the process or patterns of interaction that prevent people from resolving their issues. In many cases, this is because the interaction patterns are the result of issues that existed for each person before the specific issue came up. Here’s an example. Right now, many of my client families are experiencing tension due to economic upheaval. They cannot sell their house, their house is “under water,” or one or both of the parents are recently unemployed. The issue is money, at least at the surface. By itself, money is a huge reason for couples to split. But many couples that have very serious money issues do not split, and do not even suffer high levels of conflict. How each person in the couple perceives money, responsibility, their own self-worth, the importance of social status, etc. will greatly affect their responses to a tough economic situation. Suppose the husband grew up with a single mom, fairly poor, on the edge of economic disaster for several years. The wife grew up in a stable middle class household with a father who always made good money, and a mom who also worked, so she never had any real fear of economic disaster growing up. Now the wife loses her job. The husband becomes extremely anxious about it, and cannot understand why his wife is not more concerned. They fight—he straining to tell her daily to take more action to find a job, her telling him to back off. Conflict. Unresolved.
In the example above, if they each paid attention to, not only the way they are acting, but also their own reasons for the way they are responding to each other, which in this case have little to do with each other, they will begin to understand how they can change. If they look not just at what is happening right now, but how they are influenced by past experiences, before they even knew each other, they could stop blaming the other person. They could begin to work on how to resolve the conflict, which is not just about money, but about serious differences in what it means to have less money, or more money, whose responsibility is it to make sure money is there, how worried they should be. All of these issues are resolvable, but might be very difficult to resolve without a deeper understanding of why they are so emotionally antagonistic about it.
So, there are three steps to understanding how to begin resolving what seemed like unresolvable conflict. First, what is the substance of the immediate conflict (in the example above, it is money). Second, what are the current processes used to address the conflict (the wife feels “hounded” and de-valued and the husband feels his anxiety is not taken seriously). Third, what underlying issues for each person are driving their part of the current pattern (their very different childhood experiences about money). With this information, we can begin to separate out what is being said from why it is being said. The husband and wife can each take a look at what part of the conflict right now is about the current situation, and what part is actually the result of past experiences that have little or nothing to do with the other person or the current situation. The blaming subsides, the emotional energy is redirected. The conflict becomes smaller, and resolvable.
This example is simple on purpose, to illustrate in a short space how conflicts can be resolved by looking at both the substance of the issue and the process of interacting to deal with the issue. When both people are willing and able to look at both substance and process, nearly all conflict is resolvable.
Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with clients. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.
