Why? Well, if you operate the way most people do, when your spouse takes exception to your viewpoint--or introduces one sharply contrasting with yours--you may find it almost impossible not to experience them as invalidating you--personally attacking you and striving to defeat you. And if this is how, in the moment, you perceive them (i.e., not as your lifetime companion but as your willful adversary), you're compelled to strike back, arduously defend yourself, or even exit the frustrating situation entirely (whether mentally, emotionally, or physically). After all, in that fatal instant of disagreement their words have managed to morph them into your enemy. How could this not be the case if, somewhere deep in your gut, you experience their contrary point of view as somehow puncturing your own? (And incidentally, there's an awfully good chance they'll be reacting to you similarly--i.e., experiencing your position as aiming poison arrows at theirs.)

This, of course, is when you're most likely to summon all your mental energy to prove them wrong. For it may feel as though it's absolutely critical to protect your position--if necessary, to defend it "to the death." In that moment of perceived threat you may feel (without really understanding why) as if your viewpoint represents something intimately connected to your essence, so that making any concessions or giving ground to them would be to sacrifice the innermost core of your being and put at risk your very survival.

And to the extent that you identify yourself with your mind--unconsciously regard yourself as equatable to it--then the thought of changing your mind, or simply detaching from it, can feel untenable, even hazardous. Which is another way of saying that it can be exceedingly difficult to avoid taking your partner's disagreement personally (especially when you can't help attributing to them a certain authority-they are, after all, your "match").

Additionally, when your partner takes exception to what you're saying, it can feel like a total withdrawal of their loyalty and support--and all the more so if you're dependent on their approval. Yet what's imperative to understand is that on most occasions your disagreements merely mean that the two of you happen not to see something the same way--or that your wants or needs on a particular matter differ. Not being each other's clones, naturally you're not going to share all the same preferences.

No big deal, right? Well, so long as in that moment of disagreement you actually feel abandoned by your partner, it can be a very big deal. You can feel completely out of harmony with them: frustrated, demeaned, disregarded, disconnected, distrusted, alienated, betrayed, and so on.

At least that's what the child part of you may be experiencing--and it can be intensely
uncomfortable and disconcerting.

How to Move from "Menacing" Disagreements . . . to Safe Ones

What's required in such problematic situations is that your adult part immediately embrace that anxious, befuddled, or indignant child part, and reassure it that its intimate partner's contrary viewpoint doesn't represent any kind of threat--though to your "kid self" it undoubtedly may feel like it.

And never forget, by the way, that the emotional part of you is--and will always be--"in the custody of" your inner child. Not that we adults don't have emotions but that our emotions come from our younger selves--and so can easily be governed by issues unresolved from the past. Our adult self, on the other hand, is the reasonable, logical, calm and collected part of us. It's everything we've consciously cultivated over the years to operate more effectively in the world.

 

And so in circumstances where your spouse's disagreement causes you to emotionally react (or quite possibly, overreact), it's crucial that you access that scared, lonely, vulnerable part of yourself. Then--in your mind's eye--you need, lovingly, to let that child know that their intimate companion's contrary preferences don't really relate to them. That these preferences simply define their partner as in some ways different--but safely different--from them.

Such "caring correction" of the child's mistaken assumptions can be difficult. For developmentally, children only know how to make sense of reality through linking it back to themselves. Cognitively immature, they can't help but perceive reality egocentrically (the reason, for instance, that children below a certain age are apt to infer that if their parents are getting divorced, they--or their misbehavior--must somehow have caused it). So your inner child, depending on how well (or poorly) they're integrated with your adult self, needs to be reassured that they're not bad, wrong, or unlovable just because their partner disagrees with them. As long as the adult in you hasn't left the scene entirely at the moment your spouse pushed your--or rather, your kid self's--buttons (and virtually all your buttons go back to childhood), you can appreciate that it's okay (i.e., non-threatening) for your spouse not to want what you do, think like you do, feel like you do. . . .

When you're truly able to get in compassionate touch with that tender and exquisitely vulnerable part of yourself--so susceptible to being disappointed, disturbed, or disheartened--you can appropriately respond (rather than automatically react) to perceived provocations that in the past may have thrown you off balance. The trick is learning how to settle yourself down when your feathers begin to get ruffled. And never forget that self-soothing always involves the adult part of you effectively soothing the child part. It's only after you've comforted this fragile part of self that you can begin to respond differently in moments of martial discord (and if you'd like to learn how to become more proficient at self-soothing, see part 3 of my earlier post, "The Power to Be Vulnerable").

It can hardly be overemphasized that marital harmony isn't put at risk simply because the two of you have differences. In fact, confiding in your mate about such discrepancies might even be good for you--and ultimately for the relationship as well. As long as you share your dissimilarities with grace, diplomacy, and tact, you should be able to let more of your marital hair down, and--comfortable in making the more "contrary" parts of yourself known--be more of yourself with your partner.