Sometimes we get into fights with people we love.

Hopefully, we fight fair most of the time.

We do our best to use “I” statements.

We try to understand the other person’s perspective.

We avoid blaming or attacking the other person.

But sometimes things go south really, really fast.

And before you know it, you feel like you’re not sitting across from your partner or friend.

You’re sitting across from a doppelganger—someone who looks & sounds like your partner but is something altogether different.

They’re selfish and mean and rude and do all those things you hate when you two fight.

How can you love someone who treats you this way?

Today I’ll be talking about one very important way to keep your fights sane and healthy.

Invasion of the body snatchers

There’s this funny thing that can happen when we fight with loved ones.

And some of us are more prone to it than others.

In an ideal situation, we have a kind, accurate picture of the person we love in our heads.

And this picture follows us around in our heads and hearts all day.

This picture makes room for our partner’s faults and failings as well as their strengths.

It’s a well-rounded sketch of this person as we understand them.

When we fight, it is really important we hold onto this picture in our heads. 

It is important for us to use it to anchor ourselves in the moment, when things get really tough and we want to lash out with all we’ve got because we feel attacked, misunderstood, neglected or abandoned.

But sometimes we can’t hold onto this positive representation of our partner.  The full picture gets shredded, painted over.

In this newer, distorted picture, our partner suddenly has a sneer on their face instead of a smile.  And they’re thinking and doing all sorts of unsavory things in our mind’s eye.

Suddenly, that cute, awkward thing they do drives you up the wall.

Suddenly, you’re worried that they’re cheating on you (even though somewhere deep inside you know them to be someone of really strong character).

In other words, you begin attributing all sorts of things to them that are either untrue, or perhaps just magnifying legitimate problems so much that it crowds out all the other, good stuff you love.

Either way, it puts you in a pretty hostile, desperate place.

You feel as though you’re sitting across from a doppelganger, a person who looks and sounds like your partner but somehow isn’t.  Instead, they’ve been replaced by a conniving, hurtful look-a-like hell bent on your destruction.

“You’re not the person I thought you were,” you hear yourself saying.

And then the fight gets really nasty.

Doppelgangers come to life

Old wounds rear their heads.

Disappointments and resentments wake up out of nowhere.

You’ve shifted from trying to collaborate and understand your loved one to hunkering down in an effort to defend yourself or attack.

When we fight from this place, we damage our relationships.

And, strangely, it can actually bring the doppelganger to life.

If we start treating our loved ones like doppelgangers—

if we start attributing malicious motives to them,

assuming the worst instead of the best,

expecting that they will be hurtful, terrible people—

it can actually bring out the very worst in them.

Feeling attacked, they may become retaliatory and vengeful, dishonest and spiteful.

And somewhere inside, some scared, vulnerable part of you says to yourself, “See?  I knew it all along!  They can’t be trusted.”

It is a very unfortunate cycle.  But there is something you can do.

Staying anchored

Remember that picture I was telling you about?

The one that does its very best to hold onto all aspects of a person, as you understand them?

Hold onto that well-rounded image of that person when you fight.

If you feel like the image is starting to get painted over, watered down, or destroyed take a step back.

This is a sign that you’re shifting from attach mode to attack mode, from collaborative to every-man-for-himself.

It’s a bad set up for an argument, and it’s probably not going to get you what you want, in the end.

So what if you’re having a hard time holding onto that image?

Do something that distracts or soothes yourself for a bit.

Take a little bit of time to yourself, to sort out what’s going on inside.

Here’s a practice that I often find helpful:

Imagine your partner in a vulnerable state—perhaps a photo comes to mind of him or her at a much younger age.

Now imagine yourself at that age, too, and reach out to that younger part in your mind’s eye.

That part probably wants something from you.

It’s probably feeling alarmed, mad, or worried that it isn’t getting something it needs— protection, understanding, maybe some kind of partnership.

In fact, you may find it is seeking the very things you are asking for from your partner.

Do the best you can to offer that younger part of you those very things it wants.

Offer comfort and assurance.

Talk with that part a bit.

See where it goes in your mind’s eye with you.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t go to your partner and ask, or even fight, for these things.

But if you go into the fight with your tanks full, having worked hard to offer yourself some of your own resources and soothing, you have a much better chance of having a discussion rather than fight, of keeping it reasonably calm and civil, and so on.

Fights are a part of life

You can be partnered with the coolest, sweetest person in the whole world and still end up in some nasty fights with them.

Everybody fights with the people they love from time to time.

You’ve probably heard the saying “the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.”

It’s pretty much impossible to care about someone and not have some conflict.

The conflict is a signal that the stakes are high—that this person matters to you.

That you rely and depend on this person in some way.

Well, it turns out that there’s just a one letter difference between attaching and attacking.

And if you’re not careful, in your next fight you could end up attacking the person you’re trying to maintain an attachment with.

So, be patient with yourself in this process, and play around with ways to hold onto that picture of your loved one that we discussed earlier in the article.

That is key to keeping fights healthy.

Good luck!

PS:  This article is written for folks who are in reasonably healthy relationships that are built on trust and respect.  If you are in a relationship where there is…

physical violence & abuse

extreme jealousy (i.e., your partner telling you what to wear, constantly accusing you of flirting or cheating, making you account for all your time in your day)

controlling behavior (i.e., your partner isolating you from your support system, threatening you, or using your pets, children, or household finances to blackmail you)

…I encourage you to seek support from a trained therapist, and/or to contact national or local domestic violence agencies for more support and information about your options.