Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [65]
Giving and getting freedom means we also need to have some good ways to deal with the inevitable conflicts that will arise when strong emotions are at stake. There are lots of good ways. Start by checking in with yourself on what you already know about conflict. You already have very strong ideas about this; you learned them, literally, at your parents’ knees, if not cringing in the corner.
EXERCISE Conflict: A Freewrite
Try writing for ten minutes without pausing—just write down whatever comes into your mind about these questions: How was conflict dealt with in the family you grew up in? What did people do, and what beliefs were they operating on? Did someone use alcohol to deal with tension? Who in your family was likely to initiate conflict, who avoided it to a fault? Whose job was it to placate the angry people, whose job to sweep disagreements under the carpet? Who had the job of opening up conflict? What was your job? How would you describe your style of managing conflict?
Studying the scripts you had to live by in your childhood will explain a lot about how you react to anger and conflict today. Accept yourself: as a child, you had no choices; you had to fit in, somehow, to your family’s script. How did you keep yourself safe?
Was this never an issue? People who grew up in healthy families are often both easygoing and unafraid. (We’re not sure we’ve ever met anyone that healthy, but it sounds great in principle.) The downside of growing up in an unusually healthy family is that it can be hard to understand why everybody else gets so scared.
Most people, though, learned to hide for their own safety, or to fight back to protect themselves, or to become small and pathetic so that people would take pity on them. If you have any of these responses to conflict—defensiveness, rage, withdrawal, weepiness, whatever—it is certain that you developed them for a good reason.
Once you understand how you learned your reflexes, more choices open up. Talk with your partners—what are their scripts? What’s going on when A really wants to hear how B feels, only B is trying to get safe by hiding? Maybe you each have different skills you learned about dealing with conflict—maybe you could learn new ones from each other.
Fighting Fair
Thinking about how intimate bonds are cemented by sharing vulnerable feelings brings us to perhaps the ultimate act of intimacy: fighting. Many people believe that fighting between partners is to be avoided at all costs, but most relationship therapists would disagree.
Fights between partners appear to be a universal experience; not many people actually enjoy them, but they seem to be necessary, a constructive element in the building of solid relationships, like the fires that make new growth possible in old forests. Only by fighting can partners struggle with their disagreements, express their most heartfelt feelings, and negotiate change and growth in their relationship.
There has to be a way to communicate anger in a long-term relationship, and there has to be a way to struggle with disagreements. How many times have you had a bitter argument with your partner, and when it was over, felt closer than you had before?
So the problem, as we see it, is not to avoid fighting, but to learn to fight in ways that are not destructive, physically, morally, or emotionally. A good fight is very different from abuse: in a good clean fight, there is respect for safety and mutuality so that both people get to express their feelings at full volume and come out the other end stronger and closer than before: bonded by fire, as it were.
The concept of “fair fighting” was first expounded by Dr. George R. Bach in his wonderful book, The Intimate Enemy: How to Fight Fair in Love and Marriage. Published in 1968, the book is terribly outdated, but the material on communication, and detailed descriptions of constructive ways to share your anger with a partner, is priceless