CONFLICT IN RELATIONSHIPS: Can My Relationship Improve If My Partner Won’t Work on It? +FREE Strategy for Diffusing Conflict
As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, I’ve done A LOT of couples therapy over the years. So you might expect me to say that if you want to reduce conflict in your relationship, feel more heard by your partner, or enjoy a deeper connection with them, you BOTH need to work on your relationship.
But do you want to know something?
I have many clients who really want to change something in their relationship. But they come to my office alone. Why? Because for one reason or another, their partner doesn’t want to work on the relationship.
When these clients start working with me, there’s something I see in all of them: doubt. They doubt whether the time, energy, and money that they’re investing will be worth it if their partner isn’t working on the relationship with them.
That’s why they’re usually pretty surprised (I would even go as far as to say “shocked” in some cases) when they start seeing BIG changes in their relationship and life just based on the work that they’ve done solo.
They start feeling like their partner finally understands them. They stop getting frustrated with their partner all the time. And they even find a level of love and connection in their relationship that they’ve never experienced before.
In fact, many of them look at me in amazement and say something along the lines of, “Wow! My relationship is so much better than it used to be. Can you believe it, Vera???”
In these moments, I often have to stop myself from breaking out into a massive grin. Because my clients often think that I’m just as surprised about the changes in their relationship as they are. But the truth is that I never am.
Why?
Because I know that in many cases, you can create big positive changes in your relationship even if your partner doesn’t want to do any of the work.
(I’ve even developed an entire online course called From Conflict to Ultimate Love™ that helps individual people [not couples] improve their relationship with their partner or loved one by learning how to handle conflict more effectively. You can learn more about it here.)
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: “Okay, Vera. I believe that those clients experienced changes in their relationship. But it was probably because they got lucky. Or maybe their relationship just wasn’t that bad to begin with. I don’t think it would be that way in my case, though. I bet NOTHING would change in my relationship if I was the only one doing anything to change it.”
That’s why I’m using this week’s blog post to explain just 3 of the many ways that you CAN improve your relationship with your partner or loved one even if they’re not willing to do the work with you.
I’ve got a lot to share with you in this one, so let’s dive in!
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You Can Identify and Break Free of Unhealthy Communication Patterns
One way that you can change your relationship even if your partner doesn’t want to do the work is by uncovering your unhealthy communication habits.
Unless your partner doesn’t engage in any unhealthy communication at all (which is highly unlikely because it’s something we ALL do from time to time), changing the way you communicate won’t completely eliminate challenges in your relationship. But in most cases, it can drastically improve what happens when you and your partner interact.
After all, most of the time that interactions became unpleasant or heated in a relationship, it’s because both you and your partner or loved one are reacting to each other’s negative communication habits. So if you take your toxic communication habits out of the picture and replace them with healthy ones, it takes a lot of fuel away from the fire.
For example, let’s say that like many people, the form of toxic communication that you’re most likely to use with your partner is criticism. This means that when you get frustrated because you come home to find that your partner never cleaned the house, you immediately start criticizing them. You might say something like, “You’re so lazy! You never pull your weight in the relationship. You ALWAYS make me do everything around here.”
In other words, when you get triggered in your relationship, you’re most likely to react by pointing out flaws in your partner and attributing the problem to these flaws.
Most people don’t respond well to being criticized. After all, who enjoys being told that they’re a deeply flawed person? Not me! And I’m sure you don’t either. So it isn’t surprising that when you criticize your partner, they react by either getting angry or shutting down.
But what if you recognized that you tend to criticize your partner when you’re upset about something? What would you be able to do?
You’d be able to take steps toward breaking free of this pattern. This may not seem like something that would drastically change your relationship. But it is.
Because think about it this way: if you stop criticizing your partner whenever you’re upset about the house not being clean or the kids not being picked up on time from school, your partner can’t get angry or shut down in response to it. And it’s much more likely that you’ll be able to tackle the issues that come up in healthier and more productive ways.
If you read my post on how to communicate better in your relationship, you’ll know that I was able to dramatically improve my relationships with my loved ones when I became aware of my toxic communication patterns. You can find the details of my experience in that post. But in a nutshell, I had a tendency to practically “force” my loved ones to continue the conversation when we disagreed or argued about something. And people who became very overwhelmed by my push to continue the conversation would either “attack me” back, withdraw or shut down.
When I became aware that I tended to “pursue” my loved one during times of conflict, I was able to recognize what I was doing that was contributing to conflict in my relationships. And I was able to change what I did when conflict popped up. Specifically, I was able to stop myself from pushing the other person to keep talking and give them space during the conversation if they needed it. This allowed me to work through disagreements with my loved ones with more success (and far fewer tears!).
In sum, when you’re aware of how you contribute to unhealthy communication in your relationship, it empowers you to break free of your toxic habits and replace them with positive ones. This can ultimately stop the vicious toxic communication cycle that you and your partner or loved one can get stuck in when you disagree about something or experience conflict.
You Can Recognize and Change How You Respond to Triggers
Another way that you can change your relationship even if your partner isn’t putting in the work is by recognizing what triggers you in your relationship and changing how you respond to these triggers.
Let’s walk through this with an example:
Imagine that you’re driving to work one day when you realize that your cell phone battery is low. You must have forgotten to charge it last night. But you’re not too worried because you always keep a charger cable in your car. So you can just plug your phone in and change it on your way to work.
But then you open the center console of your car to pull out the charger cable and discover that it’s not there. That’s when you realize that your partner must have taken it out to use it and forgot to put it back. You’re pissed that your partner didn’t have the courtesy to put the charger cable back after using it. And now, your cell phone might die at the very beginning of your work day as a result.
Fuming, you pick up the phone, call your partner, and tell them in a clearly-pissed-off tone that they forgot to put the charger cable back in your car: “Do you know that you didn’t put the charger cable back after you used it on Sunday??? And now my phone is almost dead and I can’t charge it. Thanks to you! Did you even bother to think about how not putting my charger cable back would affect me today? Probably not, right?"
I bet you can guess that this conversation ends with both you and your partner starting your work days off on a sour note.
But here’s the thing: when you learn how to identify and manage your triggers in your relationship, these situations can unfold in a much different way.
Specifically, if you were to reflect on this situation and others like it, you might realize that one of your triggers is when something happens to make you think that your partner doesn’t pay attention to your needs (like when your partner doesn’t put your charger cable back after using it so that you’ll have it in the car when you need it).
Once you know what your trigger is, you can learn how to manage it without getting really upset and saying or doing things that you don’t really mean.
Specifically, you can learn that although you might initially feel angry when you realize that your partner never put your charger cable back, it’s more productive to give yourself some time to calm down and cool off than to immediately pick up the phone and lash out at your partner.
You can also realize that although it’s frustrating to not have your charger when you need it, it’s not the end of the world. You can try to borrow a charger from someone at work or buy a new one during lunch if you really need to. And when you finally get home for the day, you’ll be in a calmer and healthier headspace to have a compassionate conversation with your partner about putting your charger back after they use it.
Learning how to manage your triggers allows you to reduce how stressed and upset you get when something bothers you in your relationship. But more importantly, it allows you to keep your cool enough to communicate and respond to disagreement or conflict in HEALTHY ways.
Of course, you won’t always have a built-in cooling off period when you and your partner disagree about something or experience conflict. Sometimes you get triggered when you’re standing right in front of each other and talking about something important.
What can you do in this case?
Use one of my most recommended tips for managing triggers in your relationship: the time-out strategy. It’s one of the 7 steps in the Bridge-to-Connection Formula that I teach inside From Conflict to Ultimate Love™ . But you can learn what the time-out strategy is and how to use it in this FREE video.
You Can Uncover and Avoid Unhealthy Conflict Resolution Strategies
You can also change your relationship even if your partner doesn’t want to do the work by identifying and avoiding unhealthy conflict resolution strategies in your relationship.
It’s true that everyone reacts slightly differently when they disagree with their partner or loved one or experience conflict in their relationship. But what you might not know is that most of us tend to automatically default to one or more of a limited number of conflict resolution strategies. And unfortunately, these strategies tend to be unhealthy.
I break down all of these unhealthy conflict resolution strategies in From Conflict to Ultimate Love™. But I’m going to share two of them here: avoidance and competition.
Let’s walk through them with an example:
Imagine that you get home late in the afternoon on Sunday and find that your partner invited their friends over to watch the football game. You were really looking forward to enjoying a quiet evening in with your partner before having to start another busy work week on Monday. And your partner never told you that they were planning to have friends over. So understandably, you feel pretty frustrated. But how do you react?
Well, if you’re the type of person who defaults to avoidance, you’ll keep your mouth shut and not say anything to your partner later on in the evening about how you really feel. You truly believe that talking to your partner about the issue will make the problem worse. In other words, you think it’s safer to just avoid bringing the issue up.
What’s the problem with this? When you don’t share your feelings and needs with your partner when something really matters to you, you’ll find yourself in the same situation again and again. You won’t get what you need from your partner and the relationship (having quiet time on weekends and being consulted about guests who are invited over). And you’ll eventually feel resentful, unfulfilled in the relationship, and disconnected from your partner.
On the other hand, if competition is your default conflict resolution strategy, you might wait until your partner’s friends leave and then confront them by saying something like, “You never bothered to ask me if your friends could come over. And even once you made the decision, you didn’t have the courtesy to tell me. You just let me find out when I got home. How could you be so selfish? I spent all day running around and really needed a quiet evening in with you tonight. But you ruined that! Now I won’t get a chance to recharge before another grueling work week—all because of you!”
This conflict resolution strategy is also problematic because your goal is to “win” the argument and pin the blame on your partner (instead of to resolve the issue in the most productive way). Rather than allowing you to manage the conflict in a healthy way, it sets the stage for both you and your partner to become angry and feel that you aren’t being validated, acknowledged, or accepted.
As you can see, on the surface, these strategies might seem like good ways to respond to disagreements or conflict in a relationship. But instead of helping to manage and repair conflict in a healthy way, they actually tend to perpetuate it and even make it worse.
The good news is that by taking time to reflect on how you typically manage conflict in your relationship, you can identify the unhealthy conflict resolution strategies that you automatically default to. And just like with identifying your unhealthy communication habits, when you know which unhealthy conflict resolution strategies you default to, you can take steps to avoid using them.
If you find that you tend to default to avoidance, you’ll know that you could benefit from speaking up and sharing how you feel. This will help your partner or loved one understand what you need from them. And it’ll help you actually get your needs met.
Similarly, if you find that you tend to default to competition, you’ll be aware that you could benefit from approaching conflict with love, compassion, and the goal of managing it in a way that works for both of you. This will make it more likely that you and your partner will feel heard and cared for by each other even when you disagree about something. And it’ll allow you to use moments of conflict as opportunities to actually deepen your connection with one another.
It’s WORTH IT to Work on Yourself
In this blog post, I’ve given you just a few examples of how it’s possible to improve your relationship even if your partner doesn’t want to do the work.
But I also want you to walk away from this post understanding that it isn’t just possible. It’s also WORTH it.
After all, if you and your partner continue to struggle with managing conflict in your relationship, it can push you further and further apart to the point where you might end up considering divorce or break up. And divorce isn’t just expensive. It can also take an enormous toll on your psychological and physical health.
Of course, there’s absolutely NOTHING wrong with getting divorced if it’s the right way forward for you. (I did it, and it was definitely the right decision for me.) Plus, there are cases where a partner or loved one isn’t willing to truly listen to the other person, respect them, and put effort into meeting the person’s needs and nurturing the relationship. If this is the case, working on yourself can still improve the relationship. But it may not improve it enough to bring the relationship to a point where it works for you and meets your needs. And you might decide that ending the relationship is the best way to give yourself the love and care you deserve.
But if divorce or ending the relationship in another way isn’t what you want, you owe it to YOURSELF to at least try to improve your relationship by changing how you show up in it.
I know what you might be thinking, “But Vera, why should I be the one doing all the work? Why should I bother to work on the relationship if my partner isn’t willing to?”
I totally hear you on this. I know how discouraging and even hurtful it can be when it seems like you’re the only one who cares about keeping your relationship alive.
But I want you to know that in many cases, your partner might not be resistant to putting in the work in your relationship because they don’t care about you or the relationship. Instead, it might be that they feel overwhelmed, are skeptical that working on themselves would help, have a hard time admitting that something isn’t working and needs to change, or worry that working on the relationship means that it must be in serious trouble. In other words, your partner might have fears and reservations that have NOTHING to do with how they feel about you.
So if you really care about your relationship (which I’m betting you do if you’re reading this), why not try to help it improve? Why not take that step toward working on yourself so that you can change how you show up in your relationship and stop unhealthy relationship dynamics in their tracks?
Remember, you have nothing to lose. So why not give it a shot?
Of course, it’s one thing to decide that you want to work on yourself to improve your relationship. But it’s another thing to know WHAT to work on or HOW to do it.
Above, I mentioned that when you’re faced with a disagreement or conflict, taking time to pause and calm down before talking to your partner is essential for helping you manage your triggers and avoid falling into unhealthy communication and conflict resolution patterns. That’s why, if you haven’t watched it already, I encourage you to check out my video on using the time-out strategy with your partner or loved one.
Time-outs are the #1 strategy for successfully managing conflict in your relationship. And in the video, I break down what the time-out strategy actually is and how to use it effectively.
But guess what? I have MORE free goodies to share with you.
Want a full roadmap for how to move away from conflict and toward love and connection in your relationship even if your partner isn’t on board?
You’ll find it right inside my 6-week online course From Conflict to Ultimate Love™.
In the course, you’ll learn my tried and tested 7-step Bridge-to-Connection Formula for dialing down the conflict in your relationship so you can actually start enjoying your time with your partner or loved one again.
Learn more about From Conflict to Ultimate Love™ here.
And finally, if you haven’t done so already, follow me on my Facebook page Vera Velini – The Assertive Happiness Coach. That way, you’ll be among the first to hear about new blog posts, resources, and courses.
Until next time!
Vera
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