Why do couples fight?

Why do couples fight?

Marital squabbles can be over lots of things:

· Control struggles (who's in charge) and how decisions are made
· Degree of reciprocal control or independence
· Treatment of in-laws and significant relatives
· Sex: how, when, why, by whom, varieties
· Money: earning, managing, saving and spending

With the objective of controlling, humiliating or winning over the other, all kinds of negative things are said, that are difficult to retrieve. The results are very sad, because repetition of the fight, which is inevitable when it is not resolved, will sour the relationship.

Here, I want to let you in on a secret, the hidden motivation to connect and have a good, healthy fight. Once you understand this, it is easier to look at your current “enemy” – your partner –with empathy; to see their hidden motivations; and perhaps come up with some solutions to fill this deep need for confrontation.

Why is winning or losing a dispute so important? Why is there it so essential to our self-esteem? Because we think that we fight mostly for control of things, like time, money, the car, clothes or a good job. But really, almost every fight actually has at least something to do with the rarely acknowledged need for us to get some recognition from the other. That person is so important because she can give us the acceptance or recognition that we crave!

Go back in your memory to the last three fights you had with your loved one…..Imagine that each fight is a heartfelt quest for support, recognition and respect from him or her. If so, having your partner say out loud, “Yes, you are right on this issue,” validates you and makes the world right again.

Does it feel good? Now, compare that with the pleasure you get when obtaining the thing you were ready to fight about….how does it compare? No way!

Why can't we even mention our deep need for validation from our spouse? Very simple, it has to be offered, spontaneously! That is the crux of the matter: If we have to beg for it, it doesn't taste so good, right? It has to be proffered because it is an evident, undeniable fact that we are right, that we are intelligent and beautiful and lovable… not because we ask people to say so!

And that, by the way, is the reason we get married: to have someone, freely elected, who can say to the world that we are such a beautiful person they want to spend their lives with us!

And then, very shortly, this admiration we managed to achieve goes missing, and sadly the only way to get our partner’s attention back on us is to have a good fight.

NOW, if we could only know how to do a positive conflicts fight!!!

Visualize your Desires! Here is how:

Visualize and Affirm Your Desired Outcomes: A Step-by-Step Guide

You have within you an awesome power that most of us have never been taught to use. Elite athletes use it. The super rich use it. And peak performers in all fields are now starting to use it.

That power is called visualization. The daily practice of visualizing your dreams as already complete can rapidly accelerate your achievement of those dreams. Visualization of your goals and desires accomplishes four very important things.

1. It activates your creative subconscious which will start generating creative ideas to achieve your goal.
2. It programs your brain to more readily perceive and recognize the resources you will need to achieve your dreams.
3. It activates the law of attraction, thereby drawing into your life the people, resources, and circumstances you will need to achieve your goals.
4. It builds your internal motivation to take the necessary actions to achieve your dreams.
Visualization is really quite simple. You sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes and imagine — in as vivid detail as you can — what you would be looking at if the dream you have were already realized. Imagine being inside of yourself, looking out through your eyes at the ideal result.


Mental Rehearsal
Athletes call this visualization process “mental rehearsal,” and they have been using it since the 1960s when we learned about it from the Russians. All you have to do is set aside a few minutes a day. The best times are when you first wake up, after meditation or prayer, and right before you go to bed. These are the times you are most relaxed. Go through the following three steps:

1. Imagine sitting in a movie theater, the lights dim, and then the movie starts. It is a movie of you doing perfectly whatever it is that you want to do better. See as much detail as you can create, including your clothing, the expression on your face, small body movements, the environment and any other people that might be around. Add in any sounds you would be hearing — traffic, music, other people talking, cheering. And finally, recreate in your body any feelings you think you would be experiencing as you engage in this activity.

2. Get out of your chair, walk up to the screen, open a door in the screen and enter into the movie. Now experience the whole thing again from inside of yourself, looking out through your eyes. This is called an “embodied image” rather than a “distant image.” It will deepen the impact of the experience. Again, see everything in vivid detail, hear the sounds you would hear, and feel the feelings you would feel.

3. Finally, walk back out of the screen that is still showing the picture of you performing perfectly, return to your seat in the theater, reach out and grab the screen and shrink it down to the size of a cracker. Then, bring this miniature screen up to your mouth, chew it up and swallow it. Imagine that each tiny piece — just like a hologram — contains the full picture of you performing well. Imagine all these little screens traveling down into your stomach and out through the bloodstream into every cell of your body. Then imagine that every cell of your body is lit up with a movie of you performing perfectly. It’s like one of those appliance store windows where 50 televisions are all tuned to the same channel.

When you have finished this process — it should take less than five minutes — you can open your eyes and go about your business. If you make this part of your daily routine, you will be amazed at how much improvement you will see in your life.

Create Goal Pictures
Another powerful technique is to create a photograph or picture of yourself with your goal, as if it were already completed. If one of your goals is to own a new car, take your camera down to your local auto dealer and have a picture taken of yourself sitting behind the wheel of your dream car. If your goal is to visit Paris, find a picture or poster of the Eiffel Tower and cut out a picture of yourself and place it into the picture. With today’s technology, you could probably make an even more convincing image using your computer.

Create a Visual Picture and an Affirmation for Each Goal
We recommend that you find or create a picture of every aspect of your dream life. Create a picture or a visual representation for every goal you have — financial, career, recreation, new skills and abilities, things you want to purchase, and so on.

When we were writing the very first Chicken Soup for the Soul® book, we took a copy of the New York Times best seller list, scanned it into our computer, and using the same font as the newspaper, typed Chicken Soup for the Soul into the number one position in the “Paperback Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous” category. We printed several copies and hung them up around the office. Less than two years later, our book was the number one book in that category and stayed there for over a year!

Index Cards
We practice a similar discipline every day. We each have a list of about 30-40 goals we are currently working on. We write each goal on a 3x5 index card and keep those cards near our bed and take them with us when we travel. Each morning and each night we go through the stack of cards, one at a time, read the card, close our eyes, see the completion of that goal in its perfect desired state for about 15 seconds, open our eyes and repeat the process with the next card.

Use Affirmations to Support Your Visualization

An affirmation is a statement that evokes not only a picture, but the experience of already having what you want. Here’s an example of an affirmation:

I am happily vacationing 2 months out of the year in a tropical paradise, and working just four days a week owning my own business.

Repeating an affirmation several times a day keeps you focused on your goal, strengthens your motivation, and programs your subconscious by sending an order to your crew to do whatever it takes to make that goal happen.

Expect Results
Through writing down your goals, using the power of visualization and repeating your affirmations, you can achieve amazing results. Visualization and affirmations allow you to change your beliefs, assumptions, and opinions about the most important person in your life — YOU! They allow you to harness the 18 billion brain cells in your brain and get them all working in a singular and purposeful direction.

Your subconscious will become engaged in a process that transforms you forever. The process is invisible and doesn’t take a long time. It just happens over time, as long as you put in the time to visualize and affirm, surround yourself with positive people, read uplifting books and listen to audio programs that flood your mind with positive, life-affirming messages.

Repeat your affirmations every morning and night for a month and they will become an automatic part of your thinking — they will become woven into the very fabric of your being.
© 2006 Jack Canfield
Jack Canfield, America’s Success Coach, is the founder and co-creator of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul and the nation's leading authority on Peak Performance. If you're ready to jump-start your life, make more money, and have more fun and joy in all that you do, get your FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now at www.JackCanfield.com

How do You React to Conflict?

We can have several reactions to conflict, depending on what past experiences have taught us:

• Fight fire with fire and answer with more defensiveness, including verbal and physical violence.
• Deny the conflict, hide inside and avoid future conversations on problematic issues.
• Give up and go along with others, forgetting our own interests and finally compromising our souls.
• Decide to get our own way no matter what, and do "passive aggressive resistance" without ever getting to discuss our behavior and its deep motivations and its impact on the other.
• Go the way of skilful negotiations, and learn how to talk about difficult issues with the people we love, and explore different sides of a dispute and get an agreement.

If you have experienced your share of conflict in your life—and who hasn’t? — You may even be afraid of conflict. Perhaps you lost big time when you tried to impose your views on your spouse; or your best friendship ended in sour recriminations that nobody wanted, but nobody could stop.

What is the lesson here?

What did you learn?

Is there another way?


In the future, you may decide to escape; to do anything to avoid another conflict situation: giving in to other’s demands without being satisfied yourself, only to keep the peace; settling for second-best without getting your needs met, and in general taking refuge in a place where you don’t ever have to be bothered with anything related to confrontation, challenge, or friction.

If you adopt this response while in a relationship, the demands of the other person will be seen as intrusive and could lead, on your part, to all kinds of passive aggressive behaviors - sabotage, and self-isolation, to name a few - which will escalate the conflict. You may go deep inside yourself, in fear and mistrust, and refuse to get near other people again, preferring loneliness to anger and mistrust.

Sometimes, people never have learned the necessary skills to assert themselves with respect, to challenge toxic situations or to negotiate their own needs’ satisfaction with others! People never obtained the skills to negotiate with loved ones with little risk to the relationship, and this is the problem here, because now, they don't know what to do. You can see clearly how this terrible lack of skills compounded their loneliness and frustration.

Rremember that all avoidance ways of dealing with conflict will help you stay away from confrontation but will never provide you with the warmth, intimacy and confirmation you are always craving for! Besides, there is no learning of more productive strategies, if you keep avoiding. So, face on and do some positiveconflicting, right?