Walnut Creek, California
It is one argument. You have had it four hundred times.
You could both perform the other person's lines. The subject changes and the shape never does. Somewhere along the way it stopped being about the dishes and became about whether you matter to each other.
This might be you if
- You can predict their next sentence and you say yours anyway
- One of you pursues and one of you goes quiet
- You have agreed on the solution more than once and it did not hold
- You are careful with each other now, and you did not used to be
The argument is not the problem
It is the alarm. Underneath almost every repeating fight is one person who is afraid of being abandoned and one who is afraid of being swallowed, and each one's protection is precisely the other's trigger. That is why it loops. You are both defending, and neither of you is being unreasonable.
Why two hours, and not fifty minutes
Couples sessions run two hours. In fifty minutes you are still explaining the incident when the time is called, which means you leave with the wound open. Two hours is enough to get underneath it and to come back up together before you walk out of the room. As I put it, it is almost two sessions in one.
What changes
Not that you never disagree. That the disagreement stops meaning what it has been meaning. Most couples notice the difference first in how quickly they recover, which goes from three days to about ten minutes.
How I would work with this
You are not broken. Your relationship is not either.
Start with a free 15 minute call
We talk, you ask questions, and you decide if this is right for you. No pressure either way.