Why Relationships Matter

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From the time we're born, women are taught that our job is to take care of other people.

When our partner is angry, women's first response is usually to try to restore the bond no matter what.

The first step is to resist the urge to immediately make your partner OK when conflict arises.

Before I describe what I believe is the most important shift we can make when dealing with a partner’s defensiveness and anger, I want to remind us of the strong conditioning we receive as women in our culture—what we’ve been taught to believe and, thus, the soil within which this shift must grow and be trusted.

From the time we're born, women are taught that our job is to take care of other people; our value and worth rest on our capacity to be helpful, selfless, and kind—in short, to make other people happy. We’re raised to feel responsible for everyone else’s okayness, and guilty if we can’t meet others' wants and needs. At the same time, we’re taught to be peacemakers and empaths, to smooth choppy relational waters, and keep everyone pleased.

This conditioning plays a strong part in why women respond to a partner’s anger the way we do. When our partner refuses to “hear” us, to empathize with the pain they’ve caused us, when they blame us for our experience, and emotionally attack us for “aggressing” them with our pain, our first instinct, often, is to (immediately) make everything OK, “win them back,” and, essentially, convince our partner that he should still love us—we won’t be “bad” again, won’t accuse him of doing something that wasn’t OK—for us. Our first response is usually to try to restore the bond no matter what, get things back to OK, no matter what the cost to ourselves. And so we bury our pain, abandon ourselves—our focus narrows and becomes singular: to scrub all conflict from the relational space.

The Role of Survival Instincts in Relationship Conflict

But........

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