The Big Four
Four Types of Interpersonal Conflicts.
(1) Solvable Issues. One-time, solvable problems. I think many of us bull-headed people assume that all problems are solvable. They’re not.
(2) Cyclical conflicts. The Gottmans call these problems “perpetual issues.” Unlike solvable problems, they are based on fundamental differences in your personalities, emotional needs, or ideas about how you’d like to live life—and they will never, ever go away. Period. Accept that now.
They can become workable, however. The classic example of this is the slob who is married to a neat-nick: She wants the house hospital-clean; he leaves piles of crap everywhere. Being neat is hard for him, but easy for her.
Even if he commits to putting his stuff away, she can’t really turn him into a neat-nick, and so this is a problem that will wax and wane. His efforts to be neat will gradually fade as he gets busy or stressed or just lazy. She’ll get frustrated and the conflict will resurface. He’ll redouble his efforts, and the conflict will fade again, and so on.
The question is not whether you can get the problem to go away completely—you can’t—but whether or not you can establish a constructive dialogue about it (again, using your superior conflict resolution skills—more coming soon!) and make periodic headway toward solving it.
Cyclical conflicts can actually create intimacy: You’ve worked together to improve a problem, and that feels good. So the question is: Can you arrive at a workable solution, knowing that you will continue to revisit this throughout your time together? These are the lesser-value gems. Can you work with them?
(3) Deal Breakers. What are your deal breakers? Have you ever thought about it? When it comes to yourself and an intimate relationship, it’s important to create a list of deal breakers and share them with your partner ahead of time. What are deal breakers? It’s where you draw a definitive boundary with a partner on an action or inaction because ultimately it will affect the trust. For instance, a deal breaker could be infidelity, for others it could be taking drugs, for others, it could be continually lying and not admitting to it. What are your deal breakers? Use The Deal Breaker List to create your list and keep it close. You can add and modify as you like, and this can only help you in your relationship to understand where your and their boundaries lay.. If you can’t work with those imperfect gems, you’ve got a deal-breaker issue on the table. Abuse is a deal-breaker that sometimes masquerades as a cyclical conflict.
Other deal-breakers aren’t so obvious.
(4) Wounding Problems. Wounding problems are similar to cyclical ones, in that they can be fights you have with your partner over and over and over. The difference is that you never really make any headway on the issue.
Wounding problems generate frustration and hurt, they get worse over time, and they lead to feeling unloved, unaccepted, and misunderstood. These conflicts are characterized by the presence of the four things that the Gottmans have long found to predict divorce: defensiveness, contempt, criticism, and stonewalling (think of talking to a stone wall: The other person is totally disengaged).
Many couples can move their wounding problems into the cyclical conflict category by learning how to fight differently (again, those stellar conflict resolution practices). Spouses who raise their issues with genuine respect and appreciation for their partner tend to engage in radically different discussions than spouses who launch headlong into a fight and hope to “win” it, blaming and vilifying the other and going right for the jugular.
