Should We Get A Divorce If We Fight All The Time?
Over the weekend, I received an email from a wife who was at the end of her rope
. She told me that she and her husband were only interacting these days by fighting. She said that she honestly felt like she was living in a "war zone." She worried about the affect of this fighting on her kids. She did not want to continue to live this way.
Still, she had to admit that she still loved her husband and she felt pretty strongly that he still loved her. They were sometimes affectionate with each other when they "made up" after their fights. But, there was no doubt that there was way too much tension in the air way too regularly. The wife wanted to know if I thought she should divorce her husband to put a stop to all of the fighting and tension. I'll share with you some of the advice I gave her in the following article.
Getting A Divorce Versus Fighting All The Time: To start the discussion off, I asked the wife very directly if she wanted a divorce. She did not even have to think about it. She gave me a very definitive "no," but then quickly prefaced it with "but I don't want to continue to live with all of this fighting either."
There's no denying that constant fighting is a very detrimental environment in which to raise a family. This sort of pressure cooker environment is not conducive to any one's mental health. Plus, the children are growing up witnessing a relationship in which arguing, belittling, and raising voices is the way that folks work out their problems. This was certainly not the example that the wife wanted to set. She wanted to show her children a positive way to get their points across and to negotiate their wants and needs. And, she was very upset to see her children exhibiting aggressive and angry behavior.
So, it's pretty clear that constant fighting is detrimental to every one in the house. No one can deny this. But, having divorced parents is not always a great alternative either. The wife's parents were divorced and she still felt the void and the sadness that followed her parents' divorce, even as a grown woman. She told me that seeing her father's truck drive away from her family home is probably the most persuasive memory that she has from her childhood and it saddened her to think that she might be headed to similar place with her own children. But, she could not see a way out of either problem.
Stopping The Cycle Of Fighting To Prevent The Impending Divorce: I asked her whether she had ever focused on trying to improve the fighting or the combative way that the two of them interacted. She told me that she had and that sometimes things got briefly better, but they almost always reverted back to their old ways eventually.
After discussing this for a little while, it became pretty clear that the two of them were mostly fighting over the same few topics over and over again. And, because nothing ever got solved for good, both parties were becoming increasingly frustrated and hopeless and so the fights escalated and took on more negative tone over time.
Another factor in this cycle of behavior was that the fights were becoming very common place in their home. This had become the normal way that they interacted and expressed their feelings. Eventually, they both almost begin to feed off of this. It became part of their routine that one person would push and then the other would push back and so on over and over again.
Obviously, the first step toward breaking this cycle was to change the way that the wife responded to the husband's little barbs and pushes. See, the wife had to accept that she could not control her husband's behavior. She could not really shame, force, or guilt him into changing. This decision had to come solely from him. And, I felt that this decision was much more likely to come if the environment began to become more supportive and less combative.
The wife felt very strongly that if the two of them could solve the issues that were coming up over and over again, then the fighting would become less common. This was certainly possible, but here are some flaws with that thinking. First, they had tried to work through these issues for years, so what was going to be so different this time? Second, even if they did "solve" these hot button issues, other stressors would always come up. This is just real life. So, they needed to learn new ways to negotiate and compromise to ensure long term success and the wife could begin this process by focusing on herself.
There were many considerations to this, but I did not want for her to get overwhelmed so that she would forget what she was trying to do. So, I gave her just a few things to focus on. First, I wanted for her to break up the cycle that the fighting would typically take. When she felt the urge to lash out at her husband, I wanted for her to instead to take out a pad of paper and write down her issue in only one sentence. The tendency for this couple was to "pile on" the complaints when they became angry at each other so that one issue would give rise to several issues.
I wanted for her to give herself at least an hour from when she wrote down her point to when she brought it up. This would give her time to calm down and this would force her to keep the topic to what was really bothering her. So, in this way, she could control it when she was the one with the issue. I wanted for her to address the ONE issue that was bothering her most once she had the time to calm down.
Next, I wanted for her to change the way that she responded to her husband when he approached her with a topic that had gotten them in trouble in the past. So, I told her that the next time the husband tried to pick a fight with her, I wanted for her to calmly and directly say that this topic often got them into trouble and started a cycle of fighting. I wanted for her to calmly ask the husband to wait to discuss this until they could both be calm. Then, I wanted for her to offer a specific time for the discussion like after the kids were in bed.
This way, the husband was less likely to follow her around or to feel that she was just ignoring his concerns. When the time came to discuss it, I wanted for the wife to lie this on the table. There was nothing wrong with telling him that she was troubled by their fighting and wanted to stop this. To that end, she was not going to engage with him when she felt that the fighting was going to happen. Instead, she was going to give herself time to calm down, pinpoint the real issue, and discuss it when they were both calm which would be much later.
In this way, they were not denying their problems but they were breaking the cycle that had become so common place and they were learning new and better ways to interact and work through the issues. I also suspected that as they broke this cycle, these large issues would become much more manageable as you would no longer have two angry and resistant people who were unable to compromise.
I felt strongly that this couple could learn new skills because this is what I had to do to save my own marriage. Unfortunately, I waited much longer than this couple and it almost costs me my marriage. Luckily though, I was able to use new skills to craft a marriage that was much better than the old one. You can reada
very personal story on my blog at
http://isavedmymarriage.com/ Should We Get A Divorce If We Fight All The Time?
By: Leslie Cane
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