Is Your Marriage in Gridlock?

By Terry Real

Gridlock is what I call that fight that your and your partner have over and over again. It describes the endless dance in which you two play the parts that you learned from when you grew up, and the knee jerk behaviors you fall into.

For example, "scolding mother rebellious son." Every time this boyish husband is irresponsible and says he's going to do something and then doesn't, the wife turns into the scolding mother clicks and tries to control him. He then pouts and says he's going to do it and either does it after the tenth fight or she gets exasperated and say, "Fine! I'll do it myself," to which he smiles to himself feeling like the sly victor when really he's just being a passive-aggressive jerk.

Being passive-aggressive means getting back at someone by what you don’t do. There's an old joke that illustrates this: A sadist and a masochist walk into a bar. The masochist says, "Hit me." The Sadist says, "No."

A lot of marital gridlock is a variation on the parent-child dynamic. Besides the one above, it could be the pursuer/distancer routine where she keeps saying, "We've got to talk," and he keeps saying, "About what?"

If you feel like your marriage is in gridlock or that you have a bad deal, that means you and your partner are stuck in roles that don’t satisfy either of you, and those rolls hold you in an endless cycle of dissatisfaction, taunting and retaliation. You and your partner have the same argument over and over again and nothing gets resolved.

Relational Life Therapy breaks the impasse and unlocks that gridlock to release the potential you have as a couple.

Listen if you had the ideal marriage -- if you were Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Theresa -- you'd always have good self-esteem, you never have bad boundaries, and you would come out from behind walls and actually talk to each other, but what in a real relationship you slip all the time. The key is to recognize it and deal with your role in it so you can resolve the issue instead of getting stuck in that whirlpool of discontent.

The technical term for this is the struggle between first consciousness and second consciousness or the struggle between the adaptive child and the adult parts of you.

You can be "right" or you can be married

I often say, "You can be right or you can be married." Well, the adult part of you says, "Of course, I want to be married," but the adaptive child part of you says, "Well I want to be right," and then behaves with righteous indignation and all kinds of bad behavior like being defensive or being vengeful – whatever those defenses are when you were a child.

The "adaptive child" is what people used to call the "ego." It just wants to be safe. In life, we actually have to teach and grow that part of ourselves into the adult part that wants intimacy.

One of the most important things to understand is that intimacy is scary as hell. The more you saw adults behaving in ways that disturbed you as a child, the more scary the whole idea of a relationship is for you.

To be in a relationship, and especially to be in a marriage, means to be vulnerable. As adults, we don’t want to be vulnerable because we don’t want to be hurt. Thus creates the twin pulls between openness and intimacy.

What we really want is to be completely open and completely intimate and still be completely safe.

The real deal is that If you want to be safe , stay in bed in the morning. There is no such thing as a safe relationship, because in the end one of you dies and leaves the other, and what's so safe about that?

That said, you can be safe inasmuch as you can trust your partner to be accountable and for the most part be respectful.

Will your partner hurt you? Absolutely. Will your partner let you down from time to time, absolutely.

What makes for a great relationship is not that you two are perfect, rather that you can accept each other's imperfections.

You cannot expect to move from gridlock to perfection. It's not about two gods having a relationship. You move from two kids arguing in the sandbox (gridlock) to two adults having a relationship (healthy esteem).

Goint to Bed Angry Can Be The Healthy Choice

So how do you do it? One of the regrettable rubrics of the last twenty years is the notion that "You shouldn't go to bed angry." That's one of the eight million stupid things that pop psychology has put out there. In my own marriage, if I tried to live up to that maxim, I'd be chronically sleep deprived!

When you're in a relationship gridlock, using that logic means that you're just going to stay up and fight. Sometimes you've got to sleep it off like a drunk.

The right thing to do is to wake up in the morning, admit what a jerk you are, and then get on with it.

The way to get out of gridlock is unilateral disarmament. People think that it's about getting your partner to get over himself or herself, but it's really about YOU getting over yourself. That could mean that you break the transaction and go to bed. It does not mean that you have to have a breakthrough in the argument in that very moment.

You're never going to break through the impasse by trying to get your partner to admit that you're right and to do it your way. YOU have to step off the seesaw on your end. You may not get your way or what you want, but you will certainly stop getting what you don't want -- the endless arguing and the feelings of frustration, powerlessness and loneliness that go along with it.