Ways to Create Peace in a Difficult Relationship
In your healthy relationships, you need to create a culture of being able to be calm and ensure safety or peace when you are together. When you have that in place, you can have really great conversations and an easy sense of connection.
What happens when you start to have difficulties in your relationship, though, is you often lose the ability to be calm together (if you ever had it to begin with), and you certainly start to eliminate the feeling of safety and peace with each other as well. Typically fight, flight, or freeze kicks in and an icy distance or a fiery conflict feels inevitable. It's really frustrating, and my heart goes out to you if this is the dynamic you live in.
What to Do When Peace is Fragile
So if this is your reality - what do you do about it? How do you tolerate the ongoing frustration and start to communicate better?
You have to start by revamping both your mindset and your communication. Here's how:
Old Mindset: I share freely and hope that this person will care about me and my concerns. I'll enter in with the hope of good connection, even though we have not had any lately. I'll keep begging or insisting on a different way from them. I'll trust that this person can do it this time.
New Mindset: Because I understand through my lived experience that we cannot create safety together (because one or both of us are unregulated or unable to do so), I am willing to learn new ways to preserve my own safety and peace. This will be different and unfamiliar but could create more health for me.
Old Communication: The minute I feel misunderstood I double down on my explanation, I blame, I criticize, I beg, I defend, and I chase every possible rabbit trail. I shut down, I react, and I do that familiar thing I do. Or - I use all my perfect tools and still don't get anywhere.
New Communication: I speak from my values - “This matters to me, and so I'll be addressing it independently.” I do not need to be understood - ”This is my perspective." I shut off conversations that are damaging - “I'm happy to discuss this when we can both commit to ensuring a calm safe environment in which to do so.” I note the dynamic - “We seem to have a pattern of not hearing each other, and the impact of that is starting to wear on me.” I use brief, informative communication, and I hang on to myself.
The best part of this shift? You don't have to become better at getting someone else to be calm, safe, reasonable, or understanding. You can become better at recognizing when that's not available and knowing what you are going to do next. It is an important return of power to you at a time when your influence can feel really small. This is how you reverse engineer a boundary and get clear on where it is that you can and cannot connect with someone.
This shift lets you exhibit a very different kind of strength. There is something incredibly freeing about realizing you don't have to create peace in your relationship in order to create peace for yourself.
If finding peace in your relationship is challenging for you, I can help. Schedule a complimentary call here to get started.
About the Author:
Hi, I’m Andrea - a relationship coach, author, and speaker. I help people navigate all kinds of relationship challenges - whether you’re preparing for marriage, improving communication in a longer marriage, or finding your footing during or after a difficult breakup. I help clients understand what is happening beneath the surface and what must shift for relationships to become more steady, intentional, and sustainable. My clients reduce escalation, improve communication, and create a more connected, sustainable dynamic - and I can teach you how to do it too. Let’s talk.
