by Sara Stanizai, LMFT.
You can know exactly what's wrong with your relationship, be able to give a TED talk on it, and still be completely unable to stop it.
Most couples who sit down with me have already done the work of naming their own dynamic somewhere else, sometimes years of somewhere else. They know who pursues and who withdraws, they know what sets it off, and they're still stuck, because understanding a pattern and actually interrupting it in real time are two entirely different skills, and almost nobody ever gets taught the second one.
Here's what's usually going on underneath the fight you haven't been able to fix.