The key to a happy relationship? Understanding why you fight

Why do people have the same fights, over and over again? That's the repetition compulsion, a deeply ingrained psychological phenomenon—but not so deep that it can't be beaten.

Daniel Shapiro, Ph.D., is a world-renowned expert on negotiation and conflict resolution. He founded and directs the Harvard International Negotiation Program, which has pioneered innovative strategies and teaching methodologies to address the human dimensions of conflict resolution. Dr. Shapiro also is an associate professor in psychology at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital and affiliated faculty at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, where he serves as the associate director of the Harvard Negotiation Project. For three years, he chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Conflict Prevention.

He has launched back-channel negotiations to help revitalize formal peace negotiations in a major Middle East conflict, and regularly conducts negotiation trainings for government leaders around the world—including Middle East negotiators, Chinese officials, Serbian members of parliament, and senior U.S. officials. Through nonprofit funding, he developed a conflict management program that now reaches one million youth across more than thirty countries.

He has appeared on dozens of radio and television shows and has contributed to The New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and other popular publications. Dr. Shapiro is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Psychological Association’s Early Career Award and the Cloke-Millen Peacemaker of the Year Award. The World Economic Forum named him a “Young Global Leader.” In his spare time, he plays blues guitar and enjoys playing baseball with his three sports-loving sons.

10 August, 2017

Dan Shapiro: So how many times have you found yourself at work and you get into the same conflict again and again with that same person at work? Or how many weekends have you spent arguing with your spouse or your kid at home? The conflict might be different from day to day, week to week, but the dynamic is the same. This is what Sigmund Freud originally called the repetition compulsion. And this is the fact that we all tend to repeat the same dysfunctional patterns of behavior again and again and again and again even though our conscious mind says, “Don’t do that, don’t do that, don’t say that, don’t say that!”—this is the repetition compulsion, and it’s more than just a habit. This is a special feature of how our minds tend to work.
Initially Sigmund Freud thought that we human beings, we operate on what he called the pleasure principle. We love pleasure and we like to move away from pain. And then he started working with a whole bunch of people who actually seemed to move from one painful relationship to another.

So you find yourself in one domestic abuse relationship, you get out of it, but then you move to another. You find yourself in a dysfunctional relationship with your subordinates in one organization. You move to a different organization: "But they’re dysfunctional here as well!"
Maybe it’s not just everybody else. Maybe, in part, it’s you. This is the repetition compulsion. Now how do you deal with this thing? The first thing to do is to become aware of it. What is the typical pattern that you tend to fall in. I mean, think right now of a difficult relationship in your own life. It could be in your personal life, it could be in your professional life. How do you deal with conflict in that relationship? How does it start? Does the other side start by saying some little subtle comment that gets under your nerves? And then you decide to walk away for 15 minutes, your face starts to get red, you come back 15 minutes later: “You’re such a jerk!” And you respond like that.

Or is it that one side says something and then you say something back and you very quickly confront? What’s the pattern that you find yourself typically getting into? Note that pattern. That’s your cycle of discord. And there typically is some sort of common thread or trigger, something that tends to commonly trigger those kinds of conflicts. It might be that in your relationship you always feel second rung. “You’re always trying to act so superior to me.” Or it might be that you always feel excluded, and the moment the other side says anything that even subtly demonstrates exclusion, now you’re back in that cycle of discord.

So how do you deal with the repetition compulsion? The first step is to become aware of your cycle of discord. Who says what? Who says what next? Because the moment you know that pattern, you can decide to break any little node in that cycle and you break the whole cycle.
Here’s the frustrating part though—the honest-to-goodness frustrating part. The moment you try to break that pattern it’s going to feel extremely uncomfortable for you, because this is what you know. This is what is natural to who you are in your identity. And the moment you try to change that cycle you’re in a sense threatening a part of your identity—for a good reason, but you’re threatening it. And every part of your body is going to want to move back to the way things were before. Let me give you an example. Let me take the spousal example. Husband and wife get into a conflict. The wife experiences emotions very deeply and needs some time to boil in those emotions before she can talk. The husband wants to get this thing over as quickly as possible. Now you take those two classic individuals and you put them together, you have a real problem, because the husband wants to talk the thing out right away and the wife says, “No, no, no. I want space.” And you have a chase situation, an attack-avoid situation.

My advice—and I’ve worked with couples like this—my advice in that kind of situation, I was in one situation working with a husband and in that situation the advice to the husband was: “You know what? When you start to get into that conflict situation with your wife, don’t immediately try to engage. Take ten minutes break. Tell your wife, 'Let’s take a ten minute break and then let’s talk about this.'”

This gentleman came back to me two weeks later. He said, “This stuff works like magic, but this was the hardest thing in the world to do!” he said. “Because I was there in the bathroom, you know, watching those ten minutes go by, and every thread in my body, every blood vessel and so on was begging me ‘go talk, go talk’, feeling so uncomfortable.”

That’s the lure of that repetition compulsion. But he fought it. Ten minutes later, “Hey, honey, let’s talk.” “Okay, let’s talk.” And they're in a very different place. It’s not easy to fight the repetition compulsion but it is possible. It takes mapping out: what is your cycle? And two, how do you try to break this thing? Uncomfortably try to break it. Over time your habit will change and it’ll feel more comfortable.

Sigmund Freud initially thought humans operated on the 'pleasure principle'—that we run toward pleasure and run away from pain. However, this didn't quite align with what he saw in his office. There, he worked with people who escaped abusive relationships only to end up in a new relationship with the same dangerous dynamic. Many of us have the same fight with a coworker or a loved one, in different forms, over and over again. This led Freud to a turning point in his theory: he dubbed this phenomenon the repetition compulsion, a psychological trap where we repeat the same dysfunctional behavior or fall into the same traumatic circumstances, over and over again. In the video above, Harvard professor Dan Shapiro explains that there is a way to break this cycle of dysfunction and have healthier relationships. It's not easy, but it's worth doing to live a happier and less stressful life. As Sam Harris describes in his book, Waking Up: "My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again." Understanding the way that you fight, and what your conflict triggers are, will stop you living the same destructive patterns on a loop. Dan Shapiro's latest book is Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts.

Dan Shapiro Harvard relationships fight conflict abuse repetition compulsion workplace partner couples therapy relationship advice videos

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A wall of rock exposed by a receding glacier is about crash into the waters below.
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The Barry Glacier gives its name to Alaska's Barry Arm Fjord, and a new open letter forecasts trouble ahead.

Thanks to global warming, the glacier has been retreating, so far removing two-thirds of its support for a steep mile-long slope, or scarp, containing perhaps 500 million cubic meters of material. (Think the Hoover Dam times several hundred.) The slope has been moving slowly since 1957, but scientists say it's become an avalanche waiting to happen, maybe within the next year, and likely within 20. When it does come crashing down into the fjord, it could set in motion a frightening tsunami overwhelming the fjord's normally peaceful waters .

"It could happen anytime, but the risk just goes way up as this glacier recedes," says hydrologist Anna Liljedahl of Woods Hole, one of the signatories to the letter.

The Barry Arm Fjord

Camping on the fjord's Black Sand Beach

Image source: Matt Zimmerman

The Barry Arm Fjord is a stretch of water between the Harriman Fjord and the Port Wills Fjord, located at the northwest corner of the well-known Prince William Sound. It's a beautiful area, home to a few hundred people supporting the local fishing industry, and it's also a popular destination for tourists — its Black Sand Beach is one of Alaska's most scenic — and cruise ships.

Not Alaska’s first watery rodeo, but likely the biggest

Image source: whrc.org

There have been at least two similar events in the state's recent history, though not on such a massive scale. On July 9, 1958, an earthquake nearby caused 40 million cubic yards of rock to suddenly slide 2,000 feet down into Lituya Bay, producing a tsunami whose peak waves reportedly reached 1,720 feet in height. By the time the wall of water reached the mouth of the bay, it was still 75 feet high. At Taan Fjord in 2015, a landslide caused a tsunami that crested at 600 feet. Both of these events thankfully occurred in sparsely populated areas, so few fatalities occurred.

The Barry Arm event will be larger than either of these by far.

"This is an enormous slope — the mass that could fail weighs over a billion tonnes," said geologist Dave Petley, speaking to Earther. "The internal structure of that rock mass, which will determine whether it collapses, is very complex. At the moment we don't know enough about it to be able to forecast its future behavior."

Outside of Alaska, on the west coast of Greenland, a landslide-produced tsunami towered 300 feet high, obliterating a fishing village in its path.

What the letter predicts for Barry Arm Fjord

Moving slowly at first...

Image source: whrc.org

"The effects would be especially severe near where the landslide enters the water at the head of Barry Arm. Additionally, areas of shallow water, or low-lying land near the shore, would be in danger even further from the source. A minor failure may not produce significant impacts beyond the inner parts of the fiord, while a complete failure could be destructive throughout Barry Arm, Harriman Fiord, and parts of Port Wells. Our initial results show complex impacts further from the landslide than Barry Arm, with over 30 foot waves in some distant bays, including Whittier."

The discovery of the impeding landslide began with an observation by the sister of geologist Hig Higman of Ground Truth, an organization in Seldovia, Alaska. Artist Valisa Higman was vacationing in the area and sent her brother some photos of worrying fractures she noticed in the slope, taken while she was on a boat cruising the fjord.

Higman confirmed his sister's hunch via available satellite imagery and, digging deeper, found that between 2009 and 2015 the slope had moved 600 feet downhill, leaving a prominent scar.

Ohio State's Chunli Dai unearthed a connection between the movement and the receding of the Barry Glacier. Comparison of the Barry Arm slope with other similar areas, combined with computer modeling of the possible resulting tsunamis, led to the publication of the group's letter.

While the full group of signatories from 14 organizations and institutions has only been working on the situation for a month, the implications were immediately clear. The signers include experts from Ohio State University, the University of Southern California, and the Anchorage and Fairbanks campuses of the University of Alaska.

Once informed of the open letter's contents, the Alaska's Department of Natural Resources immediately released a warning that "an increasingly likely landslide could generate a wave with devastating effects on fishermen and recreationalists."

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Image source: whrc.org

The obvious question is what can be done to prepare for the landslide and tsunami? For one thing, there's more to understand about the upcoming event, and the researchers lay out their plan in the letter:

"To inform and refine hazard mitigation efforts, we would like to pursue several lines of investigation: Detect changes in the slope that might forewarn of a landslide, better understand what could trigger a landslide, and refine tsunami model projections. By mapping the landslide and nearby terrain, both above and below sea level, we can more accurately determine the basic physical dimensions of the landslide. This can be paired with GPS and seismic measurements made over time to see how the slope responds to changes in the glacier and to events like rainstorms and earthquakes. Field and satellite data can support near-real time hazard monitoring, while computer models of landslide and tsunami scenarios can help identify specific places that are most at risk."

In the letter, the authors reached out to those living in and visiting the area, asking, "What specific questions are most important to you?" and "What could be done to reduce the danger to people who want to visit or work in Barry Arm?" They also invited locals to let them know about any changes, including even small rock-falls and landslides.

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