BEWARE OF FAKE FIGHTS

A FAKE FIGHT is synonymous with Mind-less CONFLICT.

You are facing your partner, expressing your differences…and suddenly it goes haywire. They don’t respond the way you want them to respond. “They are not there for me”, you surmise. You feel inadequate or not cared about. A warning bell goes off in your head…Danger! Danger!

Anxiety, much more commonly known as FEAR, can spread like a wild fire between two people who depend on each other for validation.

Your survival instincts take over and that voice of sanity in your mind is pushed aside. Fight or flight!


You see the whites of the enemy's eyes and the enemy is your partner! “He’s making me feel bad. She’s wrong and I am right.”

A talk about differences can become a burning fake fight when two people are mindless about how they are judging instead of accepting their partner, attacking instead of attuning to their attachment anxieties, and weakening instead of affirming their connection.

The problem with fake fights is that both partners are:
1) Don’t even know what you are fighting about. What they are REALLY fighting about are their needs for love, validation, and control.
2) trying to express their needs using harsh feelings such as anger, which pushes their partner further away
3)“listening” to their partner with DEFENSIVENESS AND JUDGMENT, which only serves to raise their partners anxiety level.

The formula to stop the fake fights is:
ACCEPT - maintain more flexibility and be less reactive with your judgments and expectations. In order for your relationship to succeed, what you like about your partner needs to be 5 times stronger than what you don't like.
ATTUNE respond to and soothe each others anxiety to restore feelings of safety and connection.
AFFIRM - put the connection, the "WE," not the Me first. Ask yourself, "What does the WE need now?