What Happens When You and Your Partner’s Triggers Clash?

You and your partner are compatible, but your triggers may not be.

Conflict is part of any healthy romantic partnership. The best strategy for long term relationships is not to avoid conflict, but to learn how to repair any rifts as effectively as possible. Most couples can get stuck in unhealthy cycles where it feels like they are having the same fight over and over again, and communication has fallen apart. Some fights feel different, however- they feel like they go from zero to sixty in an instant, you struggle to think rationally at all, and you both feel like you’re fighting for your life. These are signs that you are struggling with a trigger from some difficult time in your past, possibly a traumatic event or time. When your trigger is activated you may feel amped up, furious, scared or anxious. You might also feel numb, shut down, frozen or exhausted alternatively. Both are examples of being emotionally dysregulated and struggling to access the thinking part of your brain instead of just the feeling and/or survival parts. When partners share the same trigger, or have triggers that amplify each other, fights can get explosive. 

Fights where partners are activated can be frightening, isolating, and disheartening. 

Imagine you grew up with one or more caregivers that tended to not trust you or listen to you, or didn’t believe you about an important, difficult event. This can leave you with a wound that shows up during conflicts with your partner. If you both have the same trigger, any conflicts with significant misunderstandings or ineffective communication can lead to a major fight that goes off the rails. You might both be so desperately trying to feel heard and understood that you are making no progress at all. Another example is a partnership where one person has a deep rooted fear of abandonment because of the loss of a parent when they were young. Their partner, on the other hand, had an abusive first romantic relationship and is now fearful of feeling trapped or controlled. It’s easy to see that when triggered, those partners might have very incompatible needs. Reaching out to a therapist that specializes in both couples and trauma can be the first step to breaking these destructive cycles that pushes partners further apart. 

The right therapist can create a safe space for you to create new, healthier patterns together. 

A clinician trained in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy can help you uncover deeper emotions and their origins as well as identify the current cycles your conflicts are stuck in. You can then focus on more fully understanding each other's experiences when heavy conflicts arise and disagreements become fights. Your therapist can help you create new, healthier patterns by assisting you in recovering from activation more quickly and easily. A couples therapist trained in a reprocessing method like Brainspotting can help you reprocess past events to reduce the frequency and severity of triggers to reduce the likelihood of future fights. The traumatic or difficult times we have experienced are not something that we are “stuck with” or that we have to accept as a permanent part of ourselves- they can instead be an opportunity for growth and a method for increasing closeness and vulnerability with our partners.