The Power of Conflict: How Disagreements Can Strengthen Your Relationship
Can conflict actually help you connect? The whole reason that I wanted to do this episode is to help you to understand that conflict can be a great asset in your marriage. Conflict can actually be a great asset in any relationship if you understand how to use it. Conflict is like a tool. And if you learn how to use the tool correctly, then you’re going to find that it’s not such a scary thing when conflict shows up in your relationships. So we have a jam-packed episode today, you guys. I’m going to be sharing lots and lots of skills, tools, and resources with you.
But before we get into all of that, I want to ask you to do me a favor. Right after you finish listening to this episode, I would love for you to write a podcast review, especially if you are listening to this on Apple podcast or Spotify. Let me tell you why there are so many people who find out about this podcast by word of mouth. Shaun and I were in a restaurant, eating dinner with some friends. We were outside, and a couple walked past the table, and they were like, “I love your podcast. I love your podcast.” And I was like, Oh, my gosh, I’m feeling famous. You know what I mean? And it was such a cool experience. But then, about ten minutes later, this other woman walks by our table, and she’s like, “Oh, my gosh, I love your podcast. I listen to it every single week!”
Why am I sharing this with you? Because both the couple and the woman who walked by heard about my podcast from a friend. So when you share this podcast, you have no idea the seeds that you are planting in your friends’ lives. They might hear an episode that I did way back in 2020 or 2021 that will help to save their marriage. So by writing a simple review, you are helping this podcast to be found by people who really need it. So thank you so much for doing that.
Let’s Talk About Conflict
So I like to talk about conflict, okay? I am not conflict-avoidant at all. Now, when I say that to people, it doesn’t mean that I like to stir up trouble either. I don’t like to create conflict. I’m just not afraid of it because I have learned that conflict is a tool in your marriage. But it’s also a tool in any relationship. If you’re a parent and you’re dealing with conflict with your children, you can use that conflict to draw you closer to the relationship that you have to teach you more about your child, to teach you more about yourself. And of course, you can just sparse that out into any relationship that you’re in. So I want to be able to give us some real practical takeaways today. As you listen to this episode, we’re going to be talking about conflict as connection.
If you’ve listened to my show for a while, you know that I talk about connection a lot. I’m going to give you five quick reasons, and I might throw in a bonus as to how conflict is connection or how conflict shows up as connection in your relationships. So the first thing is that conflict gets you talking. When you start to have issues in your relationship or issues in your marriage, there’s some sort of disagreement, right? It’s going to keep you talking. Now, you might not always say the right things or say them in the right way, but at least you’re talking. You’re getting your feelings out. You’re sharing your emotions. You’re being authentic, you’re being honest about how you truly feel and what that particular thing is bringing up in you.
Conflict Teaches You How to Speak Up
So let’s say, for example, you are having a disagreement with your spouse about parenting. My goodness, that happens to all of us in that connection. It might come up that you realize that when you were growing up, your parents were overly critical of you. Maybe you’ve never really thought about that before and how that shows up in your parenting, but you get into an argument with your spouse and you’re like, you sound just like my dad. You sound just like my mom. My mom was always overbearing. My mom was always critical of me. And you didn’t even realize that you were saying that until the words came out.
Now, your spouse might not appreciate that you just said that about them, but if your spouse and you can take a step back and go, whoa, wait a minute. Okay, so this isn’t really about my spouse. This is about my parents, and I’m being triggered by something that my spouse is doing. But, at the end of the day, I just had an epiphany. I just realized that I’m still dealing with some trauma or some struggles or some bad memories of how I grew up and how I felt like my parents treated me. And I’m kind of taking that out on my spouse. So when you’re in conflict, it can help you to connect to your spouse because it gets you to talk. It gets you to say the things that you’ve been stuffing down inside. It gets you to say the things that you’re thinking about, but you’re not necessarily talking about. And so in that regard, conflict is a great connector.
Conflict Teaches You When to Shut Up
Now, number two is going to seem like a contradiction to what I just said in number one, and it’s that conflict can get you to shut up. We just talked about it can get you to talk, but it can also get you to be quiet. It can get you to shut up when you’re in conflict with your spouse. There’s a point where you realize, I’ve said all the things that I need to say there’s really nothing else to say, and so I’m done. Now, when I say I’m done, I don’t mean like, I’m done. I’m walking out of the marriage or I’m walking out of the relationship. I mean, I’m done talking about that issue because there’s really nothing else to be said about it. You all when we learn the appropriate times to shut our mouths, it can be incredibly helpful in our relationship.
I was talking to someone today, a client of mine, and I told her, I said, there are times in our relationship that we have to learn. It’s just like driving a car. You got to learn how to press the gas pedal down, and then sometimes you have to learn how to apply the brakes. So if you’re always pressing that gas (i.e. working on your marriage, working on your relationship, talking about communication, fixing your communication), that’s like the gas pedal . . . Well, at some point, your car is going to run out of gas. You have got to learn how to slow down sometimes, how to put the brakes on sometimes. And this is what I mean by silence or not talking and how that can actually help to create the connection in your marriage or your relationship.
It’s okay if you’re not talking about all the issues and all the problems every single day. It’s okay if you and your spouse get to a point and you’re like, I really don’t know what else to say about this particular thing. Take a breather. Now, you do need to come back at some point to that problem so that you could figure out where we go from here. Even if there’s no “solution” to that problem, you still need to kind of tie up that loose end and say, we’re not agreed here. Maybe there’s no “solution” here, but where do we go from here? What’s our next move? What’s our next step? But before you get to that point, it’s okay if there’s some sort of putting the brakes on, if there’s some sort of pause, if there’s some sort of some quiet. I think it was about two years ago, I put a poll up in a Facebook group that I managed. It’s called Christian Marriages and Relationships. Shameless plug. If you want to join that group, head on over to Facebook and join.
I put up a poll in the group, and I asked them, I said, what do you think is more damaging in a relationship, silent treatments or angry outbursts? And it was an incredible post, and I love hearing from some of our members in that group. And actually, now that I think about it, I should probably do a whole podcast episode on that because we must talk about what are some of the benefits of both. Now, I don’t believe that anger is really something that we are going to use as a helpful tool in marriage, but we can learn a lot about ourselves and our spouses when anger does show up. But I digress. Number two is that conflict can help you to connect to your spouse by getting you to shut up sometimes.
Conflict Help You Connect By Teaching You About Your Partner
Number three, conflict can act as a connection because it teaches you about your partner when you’re angry about something in your marriage or when your partner, I should say, is angry about something in the marriage. It can teach you about them. It could teach you about their passion points, their values, what they hold dear, what they hold precious, what their opinions are, and what their perspective is. I am a big proponent of being a lifelong student of your partner. None of us should ever get to this point in our marriages or in our relationships where we feel like, I know my partner. We’re good. There’s nothing else to learn. I think when you get to that point in your relationship, your relationship has either died or is on the way to a slow death, we will never learn everything there is to know about our partner, because guess what? We grow. We evolve, and we change.
So when you’re in conflict, that can be a great teacher. You can start to learn, oh, wow. I did not know that my husband was insecure about such and such an issue. Oh, wow. I didn’t know that. My wife was tender about that specific subject. So Shaun is a man of few words, and Shaun does not get angry very often. You guys like, honestly, I could probably count on one hand the times that I’ve seen him angry in our whole almost 24 years of marriage. But there are times when I push that little red button, and he will respond right. In some kind of way, and I’m like, Whoop. Okay, well, I guess he doesn’t like when I say that, or I guess he doesn’t like it when I do that, right?
Read about John Gottman’s Thoughts on Criticism & Contempt
I can look at that conflict, and I can be like, oh, my gosh, look at him getting upset with me. Who does he think he is getting upset with me? He doesn’t have a reason to get upset with me. What about what he did yesterday? What about what he did last week? I can do that. Or I can say, you know what? What is Shaun teaching me about himself right now? What am I learning about this man right now? Oh, I’m learning that he feels disrespected when I come at him in this kind of way, or he feels dishonored when I say this or when I don’t say something to him. So in that regard, I can look at that conflict as a teacher. It’s teaching me about my husband. If you look at conflict the same way it should be teaching you about your husband or your wife, about your partner. So that’s just yet another way that conflict can be a connector because it teaches us about our spouse.
Conflict in Marriage Teaches You New Skills
The fourth thing that conflict does is that it teaches you new skills when you’re in conflict and you can’t figure out a solution, right? Like, have you ever been in a conversation with your partner? And it’s just like I said, the number two tip that I share, is that conflict makes you shut up, right? There are times, you guys, that conflict will teach you how to approach the problem differently. What do they say the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing, expecting different results, right? So if you are doing the same thing and you are not getting the results that you want, it’s probably time to change it up.
It’s teaching you how to deal with the problem differently. Because if you do the same old things, you’ll get the same old results. So if yelling and screaming and arguing is not working, which, newsflash, it does not work, then when you’re in conflict, you can learn some new skills. Okay, well, maybe the yelling thing isn’t really working for us. So what can we do now? What’s next? What’s new? And you’ll learn. Okay, let’s do this. I remember Shaun and I were in our mastermind that we did last month with some couples. And Shaun told them a story about how he and I had this disagreement once, and he said, “Hey, Dana, I need to talk to you about something, but I don’t want you to respond for 24 hours.”
You guys, I thought I was going to die! 24 hours without talking is a long time. I like to talk. Okay? So I was like, oh, my gosh, I’m not going to be able to say anything that this man for 24 hours. Now, he didn’t mean like, I can’t talk to him, but he meant he did not want me to talk about that situation. And I was like, well, what am I supposed to do with 24 hours? Oh, my gosh, I have so many words and so many thoughts. But you know what I did? I thought I thought about what he said. I thought about what I said. I thought about what he meant. I thought about what I should be thinking, and something magical happened in 24 hours, you guys. And it was that my response to Sean was so different 24 hours later than it would have been if I would have given him an answer right away. He’s a wise man, isn’t he?
There are times in your relationships when you’re going to learn a new skill, a new tool. Shaun didn’t get that out of a book. It was really spontaneous because he was tired of us dealing with this issue the same old way. So he’s like, let’s switch it up. Let’s do something different. And now that has become one of our favorite go-to tools. When we are in an impasse, when we’re dealing with conflict that we really can’t get through, it’s like, okay, let’s come back to this thing in 24 hours. You think about it. I’ll think about it. And guess what? In 24 hours, you guys, we almost always reconcile because whatever that thing was isn’t even important anymore.
We’ve had so much time to think about what is the real issue and what we’re really feeling and what we’re really dealing with, that whatever we were upset about, it doesn’t matter. Usually in 24 hours. So that might be a tool that you can use in your relationship or when you’re in conflict, what is something else that you can do? What’s another tool that you can use to bring to that conflict to get a different result? And that is one of the greatest things that conflict teaches us. They teach us or it, I should say, teaches us new skills, new tools.
Conflict in Relationships Shows You Who the Real Enemy Is
Number five is that conflict teaches you who the real enemy is. I say this so many times that I feel like a broken record. Your spouse is not the problem. The problem is the problem. You need to look at your spouse, maybe right now if you’re with them, or later on when you see them, and tell them you are not the problem. The problem is the problem. When you deal with conflict in your relationship, then you get to realize that, like, my spouse is not my enemy. We are on the same team here. We are together fighting a common enemy. And when you go through conflict, if you’re aware and if you’re wise enough to understand that, then you can get through anything together because you’ll realize that your spouse isn’t the problem. Your spouse isn’t really the issue.
Your spouse is your warrior friend. They really are. I know you might not think of your spouse in that way, but they really are your warrior friend. Even if they’re not treating you nicely, even if you guys maybe aren’t even talking right now, maybe you’re in the middle of a silent treatment right now and you’re like, they are not my warrior friend. I do not like them right now. Like, I get it, y’all, I get it. But your spouse is your warrior friend. And so when you can actually go through conflict with them instead of against them, then you realize what the real enemy is.
Now, if you are a Christian listening to this podcast, you will know what I’m about to say. The real enemy is the enemy. It is the enemy himself who was out to steal, kill, and destroy, who hates marriage, who hates to see you thrive, who hates to see you win, who wants to destroy your marriage, wants to destroy your family, wants to destroy your legacy, wants to destroy your testimony. He’s the real enemy. And what he does is he puts these little smoke and mirrors up in front of us and we begin to think, oh my gosh, I married the wrong person. Oh my gosh, my spouse doesn’t love me anymore. Or oh my gosh, I don’t love my spouse anymore. I’ve fallen out of love. Maybe John down the street is better suited for me. Maybe Susie down in the break room is actually who I really need to be with. And that’s his play. He’s done the same thing since the beginning of time.
A Lesson About Conflict and the Blame Game
Adam and Eve and the Garden blamed each other for the very thing that the enemy had caused them to do. So we have got to start getting wise, you all, and stop fighting each other and realize that we have a common enemy. Now, you might be thinking, literally, Dana, is Satan himself really against me and my marriage? Yes. Okay, but there are times that it might not be that deep, right? You might have an enemy that is more tangible or more in your face if you want to put it that way. You could be dealing with, let’s say you’re just dealing with unforgiveness. Well, unforgiveness is the enemy. It’s not your spouse. You could be dealing with an addiction. Well, the addiction is the enemy, not your spouse. Now, that’s not a reason to excuse bad behavior and be like, oh, it’s not your fault, it’s just the enemy. No, we still have to take personal responsibility, right? Because none of us are puppets on a string. We still have free will, we still have choice. But at the end of the day, we do need to understand that there is a real enemy out there who is seeking to devour, who’s seeking to devour your marriage. And so when you understand that, then you can start taking your focus off of your spouse as the bad guy or the bad girl, and you can start to look at who’s really behind the destruction of your marriage. Y’all, I could do an entire podcast on that alone. It’s so important that you understand that fact now because I love you, I’m going to give you a bonus number six reason as to how conflict is actually connection.
Conflict Can Be Great for Make-Up Sex
Are you all ready for this one? Conflict helps you to have great makeup sex. I mean, it just does. You know, I was going there. It’s true, it’s true. Think of all the great makeup sex that you have had in your marriage. It’s incredible. You’re like, oh my gosh, I haven’t talked to my spouse. I haven’t touched them because I’m mad at them. And so, like, when their toe grazes my leg in the middle of the night, I snatch my leg away because I don’t want them touching me at all. Am I in your house? Does anybody else do that other than me? Am I crazy self, right? It’s like when you are in conflict with your spouse, you don’t want to be touched, you don’t want to connect with them. You don’t want to look at them, you don’t want to be near them. You’re upset with them. And then when you make up, it’s like all of that energy has just been like building up, building up, building up. And now you get to release it and the angels sing in heaven and it’s glorious. It’s amazing. Now, don’t go getting on your spouse’s nerves just to have great makeup sex. Like, over time, that’s going to get old. But should you find yourself in conflict, just understand that in about two or three days, you’re going to be great. You’re going to be like, oh, okay.
Funny, funny story; I remember. Well, it wasn’t funny then, it wasn’t funny then at all. It was pretty traumatic. But it’s funny now because I’m on the other side of it. I remember Shaun and I had gone through this in-home separation. This is back in crazy, crazy times of our marriage, and we’ve been through many different crazy cycles. But this particular time we were going to do like this in-home separation because we didn’t want the kids to know how bad it was. And so we were in this in-home separation and I was like, don’t even think about coming in my room and getting in my bed. We are separated, okay? And so Shaun was like on his nicest behavior. Of course, he’s trying to get back in my good graces. And I’m like, no, we’re doing this in-home separation thing. And you guys, there was something about just being in the same house with this man. It was like electrical charges were flying all over the place. And I was trying to put on my game face and be strong and be like, you know what? No, we are doing this separation thing. And he was like, hey, can I give you a massage? No, do not touch me. But then it was like two days later, I’d be like, well, maybe just a shoulder massage. That’s it, nothing lower, just a shoulder massage. And then like ten minutes later we were like having sex or something. I’m serious. That just is the truth. That’s my truth.
That’s how it happens. Why am I telling you this? Because when you are married and you go through these seasons of conflict, on the other side of that, it can bring you closer together. It can bring you closer together. Not just sexual intimacy, but emotional intimacy. There is a bond that is created, yes, through sex, that helps the other forms of intimacy in your marriage. So when you’re able to look at conflict as this thing is, it’s not so scary, it’s not so detrimental. It doesn’t have to come and destroy your marriage. You don’t have to be afraid of it. You don’t have to shy away from it. You don’t have to pretend that conflict isn’t there. You can look at conflict and say, you know what? I am grateful for this conflict because it’s going to get us to talking. It’s also going to get us to shut up. It’s also going to teach me about my partner. It’s also going to teach us some new skills. It’s also going to teach us who the real enemy is. And then it’s also going to help us to have some incredible sex. Conflict is not that scary. So I hope, my friends, that this episode is going to help you the next time you find yourself in conflict to see all the beautiful benefits that can come out of it if you understand that conflict can actually be a support tool for you and your marriage. So that wraps up our episode today.
I’m so glad that you are here with us today. I’m so glad that you are a faithful listener of this podcast. And maybe this is your first time. You’re like, I ain’t a faithful listener. This is my first time. You’re going to be a faithful listener now, aren’t you? So again, as I stated at the top of the show, I would appreciate it so much, you guys, if you would just take a minute or two and write a podcast review. You can do that on Apple podcast or Spotify and tell everybody you know about this podcast. I love meeting listeners, like I just told you, right here in Virginia Beach in my local area, where people will come up to me that I don’t even know and say, I love your show, I love your podcast. That just makes me know that I’m hitting the target. And this is why Ido this, you guys.
I do this podcast for you because I want to help you in your marriages. I want to give you some practical tools. I don’t want to just show up every week and just talk about nothing. I’m right where you are. I’m building my marriage too. I’m growing my marriage, too. I’m reading the books. I’m going to the conferences. I’m building just like you’re building. So let’s build together. Let’s thrive together. Let’s grow together. You can find the show notes of this podcast at realrelationshiptalk.com/episode146, and oh, I can’t believe I forgot to say this. A couple of years ago, I think it was in 2021, it may have been 2022, I did an episode called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It was episode 88. And if you’ve never heard of what the Four Horsemen are. You have got to listen to that episode. It’s actually John Gottman who’s, like, relationship guru extraordinaire. He came up with these four horsemen, these four really detrimental, destructive things coming out of a conflict that will destroy any relationship. So make sure that you listen to that one. Again, it’s episode 88. And as we like to end every episode by saying a good relationship is not one that works. A good relationship is one where you put in the work.
Links Mentioned in this Episode:
Join the Christian Marriages & Relationships Group on Facebook
Episode 88: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Take the “How Connected a Partner Are You? Quiz
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