top of page
Search

You Paid Me to Watch You Fight

Writer: Galen Cole
Galen Cole
Oct 2
8 min read

Updated: Oct 7

Couples tell me therapy is hard. Trust me. Try being the therapist.


I have sat across from a lot of people who pay me more than $400 for 90 minutes to do, in a comfortable office, the exact thing they already do in the kitchen. They fight. They yell. They prosecute. They defend. Then they look at me as if an hour and a half should have fixed a pattern they have been rehearsing for years.


Before we start, I do everything I can to make the deal clear. If you do the same things in front of me that you do everywhere else, and you will not listen or follow directions, I am getting paid to watch a rerun. Worse, I am helping you rehearse the pattern that brought you in. That is not treatment. That is a paid practice session in being ineffective. I will not collude with it.


A good rule of thumb, and I say it out loud before the work begins: it is okay to disagree. It is never okay to be unkind.


Right is a feeling. Effective is a result.

At the first couples session, I open with something close to this:


“My goal is not to help either of you be right. It is to help both of you be effective. Right is a feeling. Effective is a result. If either of you has to be right all the time, you are already wrong about the only question that matters: what actually helps this relationship.


No one sees a relationship in a totally objective way. You have a perspective. Your partner has another. Neither of you has the whole picture. People standing around an elephant each report the part under their hand. One says spear. One says wall. One says rope. Each report is locally accurate and globally useless.


The work starts when you stop arguing over whose picture is the real one and start building one you can both live with. It is when we begin to work together that real healing begins. It is when we pour out our sweat instead of our blood that we begin to heal.


So before anyone gets the floor, the question is this: do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective? I can help you communicate effectively. I can help you solve problems effectively. I can help you parent effectively. I cannot help you win a case against the person you say you want to keep.


David Burns described a whole catalog of ways partners make that case and call it communication: a single truth, blame, defensiveness, martyrdom, put-downs, labels, sarcasm, counterattack, old grievances, mind-reading, and the rest. You do not need to memorize the list. You need to notice when you have left the problem and entered the prosecution."


Why you fight

You do not fight because you picked the wrong person, though some matches are genuinely unsafe and should not be coached into staying. Most of the couples in my office fight because two nervous systems are treating a partial view as the whole view, and because love was never a skill set.


In my book Lasting Lover: A Science-Based Approach to Building and Maintaining a Romantic Relationship With Your Forever Person, I put it this way: attraction without skills is like loving baseball and consistently losing because nobody learned how to play. The feeling got you into the relationship. It will not run the relationship. Under stress, the unpracticed pattern shows up, and by then it feels like personality.


The research lines up with what I see.


John Gottman’s lab spent years watching couples in conflict with physiological sensors on. The fights that predicted trouble were not the ones with a disagreement in them. Disagreement is normal. Gottman has long estimated that about two-thirds of couple conflicts are perpetual. They do not get solved. They get managed, or they get weaponized. What predicted erosion was the style: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling, and the speed with which one person’s negative affect pulled the other person into the same state. He called that pull negative affect reciprocity. You have felt it. One sharp sentence, and the room changes temperature.


There is also a simpler clinical fact underneath the theory. A lot of fighting is a bid that arrived in the wrong clothes. The content is the dishes, the in-laws, the phone, the money. The process is: do you see me, and will you take me seriously? When the answer feels like no, people do not get more articulate. They get louder.


Howard Markman, Scott Stanley, and Susan Blumberg made a related point years ago in Fighting for Your Marriage, the book behind the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program. Communication quality is not a soft extra. In their longitudinal work, the way couples handled conflict could already discriminate, from premarital data, who was more likely to stay happily married years later. The couples who lasted were not the ones who never argued. They were the ones who could argue without contempt, and who could show that they had actually heard the other person.


That is the work. Not a verdict. A skill.


Why you scream

Yelling is not a communication strategy that got a little sloppy. It is an older system borrowing your mouth.


A raised voice is a mammalian alarm. Long before anyone had a paragraph, volume, pitch, and facial tension told a nearby animal that something was wrong and that the sender was willing to escalate. Your partner’s nervous system still reads it that way. The words may be about a calendar. The body hears threat.


Here is the sequence, stripped of drama.


Something in the exchange hits an old or current danger cue. Dismissal. A contemptuous look. Being talked over. The amygdala, which is in the business of fast threat detection, fires before the part of you that can weigh context has finished its work. Sympathetic arousal follows: heart rate up, breathing up, muscles ready, attention narrowed to win, escape, or shut down. Gottman measured a version of this in the lab and called it flooding, or diffuse physiological arousal. When heart rate climbs to around 100 beats a minute during conflict, people become physiologically bad at the thing the moment requires. They do not listen well. They do not empathize well. They do not problem-solve well. They protect.


Amy Arnsten’s work on stress and the prefrontal cortex explains why the smart part of the brain goes quiet right when you need it. High levels of stress chemicals impair the very circuits that hold a goal, inhibit an impulse, and keep the threat system from running the show. You are not “choosing” your best sentence. You are talking from a brain that has temporarily demoted judgment.


This is why yelling feels productive and is not. In the short run it often works. The other person goes silent, complies, or yells back and the original topic disappears. That is reinforcement. The nervous system logs: volume changed the outcome. What it does not log, until later, is the cost. Safety drops. Respect drops. The next conversation starts closer to the red line. Gottman and Robert Levenson’s physiological work found that bodies in a couple can link during conflict, and that this linkage tracks relationship distress. One flooded person can recruit the other. Then you have two alarm systems and no prefrontal cortex in the room.


There is a second, quieter version. Some people do not yell. They go blank, leave, or turn to stone. That can be the same arousal with a different output, the collapse side of the threat response rather than the explosion. Both end the conversation. Neither solves it.


So when I hear a scream in my office, I do not hear passion, and I do not hear truth finally arriving. I hear a primitive channel doing a modern job it cannot do. Alarm is for danger. Marriage, on an ordinary Tuesday, is not that kind of danger. Treating it as if it is will train both of you to live braced.


What I require before I let you start

I read the listening points out loud. Not as inspiration. As conditions.


"Be patient. Exercise restraint. If you cannot wait four sentences, you cannot do this hour.


Be curious. Ask about the concern instead of building the defense. Curiosity is not agreement. It is the decision to get the other person’s map before you correct it.


Be careful with what you get back. Show interest. Then do two specific things. Recap the content: “What I hear you saying is…” Recap the feeling under the content: “You feel like…” If you skip the feeling, you have done stenography. You have not done listening.


Be willing to take an action that makes the thing better. Insight without a behavior change is a speech.


And when your partner does this, say so. Appreciation is not a prize for perfection. It is how you mark the new pattern so it has a chance of happening again. Unmarked effort dies."


The structure I teach is active listening in two related forms, not one technique with two names. The Speaker-Listener technique comes from Howard Markman, Scott Stanley, and Susan Blumberg in Fighting for Your Marriage. The speaker keeps it short and speaks from their own experience. The listener does not rebut, advise, or problem-solve. The listener paraphrases until the speaker says, in effect, you got it. Then the floor moves.


Mirroring is the first step of the Imago dialogue I learned from Harville Hendrix, co-author with Helen LaKelly Hunt of Getting the Love You Want. You reflect what you heard, check it (“Did I get that?”), and ask whether there is more. Imago does not stop there. After the mirror holds, you validate (“You make sense, because…”) and empathize (“I imagine you feel…”). Agreement is not required. Accuracy is.


Same unglamorous rule underneath both: one person speaks, the other shows they got it, then you switch. Speaker-Listener is the discipline of the floor. Imago is that discipline plus making sense of the other person’s world before you offer your own. 


Couples hate both the first time. Good. The natural way is what you already know how to do. It is why you are here.


I run the session on the method I laid out in Lasting Lover. Identify the actual issue, not the costume it arrived in. Teach the skill in the room. Do not let the old pattern have a free rehearsal on my clock. Stop the exchange when the rules break, not after someone has been bloodied. Assign the practice, because a technique you only do in front of me is a party trick.


As David Hughes put it, it is when we begin to work together that real healing begins. It is when we pour out our sweat instead of our blood that we begin to heal. I am not interested in being a well-paid witness to the blood.


The hour is a lab, not a courtroom

If you come in and do the kitchen in my office, I will interrupt you. That interruption is the treatment. The goal is not catharsis. Venting an unkind sentence practices the unkind sentence. Neurons that fire together wire together applies to contempt as surely as it applies to anything else you rehearse.


Here is the standard I will hold.


"You may disagree. You may be hurt. You may say what you need. You may not be unkind. Unkind is not “honesty.” Honesty can be specific, owned, and brief. Unkind is global, prosecutorial, and designed to land as a blow. “I felt alone with the kids last night and I need a plan for Thursdays” is a solvable sentence. “You never care about anyone but yourself” is a verdict. Verdicts do not have next steps.


If you will not follow the structure, I am not going to pretend we are doing therapy. I will stop the session, name what just happened, and tell you the truth you already paid to avoid: continuing this way makes me money and makes you worse. The work starts when you would rather be effective than right, and when you are willing to sound a little awkward in the service of being kind."


That is available to almost every couple that walks in. It is not available to a couple that insists on winning.



Learn more and connect:

Phone: 678-629-2578


© 2026 Galen E. Cole, PhD, MPH, LPC. All rights reserved. This essay is an original work first published at galencole.com. No part of this work may be reproduced, redistributed, scraped, or used to train commercial models without prior written permission, except for brief quotation with clear attribution to the author and a link to the original post.

 
 
 

Comments

bottom of page