You Scored
The Whistleblower
You’re someone who confronts conflict head-on and you’re not afraid to call out the problem. You’re brave and take risks for the greater good of the relationship. You are willing to fight hard for connection because your partner is so important to you. However, at times, you may come across as critical, aggressive, and focused on what your partner is doing wrong.
What You Fear
Your primary fear is that the issue won't change unless you get your point across. It's important for you to regulate yourself, soften your approach, and focus more on your own experience rather than solely on your partner.
Mistaken Belief
“I won’t be okay unless my partner changes.”
How You Show Up on the Outside
You tend to focus on your partner rather than sharing your own inner experience. At times you may get escalated and self protect with criticism, blame, debating debate, assumptions, or accusations. At the extreme, your conflict style can take the form of self righteous anger and personal attacks. Yet this confrontation is an attempt to bring about change.
Your intention is to get your partner to see what’s wrong and address it. Your primary fear is that if you don’t show up this way your partner won’t hear you. The downside to this approach is that your partner is likely to get triggered and react by getting defensive, shutting down, or withdrawing.
What’s Going on Inside
When you’re upset with your partner, your nervous system may enter a state of sympathetic arousal, triggering a fight-or-flight response. In this state, your primary focus is on survival and self-protection rather than connecting with your partner. This anxious activation can be detected by your partner through neuroception (the subconscious ability to detect threat) making it difficult to have an effective conversation.
This state of alarm in the body may be outside of your conscious awareness. On the surface you may be feeling frustrated, annoyed, irritated, offended, or angry. On a deeper level, you may also be feeling hurt, frightened, overwhelmed, desperate, alone, or out of control.
You may fear powerlessness and the loss of control. You worry that your boundaries will continue to be crossed, that your partner won’t get it, and the relationship will become more damaged and disconnected. Deep down you may have a fear of abandonment that gets inflamed by these interactions.
Tips for Growth
Rather than trying to change your partner, work on tuning into and tending to yourself.
Notice the sensations in your body, such as an accelerated heart rate or tension in your chest that tell you’re too activated to engage and take a break.
Practice self compassion self soothing deep breathing, practice, go for a walk, journal, or anything that helps you get grounded
Look for the softer and more vulnerable feelings underneath the anger and frustration and see if you can connect with and share those feelings with assertiveness rather than reactivity.
Make a plan with your partner in advance to return to the conversation after a break so you have the safety of knowing the issue will be addressed.
Use “I statements” that express your inner experience instead of “You statements that focus on your partner.
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