1. Conflict and anger are signs that your relationship is failing.
True, or false? How do you think your partner would answer?
How have you and your partner dealt with conflict and anger in the past? What is the "typical" thing for both of you to do? What do both of you do to either avoid conflict, or to instigate it? When are the times that you've been able to deal with anger and conflict successfully? When has it worked for them, and when has it worked for you? What were you both doing at the time?
True absolutely, my W said that when we argued about things it just reinforced for her that our M was doomed. Originally we never much argued about anything, cause we both just deftly avoided conflict with healthy doses of love and avoidance.
I remember when we worked out some important issues years ago, it was because I brought them up and sort of forced the issue of talking about them. Then we were able to resolve them by talking and deciding how important they were to each of us. We were both giving up something it seemed, and that made it ok.
Unfortunatelt my W was a much better recipient of those kind of talks than me, as I tend to get defensive quickly and that just colors a conversation so that not much can be accomplished. For whatever reason I tend to link conflict (even conversational) with rejection, and it seems much easier to just postpone that talk than risk being drug over the coals I guess...I'm working on that of course, I know it doesn't have to be that way.
Avoidance of conflict is so much easier than grasping the issue squarely. Generally though it seems to me that it can build resentment and make the issues larger than they started.
