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Mining the Gold in Conflicted Relationships
Maya Kollman |
TEDxSoleburySchool
• May 2018
An insidious belief in modern American culture about committed love relationships is that repeated conflict is a waving flag signaling that the partnership is fatally flawed and should come to an end. For the first years of my relationship counseling practice, I thought the same thing! Couples would come to me and our sessions were like ping pong matches of anger over differing points of view, differing opinions, differing preferences. If we managed to solve a problem, the next week would bring a new problem. Conflict was endless. I felt like a fraud and my couples felt hopeless. Then in 1989, I watched Oprah do a two-part interview with Dr. Harville Hendrix, PhD., a psychologist and theologian who gave me a radical new view of the role of conflict in a committed relationship. A central nugget in his relationship theory and therapy is that conflict is growth trying to happen. There is gold under all the chaos and noise, we just need to learn how to unearth it.