Why the same fight keeps coming back: the intrapsychic in relationships

“We’re not fighting about the dishes. I know we’re not. But every time you leave them in the sink, the same thing starts.”

The couple sitting in front of me have been having this argument for seven years. (They are a composite of several stories, not two real people.) The content changes — the dishes, money, his mother, her phone at the table — but the argument is always the same. She starts trying harder and harder, louder and louder, to be heard. He grows quieter and quieter, until he gets up and goes into another room. Both know exactly how it will end. Both try to stop it. And it ends that way anyway.

This is the third post in a series on the intrapsychic. In the first I described the inner world, and in the second how childhood relationships moved into it. Here I look at what happens when these inner relationships step out of us — and find a new actor for their old stories.

Most arguments come back

John Gottman, who spent decades observing couples in his lab, reached a conclusion that at first disheartens many people: about 69 per cent of conflicts in a couple are perpetual. They do not get resolved; they come back, year after year, in different disguises. Happy couples have no fewer of these conflicts than unhappy ones. The difference is in how they talk about them.

When I first read that figure, I wondered: why these conflicts in particular? Why does one thing get settled in a single conversation while another keeps returning like the tide? Relational family therapy offers an answer I find convincing: what comes back is what is not about the content. What is about the content — who takes the child to training, where we go on holiday — can be negotiated. But what carries an old inner feeling will keep repeating until that feeling is heard.

For the couple in the opening, this is what lay beneath the surface. She grew up with a father who was at home but not there — he sat in front of the television and answered questions in monosyllables. She learned that people only notice you if you knock loudly enough. He grew up with a mother whose anger was unpredictable; he learned that the safest thing was to become invisible when a storm was gathering. When he leaves the dishes in the sink, she does not see dishes. She sees her father in front of the television. When she raises her voice, he does not hear her. He hears his mother.

Why we choose this particular person

People often wonder how, out of everyone in the world, they managed to choose the very partner who hits their oldest wound. The answer is less accidental than it seems.

Freud had already noticed that people repeat painful experiences instead of remembering them — he called it the repetition compulsion. Contemporary research is more cautious, but it does show something similar. Hungarian researchers found, for example, that adopted daughters more often chose partners who facially resembled their adoptive fathers — not the biological fathers they had never known. What attracts us is therefore at least partly learned in relationship, not innate. I wrote more about this in Why we choose partners who remind us of our parents.

Relational family therapy goes a step further. We choose not just someone similar, but someone with whom we can replay an unresolved inner relationship — with a hope we are mostly unaware of: that this time it will end differently. She chose a quiet man because silence feels like “home” to her, while hoping that this quiet man will finally answer. He chose a woman who is not afraid of strong feelings, while hoping that this time those feelings will not bury him. This is not a mistake in choosing. It is an attempt at healing that neither of them is aware of.

When your partner starts to feel what you cannot

The strangest — and at the same time most central — phenomenon we observe in couples in relational therapy is called projective-introjective identification. The name is clumsy, but the phenomenon is very ordinary.

One partner unconsciously “hands over” to the other a feeling they cannot bear themselves, and the other — just as unconsciously — takes it in and starts to feel or act it out. The psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden described this in three steps: first a fantasy of getting rid of something inside oneself, then pressure in the relationship that pushes the other into that role, and finally the other really feels that emotion as if it were their own.

With the couple in the opening, this was visible almost to the naked eye. He was calm, quiet, never raised his voice — anger, for him, was something that destroys. She, in her relationship with him, was angry in a way she had never been before in her life. She told me: “I don’t recognise myself. I wasn’t like this before.” She was right. Part of the anger she carried was not only hers. She carried it for both of them, because he could not.

This does not mean he is to blame for her anger, nor that she is an innocent victim. It means both are caught in a dance in which each carries a part the other cannot. That is why in couples therapy it matters so much not to look for who started it. The cycle has no beginning. I also wrote about how to recognise the dance in The anxious and the avoidant partner.

When there are children in the house

The dance the partners dance never stays between the two of them alone. When there are children in the family, they are part of the scene, even if they never stand in the middle of an argument.

Children sense tension between their parents very precisely, long before they can name it. And because the tension is unbearable for them, they often try to resolve it themselves. A daughter unknowingly takes on the role of the peacemaker — always at hand when mum starts raising her voice, always finding a joke when dad goes quiet. A son starts getting into trouble at school, and suddenly, for the first time in ages, the parents are talking about something together. Not because the child is calculating, but because the family as a system seeks balance, and the child is often its most movable part.

In family therapy we call this triangulation: the tension between two people is redirected onto a third, who starts to carry it. A child who has carried their parents’ tension for years internalises that experience — and the circle closes. A new inner relationship forms in their intrapsychic world, which one day, in their own partnership, will look for its own actor. In this way the intrapsychic, interpersonal and systemic levels I wrote about in the first post of this series merge into a single story that runs through the generations. I wrote more about the roles children take on in the family in Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child.

That is why a couple’s work on their own dance is always work for their children too. When parents begin to recognise what lies beneath their argument, the child no longer has to carry what nobody says. It is one of the loveliest effects of couples therapy, and one that is rarely talked about.

What happens in therapy

In therapy, the cycle is first slowed down. We are not looking for a solution to the dishes, but for what happens in each of them when the dishes stay in the sink. A conversation might sound like this (shortened and composite):

“When you saw the dishes, what was in you, before you said anything?”
“That I’m not there again. That I can stand here and nothing happens.”
He, after a long silence: “I didn’t know that’s what it was. I thought she was angry with me.”
“And when she raises her voice — what happens in you?”
“I become small.”

In couples therapy this moment is often a turning point. When he hears that beneath her anger lies abandonment, he no longer experiences it as an attack. When she hears that he withdraws not out of indifference but out of fear, his silence takes on a different meaning. The argument about the dishes will never happen in quite the same way again, because both have seen what lies beneath the surface. You can read more about how an argument can turn from a battlefield into a place of contact in How we argue safely in couples therapy.

An exercise for two: what lies beneath the argument

Do this exercise on a calm evening, not during an argument or just after one. You will need half an hour, two sheets of paper and an agreement not to correct each other.

1. Choose one argument that keeps coming back. Not the worst one. One you both recognise as “our thing”.
2. Each of you writes down what you feel. Not what you think of the other, but what happens in you: “I feel invisible.” “I feel like I’m always wrong.”
3. Each of you writes down where you know this feeling from. Just one sentence, no explaining: “It was like that when my father …”
4. Read to each other. The one listening does not reply or defend themselves. They just repeat what they heard: “I hear that you feel invisible and that you know it from your father.”
5. Say what you would need. Finally, each of you writes down one thing you would need in that moment — and says it to the other as a request, not a reproach.

The exercise will not make the argument go away. Gottman’s figure applies to you two as well. But it can change it: next time the dishes are in the sink, each of you may, for a fraction of a second, also think of what you heard on the other sheet of paper.

Where this explanation does not apply

Everything I have written has clear limits, and it is right to name them.

Not every recurring argument is an old story. Sometimes two people genuinely do not match in what they want: one wants children, the other does not; one wants to live in the countryside, the other in the city. These are not projections but real differences, which cannot be resolved by exploring the inner world — only by an honest conversation about whether a shared path is possible.

Abuse is not a dance. When one partner intimidates, controls, humiliates or hurts the other, talk of a cycle in which “both carry a part” is inappropriate and can be dangerous. Then the right place is not couples therapy but safety — you will find a short explanation in the knowledge base under violence in a relationship. In Slovenia you can turn to the SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence on 080 11 55, or call 113 in immediate danger.

Not every choice of partner is a repetition. Research on partners’ resemblance to parents shows moderate associations, not destiny. Many people choose a partner who is meaningfully different from their parents, and find in that very difference something they never had at home. If we take the repetition story too literally, it can become a new way of judging ourselves.

The hope in repetition

When a couple first hears that they may have chosen precisely the person with whom they can replay their old wound, it is often hard to take in. It sounds like a sentence: so we are doomed to this. But in relational family therapy we understand it the other way round.

If an old story keeps repeating, it means it is still alive — and that it can still be written differently. The inner world does not seek new actors to torment us, but because it hopes for a different ending. The partner who hits the oldest wound is also the only one who can experience it anew with us. Not as a rescuer, but as someone who stays where the old fear always used to come true.

The couple from the opening still sometimes argue about the dishes. Recently she told me: “Now, when I see him withdraw, I know he isn’t withdrawing from me. He’s withdrawing from his mother. And then I can tell him I’m not her.” That is all the intrapsychic needs in a relationship: for someone to see it and stay.

What to remember

• About two thirds of a couple’s conflicts come back — not because of the content, but because of what lies beneath it.
• Beneath a recurring argument there is usually an old affect: abandonment, shame, overwhelm.
• In projective-introjective identification, one partner starts to feel what the other cannot bear.
• The cycle has no beginning — so in therapy we do not look for who is to blame, but for what happens in each of the two.
• The intrapsychic lens does not apply to abuse and does not replace an honest conversation about real differences.