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Understanding the Chemistry of Fighting

By on April 5, 2014
fighting

By Dr. Jamie Turndorf

The following excerpt is taken from the book Kiss Your Fights Good-bye. It is published by Hay House (Available Jan. 20, 2014) and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com

 

Your husband just informed you that he’s going on a white-water rafting trip with his buddies the following weekend. He smiles with boyish delight, displaying a full set of sparkling teeth, which you have to resist punching out.

You have asked him, more times than you can remember, to talk with you before making plans. He forgot, clearly a case of brain flatulence. Now, you find yourself telling him, once again, how annoyed you are. Suddenly, his eyes glaze over and he turns stone deaf. He’s not listening, so you turn up the heat. No use. Instead of understanding what’s bugging you, he digs in his heels. This annoys you even more, so you crank up your emotional thermostat. But before you have finished, he orbits from the room and you’re shouting at the back of his head.

Now you’re ballistic. So you chase him to the living room, where you find him staring blindly into space, his jaw tight. You nag, whine, complain, and yell, but he ignores you.

The longer he maintains his stony silence, the more upset you become (he doesn’t even love you enough to respond to your pleas). In a last-ditch effort, you push your attack to the max and hammer harder. Eureka! His silence is broken, but instead of offering words of understanding, he hurls verbal deathblows.

“Maybe you’re the freakin’ problem!” he shouts, swinging his fist like a club.

“Don’t try to pin the blame on me! You’re the one who made plans to go off.”

“Who would want to spend time with a bitch?” he yells as his feet are already hitting the bricks.

The next time you try to talk to him about your issue, you’re even hotter than last time. And, big surprise: he’s more deaf and more defensive, or just plain “outta there” in a flash.

The preceding scenario—male retreat under fire—is also referred to as “husband withdrawal,” an involuntary fleeing reaction that occurs when a man feels attacked. And according to extensive research, husband withdrawal is the number one cause of marital conflict and divorce.

Husband withdrawal is caused by a collision of two incompatible modes of handling conflict: that of the wife, who intensely expresses her hurt and anger, and that of the husband, who withdraws from the confrontation. The technical name for this phenomenon is the Demand/Withdraw Negative Escalation Cycle, and I will discuss in Chapter 7 how women can break this cycle by cooling down their emotional communications. But for now, we must concentrate on the reasons why men withdraw.

According to social science researchers J. M. Gottman and R. W. Levenson, husband withdrawal is caused by a biochemical imbalance that occurs when a man feels threatened.

When this occurs, a man’s autonomic nervous system (ANS) kicks into high gear. His adrenal glands begin pumping adrenaline, his heart races up to 100 beats per minute (bpm), his muscles become tense, and he is often sweating. Those are the physiological manifestations of ANS arousal; they are automatic and occur without the mediation of thought.

Men are physiologically hyperreactive to stress, a fact that has been empirically demonstrated in numerous studies.

One study, by social science researchers C. W. Liberson and W. T. Liberson, yielded the finding that when men and women were faced with the same stressors, men experienced physiological disturbances, whereas women’s internal chemistry remained relatively stable. Another study, by researcher L. J. P. Van Doornen, found that on an exam day, male subjects experienced biochemical imbalances, whereas females experienced no physiological changes. My own research has also demonstrated that males, but not females, experience ANS arousal during emotionally fraught discussions. The studies are clear. Men are more prone to experiencing ANS arousal in response to stress in general, and relationship conflict in particular.

When ANS arousal occurs, it triggers the fight-or-flight response, a primitive survival reaction that arises whenever a person feels emotionally or physically endangered.

The instinct to flee in the face of danger derives from ancient times when men were hunters and had to fight ferocious beasts. Imagine a primitive man on a mission to slay a saber-toothed tiger or rustle up some boar. He was out there facing countless threats, and his body had to be up to the task. Out jumped a tiger, and his body switched into the fight-or-flight mode, an instinctive reaction that guaranteed that he would either fight the tiger or flee for his life. This instinct was necessary to keep the hunter alive.

How does the fight-or-flight mechanism figure into the most common form of relationship conflict, the Demand/Withdraw Cycle? When a woman comes at her guy, baring her teeth, berating him with attacks and criticisms, his ANS sees danger. Modern danger does not come in the form of ferocious prey; it has evolved into the angry wife or girlfriend. And modern man is faced with the same dilemma that his primitive ancestors encountered: fight the enemy or flee.

Since a man doesn’t want to assault (fight) his partner, his body sends out signals that cause him to flee, to withdraw.

Withdrawal behaviors are exhibited physically, verbally, and psychically. Examples of physical fleeing include leaving the house or the room and/or avoiding contact with mate; verbal fleeing includes making excuses, justifying behavior or denying responsibility, verbal attacking, and counterblaming; and psychic fleeing, when the mind escapes, includes not listening (functional deafness), appearing stone-faced, becoming silent, or avoiding eye contact. It’s important to note that all men who experience relationship distress exhibit withdrawal behaviors in one form or another.

While men are no longer hunters, their biological programming and physiological hyperreactivity to danger is still embedded in their bodies.

Not aware that her man’s fleeing reactions are the result of this programming, a woman becomes more and more enraged that he doesn’t care about her, and unwittingly sets off more biological fire alarms in her partner. The more he withdraws, the hotter she gets, and in no time, we have chronic fighting.

To make matters worse, when ANS arousal is in high gear, it causes another physiological reaction that further intensifies conflict: a man’s cognitive functions diminish, which means that reason and logic cease to exist. This brain shutoff mechanism was adaptive during prehistoric times. When primitive man was on the hunt, face-to-face with a ferocious predator, his mind was unavailable to analyze all the dangers—which was an advantage.

Is this tiger meat worth dying for? What if I fail? If I die, I’ll never get laid again. . . . Maybe I don’t need the meat after all. The Caveman Chronicle just ran an article about the health benefits of a vegetarian diet. I think I’ll try a tofu burger tonight instead. . . . Before he could finish pondering these thoughts, he would have been hamburger meat in the beast’s belly. During prehistoric times, cognitive shutdown was vital, not only for male survival, but also for the survival of the species.

Although the brain shutoff mechanism may have been a survival tool during a brief period in history, today that same mechanism may get a man “killed.”

When a furious woman comes at her man, the last thing he needs is a brain that’s out to lunch. He needs all his higher-order cognitive functions (that is, reasoning and problem-solving skills) to handle this threat. Unfortunately, the precise tools that he needs to solve the conflict have just clicked off, and he’s completely unavailable for any productive exchange. This explains why there is a great deal of patterning to the fights that occur in chronically conflicted relationships. The fights always play out in the same way, because no creative thinking is available to explore alternative fighting tactics.

Another cause of the chronicity of marital conflicts is that it takes a long time for a man’s internal chemistry to normalize following stress—much longer than it does for a woman’s. In fact, L. J. P. Van Doornen’s research has shown that in relationships in which conflict is frequent, a man’s chemistry never returns to baseline. With each subsequent fight, his arousal mounts higher and higher, and his fuse becomes shorter and shorter, placing him at risk of acting out physically before he has a chance to flee. This risk is especially great for impulsive men who are already prone to physically acting out. (It should be noted here that domestic violence is not the focus of this book. And if a woman is involved with a man who batters, or if she feels physically endangered, she is advised to seek professional help.)

The point to keep in mind is that in all chronically conflicted relationships, residual ANS arousal and chronic cognitive shutdown fuel ongoing discord.

 

Dr. Jamie Turndorf

Dr. Turndorf is an internationally known relationship therapist, emotional communication expert, media therapist, author and advice columnist read by millions. Known worldwide as “Dr. Love,” through the web, television, radio, and print, Dr. Turndorf has authored, Till Death Do Us Part (Unless I Kill You First): A Step-by-Step Guide for Resolving Relationship Conflict. Her book was endorsed by two New York Times #1 Best Selling authors, Dr. John Gray (author of Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus) and John Bradshaw (who wroteHomecoming), and now deceased Pulitzer Prize winning author and Harvard Professor of Psychiatry, Dr. John Mack. This book will be republished by Hay House in January 2104 under the title Kiss Your Fights Goodbye: Dr. Love’s 10 Simple Steps to Cooling Conflict and Rekindling Your Relationship.

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