Below, Kim Polinder shares five key insights from her new book, Why We Fight: A Transformative Road Map to Healing Conflict in Any Relationship.
Kim is a relationship expert and conflict specialist. Before working with couples, she spent twenty years as an IT engineer at Fortune 500 companies.
What’s the Big Idea?
The conflicts that keep repeating in our relationships aren’t really about who’s right or wrong. They’re driven by old survival patterns our nervous systems learned long ago, and lasting change begins when we create enough emotional safety to understand those patterns before trying to solve the problem.
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1. Your “bad math” is running the show.
As children, we’re constantly doing calculations. We observe our caregivers and form internal equations: “If I do X, then I am loved. If I don’t do X, I am rejected.” But children have limited reasoning abilities. Their logic is often faulty. These childhood equations become what I call “bad math,” and they get deeply ingrained. We carry these calculations into adulthood, shaping our behaviors, our sense of self-worth, and the partners we choose.
Here’s how my own bad math formed. I was adopted from South Korea and raised in a predominantly white family and community. I remember the shock of seeing my first-grade class photo and realizing how different I looked from all of my blond-haired, blue-eyed classmates. My equation started forming: make myself small to fit in.
At home, one of my brothers frequently talked back and got scolded. I drew the lesson: be dutiful or be in trouble. When the house felt tense, I cleaned my room and made my bed. My mother was uncomfortable with any extreme emotional expression. If I was excited, she told me to be less hyper. If I was proud of my report card, she’d say, “Well, don’t you think highly of yourself.” I grew up believing that any emotional expression outside of a narrow range of stoicism was wrong. Others were allowed to take up all the emotional air in the room, but not me.
These equations felt logical at the time. They helped me avoid pain and hold onto connection. The problem is I carried them into every adult relationship, and I kept getting the same disappointing results. Bad math is conditioning. It can be unlearned, but first you have to see it.
2. Why your partner suddenly repulses you.
Something happens after the honeymoon phase ends. The person you couldn’t get enough of starts to irritate you in ways you can’t explain. The way they chew. How they never take charge when decisions need to be made. Their tone when they correct you about something small. It goes beyond annoyance. It can feel like genuine repulsion, and it’s terrifying because you wonder if you chose the wrong person.
Here’s what’s actually happening. In addition to reacting to your partner, you’re also reacting to what they remind you of. Underneath the irritation is an old emotional injury, what clinicians call a core wound. These are deep beliefs that formed early in life, things like “I don’t matter,” “I’m not good enough,” or “I’m a failure no matter what I do.”
“Underneath the irritation is an old emotional injury, what clinicians call a core wound.”
When your partner doesn’t stand up to a coworker, that passivity can activate your own history of feeling powerless. You were disempowered by someone early on, and seeing your partner’s lack of assertiveness puts you right back in that feeling. Alternatively, when your partner criticizes how you loaded the dishwasher, it can activate the wound of a parent who was never satisfied, and suddenly you’re not standing in your kitchen anymore. You’re 10 years old, isolating in your room to avoid a critical mother.
The repulsion is a sign. Your survival brain is telling you that something from your past just walked into the room. Now, does that mean your partner is off the hook? No. Maybe they are too passive. Maybe they are too critical. Those are real things worth addressing. But when you can separate the old wound from the present issue, the charge behind it lessens. You go from repulsed to annoyed. And annoyed you can work with. Annoyed is an easier conversation. Repulsed makes you want to leave the room, shut down, or lash out. That’s the difference awareness makes. The problem doesn’t go away, but awareness calibrates your reaction so you can actually solve it.
3. Your body erases your best communication skills.
Here’s something I see constantly in my practice. A couple learns reflective listening and empathy in session. They do it well. The relief of feeling understood gives them hope. Then they leave my office, and things fall apart. Why were they at each other’s throats the moment real life kicked in?
Once I understood the biological nature of a trigger, it all made sense. When your nervous system detects danger, it shuts down the regions of the brain responsible for listening, logic, and executive function. In that moment, your brain is deciding who to fight or where to flee. Connection is the last thing on its mind.
Your cortex may know you’re not being held at gunpoint, but your survival brain launches the same threat response. Criticism from your spouse registers in your body the same way physical danger does. That’s why most fights go sideways in the first two minutes. The problem itself is usually solvable, but neither person feels safe enough to stay regulated.
“Criticism from your spouse registers in your body the same way physical danger does.”
This is why most relationship advice skips the most important step. Using “I” statements and validating feelings matters, but the first step is safety, not communication skills. The top job of the brain is not love, but survival. Without emotional safety, the best communication skills in the world won’t matter. A dysregulated nervous system isn’t listening, reflecting, or compromising. It’s protecting.
4. The quiet one isn’t the calm one.
In most relationships, one person is more expressive during conflict and the other shuts down. We tend to label the expressive one as “the emotional one” and the quiet one as “the mature one.” When in reality, both people are equally dysregulated in the heat of the moment.
People who shut down during an argument are not regulated. They are just as flooded as the person raising their voice. Their nervous system has made the same threat assessment. The difference is in their response. Instead of fighting, their system freezes and their mind goes blank. Their threat response system says, “Stay still. Stay invisible. Wait for it to pass.”
From the outside, that looks like composure. From the inside, it’s a completely different experience. The shut-downer’s internal dialogue sounds something like, “Anything I say right now will make this worse. If I engage, I’ll get it wrong. If I show what I’m actually feeling, it’ll be used against me. Why bother saying anything at all? They can never be happy.” This is a person whose body has decided the conversation is dangerous and has cut off access to the part of the brain that could help them connect.
“The tragedy is that both people are in pain, and neither can see it in the other.”
Their partner interprets this silence as indifference. “Why aren’t you talking? You don’t care. We just had a huge argument and you’re having a grand old time on the couch with your phone, completely unbothered.” But the shut-downer does care. They care so much that their system decided the stakes were too high to risk saying the wrong thing. The tragedy is that both people are in pain, and neither can see it in the other.
When I work with couples, one of the first things I help them understand is that silence and yelling are two versions of the same alarm going off.
5. The two-step flowchart for conflict resolution.
My background is in IT engineering, and that way of thinking shaped how I approach conflict. In my practice, I noticed I was running through an internal checklist with every couple. Do they feel understood? Are they jumping to solutions before validating feelings? Is this a timing issue where the conversation would have gone differently if they hadn’t started it after a long day?
As I noticed that troubleshooting sequence repeating, I realized couples needed their own checklist to follow at home. That became my conflict resolution flowchart, and it breaks down into two steps:
- Step one: Empathy First. Before any solution can be reached, both partners need to feel heard. We will dig in our heels until we’re convinced our partner understands our position. Studies on international conflict point out the same thing. Countries at war won’t approach peace talks until they feel their position has been acknowledged. The same holds true in relationships.
- Step two: Solutions Next. Once both people feel understood, you work toward resolution. What do you need from your partner? Can you express it specifically and without blame? Is there a compromise that can be reached?
The key checkpoint in step one is a simple question: “Do I feel understood?” If the answer is no, you don’t move forward. You troubleshoot. Maybe your partner had a brilliant solution but missed the pain underneath. Maybe you’re too flooded to receive anything right now. Solutions built on a shaky foundation will crumble every time. Empathy is the foundation. Everything else sits on top of it.
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