Why Do I Pick Fights When Things Are Going Well?
The Pattern
Things have been good for a few weeks. There is a stretch of unbroken closeness. And then you find yourself in the kitchen, sharp and irritable, picking at a small thing until it becomes a large thing. You cannot fully say why. You watch yourself do it. The peace had been making you anxious, even though anxious was the last thing you would have said you felt. The fight is the nervous system reaching for a familiar emotional weather that the calm was disrupting.
Origins & Context
Bessel van der Kolk's research on trauma and the body describes the phenomenon in which a nervous system shaped by chronic stress becomes uncomfortable in states of sustained calm. The body has built itself around vigilance, and the absence of threat feels like an absence of information. Conflict, at a physiological level, is familiar. Peace is foreign.
Murray Bowen's family systems work introduces the concept of homeostasis, the tendency of relational systems to return to a familiar level of distress regardless of the individuals' conscious wishes. A person who grew up in a family with chronic conflict carries that homeostatic setpoint into adult relationships. When the temperature drops too far below that setpoint, an unconscious force begins to push it back up.
The peace had been making you anxious. The fight is the nervous system reaching for a familiar weather that the calm was disrupting.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
It shows up in the small comments that escalate over the course of an evening. The eye roll that turns into a sigh that turns into a real fight. You can feel yourself doing it. You cannot quite stop. The story you tell yourself is that the issue is real, the irritation is valid, the criticism needed to be said. Some of that may be true. The timing is the tell.
It shows up as the way a really good vacation often ends with a blow-up on the last day. The way a particularly tender weekend gets capped with a Sunday night fight. The body cannot sustain the openness, and the fight is the involuntary contraction back to a known state.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as Homeostatic Reactivity (Murray Bowen), the unconscious tendency of relational systems and the individuals in them to return to a familiar emotional setpoint. It is also named as Sustained Calm Intolerance (Bessel van der Kolk), the trauma-shaped nervous system's discomfort in the absence of threat. In couples therapy, Stan Tatkin names a related dynamic as the Disruption Pattern, the predictable interference with closeness in couples whose attachment histories make sustained intimacy threatening.
Related entries in this library: Why Chaos Feels More Comfortable Than Calm, Nervous System Dysregulation, Self-Sabotage, Hypervigilance, the Body Keeps the Receipt.
Nikita's Note
I had to grieve when I first noticed this in myself. I was the one breaking the peace I had been asking for. The good thing arrived and I made it bad, and I could not explain why.
What helped was naming it out loud, to the person I was with. Not as an excuse, but as a kind of contract. When I start picking, that is information, and we both know what it means. The naming did not stop the impulse, but it gave us both a way to step out of the loop instead of into it.
From the work
The peace had been making you anxious. The fight is the nervous system reaching for a familiar weather that the calm was disrupting.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.