How does an addiction to conflict affect a relationship?
When does it start?
An addiction to conflict can start from childhood. It might be related to the way your parents interact with each other or with you. People that are used to these kinds of environments find a sense of peace and comfort in emotionally unstable situations. They find pleasure in the chaos they create. This pleasure is caused by the adrenaline that flows into your brain when this happens, it is an addiction. An addiction to conflict comes from constantly being in unstable relationships and not being able to live without conflict in your life.
How does it reflect in life?
This type of addiction to conflict can deeply impact your relationships with people especially the most intimate ones. When everything is going perfect you might feel this type of “icky feeling.” Which makes you feel like everything is wrong. You might probably start to remember all the things the person had done wrong. Finding it hard to concentrate on all the good things this person has but you can only focus on the things they constantly do wrong. When everything is going good one tends to search for it to get this feeling of comfort and the pleasure of blaming things on other people and not on themselves.
The cycle
This forms a cycle that starts with conflict. Then followed by a feeling of satisfaction, sometimes even affection from your partner. That further reinforces the need for conflict later in the relationship. This pleasure after the conflict is a release that is followed by a short period of peace. As well as an incremented need for this period of peace again, building up the anger and the reasons to fight when it bursts out again. The cycle repeats itself.
How to break it?
Start recognizing it
As my therapist told me, the first big step is recognizing that there is somewhat addiction to conflict or a cycle that exists. And if you are reading this it is probably a sign that you noticed that you have this problem or that someone close to you does and you want to help them. That is a big step already.
Analyze feelings and thoughts afterward
After recognizing that this such thing exists it is helpful to analyze the feelings that show up with it before and the reasons, excuses, or thoughts that come up to your head after this happens. This will help you understand yourself and start to notice more when it is about to happen.
Stoping the overthinking
Issues might come because we give too much thought to things and ideas that pop into our heads. Overthinking often leads to conflict because there is a whole scenario created in our heads on what is about to happen and how can we fix stuff. This definitely doesn’t help because we are already building up a conflict in our heads that hasn’t happened.
Find a way to properly communicate with people
To avoid conflict it is better to communicate your thoughts and concerns to your partner. That way they can give you some sort of reassurance on the topic and avoid a potential conflict. You will notice that the cycles of conflict will start to extend further apart from each other and the conflict will happen less often. Also, you can choose to talk to a professional that will help with these issues.
