The fight you keep having
You know the one. It may have different trigger points… the tone of voice, the comment about money, the way they go quiet – but it follows the same arc every time. Someone gets hurt. Someone gets defensive. Someone says something they regret. And afterward, nothing is really resolved.
If you’ve ever thought, “Why do we keep doing this?” – that’s the right question. Not “Why are they like this?” or “What’s wrong with me?” But: why does this keep happening between us?
The answer isn’t found in the argument itself. It’s found underneath it – in the patterns that each person brings, and in how those patterns lock together.
Where patterns come from
We don’t arrive in relationships as blank slates. We arrive carrying everything that has already happened to us – every time we were hurt, dismissed, betrayed, or left. And from those experiences, the body builds a kind of early warning system: a set of automatic responses designed to protect us from being hurt that way again.
Psychologists call these trigger responses. In Emotional Liberation, we see them as survival adaptations – ingenious, once. But they don’t update automatically. The system that learned to protect your eight-year-old self is still running the same program in your adult relationships. It can’t tell the difference between then and now. It can’t distinguish between your father’s critical voice and your partner’s frustrated one.
So when something in the present moment resembles something that hurt you in the past – a certain tone, a look, a silence – the old response fires. And suddenly it’s not two adults in a disagreement. It’s two wounded younger selves, doing their best to survive.
The interlocking dance
Here’s what makes relationship patterns so hard to see: yours and your partner’s don’t just coexist. They interlock. Each pattern activates the other. And the longer the relationship, the more entrenched the dance becomes.
Take Sarah and Mark. She grew up with a father who disappeared emotionally when things got hard – she developed an unconscious association between conflict and abandonment. When things get tense with Mark, she withdraws to protect herself. Mark grew up with a mother whose love was conditional and unpredictable – his survival instincts learned that distance means rejection. When Sarah goes quiet, he pursues harder, needs reassurance, becomes what she experiences as suffocating.
She pulls back. He chases. She feels controlled. He feels rejected. Neither is wrong. Both are frightened. And neither can see that they are each triggering the other’s deepest wound – because they’re too busy defending against their own.
This is what we call the interlock. And the problem is never the argument you’re having. The problem is the interlock underneath it.
“You look all grown up. But when triggered, it’s your scared child arguing with their scared child. The person you love has left the building. This work brings them back.”
— Becca Williams
What the Emotional Liberation process does with this
Relationship patterns can’t be resolved by communicating better. Not at first. Not when you’re already in survival mode – because when you’re triggered, you’re not accessing your best thinking, your empathy, or your genuine love for this person. You’re operating from the oldest hurt you know.
In the Emotional Liberation work, we start by slowing everything down. We look at the pattern itself – the specific sequence of events, the moment things tip, the feelings that flood in. We trace it back: what is the threat your body is responding to? And when did that threat first get established?
That understanding alone – seeing your reaction as a survival response rather than proof that you’re too much or that your partner is the problem – begins to shift the story your patterns have been running.
Then comes the deeper work: psycho-spiritual inquiry, movement, breath, and body-based practices – the tools that drop you into your ‘deep inner knowing’, beneath the story the wound has been running. This is where the pattern can begin to shift… not by recognizing it alone, but by moving the emotional material stored in the body that has been driving the pattern all along.
The needs underneath every fight
Under every repeated argument – every fight about dishes, money, sex, or time – there is an unmet need. Not the surface need (for the dishes to be done) but the deeper one: to feel considered, safe, valued, seen.
We are all, in some way, trying to get those needs met. The trouble is that when our survival patterns are running, we pursue them in ways that almost never work. We pursue through withdrawal, or through attack, or through a kind of relentless pursuit that pushes away the very connection we’re looking for.
Part of the Emotional Liberation process is learning to identify what you actually need – not what you’re arguing about, but what’s underneath. And then learning to ask for it in ways that your partner can actually hear. That shift alone – from complaint to realizing what we need – can change the entire texture of a relationship.
What changes – and what takes time
As the emotional roots of your patterns begin to move, the patterns themselves begin to loosen. The trigger fires less easily. The recovery time shortens. The capacity to stay present – to choose a response rather than react from a wound – becomes more available.
This doesn’t happen overnight. These patterns were built over years, in response to real experiences. They don’t dissolve in a session or two. And the relationship itself takes time to recalibrate – your partner will still expect the old version of you, even as you’re changing. That gap can feel disorienting. We work on that too.
And you don’t have to do it alone. My group masterclasses, trainings, retreats, and ceremonial gatherings create a dynamic all their own – people learn from one another, and there is profound medicine in witnessing and being witnessed. Teachers and facilitators often find this work particularly valuable – understanding these patterns in yourself makes you more effective in holding space for others.
What the research says
The links between early attachment experience and adult relationship patterns have been extensively documented. Leading thinkers have long established that the strategies we develop in childhood to maintain closeness with caregivers become templates for how we relate as adults.[1] Foundational work on the neuroscience of emotional memory has shown that trauma and fear memories are stored differently than ordinary memories, in brain regions that operate faster than conscious thought, which is why triggers feel so instantaneous and so out of our control.[2] And the longitudinal work of John Gottman identified that the specific content of arguments matters far less than the underlying emotional patterns — contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling, and criticism are what predict relationship breakdown, not individual fights.[3]
More recently, peer-reviewed research has confirmed that attachment patterns formed in childhood show significant continuity into adulthood, shaping how we regulate emotion, seek closeness, and respond to perceived threat in intimate relationships.[4] And research on emotional memory has confirmed that subcortical fear responses operate independently of conscious thought, which is why understanding a trigger rarely stops it from firing.[5]
Sources
- Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Basic Books.
- LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain. Simon & Schuster.
- Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Crown.
- Fraley, R. C. (2002). Attachment Stability From Infancy to Adulthood: Meta-Analysis and Dynamic Modeling of Developmental Mechanisms. Psychological Bulletin, 128(1), 123-151. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0602_03
- LeDoux, J. E., & Pine, D. S. (2016). Using neuroscience to help understand fear and anxiety: A two-system framework. American Journal of Psychiatry, 173(11), 1083-1093. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2016.16030353
