Episode 39: Fighting Fair

sSara  00:00 

Empowered people make informed decisions that lead to living a life without regret. This is Sara Khaki and Shawna Woods from Atlanta Divorce Law Group. And this is the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast.

Welcome to the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast. This is Sara Khaki with the Atlanta Divorce Law Group and I’m joined by our managing partner, Shawna Woods. Today we are going to talk about fair fighting. Every couple, every partnership, every relationship that has made it to a certain point is going to get into a fight. That’s where the friction of growth happens. Hopefully. Hopefully it’s a good fight.

sShawna  00:41 

Absolutely.

Well, it really does depend on how you proceed. And we’ve all been there where we’ve said things we shouldn’t have said. We’ve said things in a way we shouldn’t have said them. We’ve insulted people instead of addressing the issues at hand. And I think fair fighting is hard for us to do because in the moment of the fight, what are we? We’re heightened anger. We’re heightened emotion. They’ve said something that set us off. Or done something. Then it’s on.

sSara  01:14 

I’m done.

sShawna  01:17 

And I think unfair fighting, I think that’s important to define that too.

sSara  01:23 

So what is bear fighting?

sShawna  01:25 

The

Fair fighting is actually a therapeutic term that people use in marital conversations. And they include certain things. And they’ve actually got a list of rules here. We do like rules and we do like lists. One of the things that I really, the first thing, it’s not the first rule on here, but it popped out to me is don’t make assumptions. Don’t jump to conclusions.

sSara  01:29 

Huh?

Alright. We like ourselves some rules.

sShawna  01:54 

And this is really important when you are in a relationship and somebody has done something that’s offensive to you. You’re assuming perhaps their intent. In other words, be mindful of the time you choose to discuss a problem. Right. I mean, come on, let’s not do it when we’re hungry. We’ve all been that hangry people. Quite frankly, there are certain times in the time of month for me that probably you could not have that discussion.

sSara  02:22 

Before you’re in a rush and trying to get somewhere.

sShawna  02:25 

You’re in a rush, you’re out to work, right? You’re choosing a time that they’ve already got their emotions or their physical sense somewhere else, right? Don’t do that. Be mindful that, all right, is this a safe space? Know, is, but emotionally, right? To do this, take a break if needed to calm down and then commit to resuming later. I don’t know if you have this. I have a word.

sSara  02:48 

Okay.

sShawna  02:52 

With my daughter and we’ve done this and she has a word with me. And when I say a word, which means we’re stopping all discussion, we’re taking a break, I need to step away from this. And it’s usually when one of the other is pushing a little too hard. It was, we didn’t even discuss the word. I just one day went porcupine and walked away. And she knew.

So I just called a quit to that right there. And I think it’s really important to be able to take those timeouts. Right. Right. And even when the other person really wants to push to say, I can’t process this right now. Also in contrast to that, don’t stonewall them either. Don’t just yell that word out because you don’t want to be called to the carpet on whatever you’ve done to upset the other person. This one. Look, we love this word, Sara. Setting clear boundaries.

sSara  03:42 

There it is.

sShawna  03:44 

Boundaries is a lovely word and lovely phrase and a really good thing to have in a fight which may include don’t raise your voice, right? There’s no yelling. There’s no degrading Really important. There’s no threatening right? Right? No cursing which that’s a hard one for me And I don’t know if I’m gonna Be honest. I don’t know if I can follow that one completely But I do think that there’s a difference in saying you are a blank

sSara  04:02 

I agree on that.

sShawna  04:14 

Rather than you are behaving like a blank.

sSara  04:18 

Or just cursing or saying an angry word out. Loud. At someone. Relieving attention within with the word.

sShawna  04:24 

Yeah, just, you it is.

Absolutely. I do think it’s really important about the yelling and I do think it’s really important about the degrading, especially when we’re talking about fighting and right now we’re talking about partners, right, or friendships. But think about there are times when you get in arguments with your children who are not yet grown and that degrading and that yelling is going to form their part of their personality that as they get older, that’s how they’re interpreting it, right? That’s how they’re interpreting their world.

Another thing I think we could call this ownership, right? Taking your responsibility in this disagreement. And I cannot tell you, I can’t remember a time that I’m thinking of right now where I’ve had a disagreement with someone where it was all their fault. Right? You have an ownership in whatever the disagreement is moving on after resolving a problem. And I think that’s really important too.

sSara  05:22 

Okay.

sShawna  05:25 

Is I do think that if we don’t address a problem, if we don’t have this fight, and I’m putting that in quotations for those of us can see in a podcast, but if you don’t go through with that and resolve, then you have the resentment and what happens with that resentment. It’s a kind of a running joke. Women can tell somebody what they did wrong 15 years ago while they were standing in line at a grocery store. We hold on to it.

sSara  05:51 

We hold on to that for dear life.

sShawna  05:55 

Men typically, once they get it out and done, it’s out and done. I can’t tell you how many times where I’m talking to different clients that will say, tell me the chronology. And I’m telling you right now, women will tell me what they had for cereal on the first day of their marriage. It’s ingrained.

sSara  06:15 

I remember the dress I wore the first day of kindergarten. Wow. I know.

sShawna  06:18 

Yeah. That’s

Crazy. Impressive. But if we do that in fights, right, and we hold on to it and we don’t have the resolution, where does that leave us? Yeah. Right. And so that’s some rules for fighting fair. Do you have rules for fighting with a sham?

sSara  06:38

Personally feel like we are still working on them because ours are so mismatched. I call these rules of engagement. Okay. Just like war. Absolutely. Of engagement. Sham’s sense of like having an authentic, honest fight where you really get it out is so important to him. He honors that so much. And I honor not going below the belt so much. And so sometimes that works.

A lot of times that’s a mismatch because if you have having a completely authentic experience where you feel a certain way about your spouse at that point, that your partner, you may, you you feel so aggravated at them that you want to yell at them or you want to scream at them and you truly want to have an authentic experience over your frustration, anger with them. But it’s received as you went below the belt. You have a problem, right?

sShawna  07:35 

And how do you know what below the belt is?

sSara  07:36 

And

That’s, I think, a personal thing. I think it goes back to your love languages. For me, words is very important. Love language, words of affirmation from not everybody, but my core people, words are very important. So the words you use in a fair fight with me is part of my rules of engagement. Words that you use, now that I will hold on to in my memory bank.

Like my kindergarten dress. Like I will know that every detail, every nuance of how you said a word to me and I hold on to it. Sham, words are words. I mean, this is a fight. Like what’s supposed to happen in a fight? We throw roses at each other. So he’s very like, and it comes a lot from, again, just continuously going back to what did you see in your home growing up? My parents, their fights were never la-

Their fights were never visible. It was very much like a tiptoeing, them sorting it out, like going back and forth when we were children. When got older, it a little passive aggressive because they might have never ever like released it. Whereas Hisham grew up in a household where it came out. Like the voice came out, the words came out. And to him, that’s like, that’s how you get it out. That’s how you get it out of the system. And to me, it’s like, in that process of yours,

Things can go under the belt that I may not be able to grow past. It might create resentments that I may have to carry on for a long time. So that’s definitely been something that we worked on in our marriage. Now here comes the next level of complication with it. We’ve shared this with each other and what he would say is probably his rule of engagement is what you said, like working it out, where he believes that after we’ve

Done this, after we’ve had this explosion, it should be done. It should be done. I don’t operate that way. I, after the explosion, go through a lot of processing of what did this mean? What is my responsibility? What is his responsibility? Why did this happen? Like I go into complete, Sara has to figure out the everything here and it has to like, I want to sink my teeth into it and understand

Where was the root of this, right? I don’t ever take these fights as a surface issue. I want to go into the root of them. And so what I’ll do, which is a complete breaking of his rules of engagement is a week later come back and be like, so when you said X, Y, and Z, and then I did this, like, what did that mean for you? And he’s like, oh my God, oh my God, we’re here again? Like, it was done, you know? I thought we sorted it out. I’m like, no, no, I’m still marinating on this one.

We’re not done yet. You know, let’s go on to the next season of this. We need season two. So that’s, I think that’s where we break each other’s rules of engagement. So what have we done about it? Well, he has in order to not.

Raise the voice and not use the words that I can’t unhear and you raise your voice at me, I shut off. I’m not hearing your words. I’m shutting off. You are just a scary monster and I don’t want to be around it. So in order for him not to do that, he engages in something where he’s like, I can’t talk about this right now. He waits to find the space and the time to sort it out where he can say, okay, I have the patience.

I have the listening ears to be able to receive your part now, to receive your honesty, right? I can create the space for you to do that. What I do, because again, I’m the kind of person that’s like, if we have a problem, we talk about it right now and we talk till we’re done. Like we do not stop talking. And there is, I can never stop talking. And to me, there’s almost like no point of diminishing returns of talking a problem out.

Or to sham there is. So I’ve learned to try to respect that where I’m like, okay, I’m losing my audience. We have not even come close to perfecting this. This is something we have awareness of, but we’re working on it. And we are aware that this is how our programming and our patterns butt heads when we are in a fight.

sShawna 12:10

You’ve said a couple of things that really stuck out in my mind. One of those things is we learn our fighting patterns from our parents, right? We learn how they… One of the things that is prevalent in… And I know this wasn’t you or Hacham’s family, but one of the things that is prevalent in family who’s had violent episodes, right? Where the fighting actually turns to physical violence.

It affects the children so much in their perspective of relationships because they believe those are normal and that is how you resolve issues is through violence. Right? I grew up in a household where my mom was extraordinarily violent and my parents, when they fought, dad never laid a hand on mom. That was, that was never going to happen, but she certainly was going to.

To lay into him a couple of times. And I remember distinctly when she threw a pair of keys across the room and she threw them so hard they stuck in his arm. That’s a vivid memory that I have. And I did really have to program myself as an adult. I never was physically violent with someone, but I was very verbally violent. And I really have a tendency when I’m angry to go for the jugular.

So when we were talking earlier and you’re talking about how you have to talk it out to the end, like that would drive me crazy if I’m trying to control my anger. Right? If I’m trying to control what was naturally in me from childhood that I learned that I need to take that, like me, I’d be shot in porcupine every two seconds. Kind of take that break, man. And taking those breaks is really important for somebody who has this kind of

Innate anger issues, right? And you can go through all the therapy in the world and then there’s sometimes that’ll still trigger it in you and you’ve got to be mindful of to yourself of how to step back and share that with your partner and say, look, I get to a place where I’m not even aware of how mean I’m being. Yeah. I’m saying the most hateful things. I don’t mean them. I don’t really think this about you, but I want to hurt you so bad right now that I’m going to go for your weakest spot. Yeah.

And I think that when you get to those spaces and if you want to maintain this friendship, this relationship, whatever it is when you want to maintain, you really have to be able to take that step away.

sSara 14:36

And I think that’s so helpful what you’re saying. I’ve heard Hisham say the exact same thing to me, but hearing you even say it helps me bring more, helps me see it more clearly from his perspective of he’s asking for this, this disconnection of communication for my sake. The sake of I am about to say things that…

Are going to hurt are going to be hurtful and I won’t remember them, but you will. Absolutely. And then we’re back to season two and season three. Season four. The part that I, you know, need from him is, listen, this may not this may not be done for me right now. Even like just the fact that I am walking away, letting you have the space so that you can recollect doesn’t mean that I’m OK not talking about this again.

sShawna 15:06

Season 3 and Season 4

sSara 15:28

Yeah, when you’re in back in that space, I need to sort this out. Otherwise, I will be carrying the resentment.

sShawna 15:34

And that was part of one of the rules is making sure you set a time to come back and revisit it. And doing that at a time where, it could be, hey, I need 10 minutes. It could be, need 24 hours. It could be, we’re gonna be both really busy this week. Let’s set some time to go for a walk next Saturday and see if we can work this out. And I think it’s really important for each partner, wherever they come from, to respect each other’s fighting rules.

sSara 16:03

Yes. And to hear them. Yeah.

sShawna 16:05

And to hear them. This does go into, of course, friendships and everything else. That your most intimate partner, the one that you trust the most, is the one that you fight with the most.

sSara 16:18

You know, I consider a good fight is the one that you grow stronger and you grow more clear on each other and understand each other better. So I consider it a win if you’ve had a fight where after you’ve done the work and you’ve resolved it, you’re almost happy that it happened.

sShawna 16:37

Absolutely. Right? Absolutely. And that’s what makes it worth it to stay in it.

sSara 16:42

Stay in it. And I’ve had friendships like that too, where after our disagreement and we’ve sorted out, like, I actually feel closer to you now.

sShawna 16:49

Absolutely. My cousin, Tiona, we had a huge row many years ago and we didn’t talk to each other for a couple of years. And after that, once we were able to talk through all of the issues that were brought up, was so much stronger friendship and so much more respect for each other’s perspectives. Much deeper connection. So I agree. The goal of the fight is one of the things I think we should consider. Right. Are we just going in this because we’re mad?

sSara 17:08

It’s a deeper connection I imagine.

And we want to make it do it to dinner right? Yeah, that’s a really good point. What’s the goal of this fight?

sShawna 17:25

Think that would be a very good thing to stop and ask.

sSara 17:28

That a lot of men would appreciate knowing what is the point of this.

sShawna 17:34

But there is a way to ask it that’s not gonna piss the other person off.

sSara 17:39

Is so true. This is so true.

Perhaps we can ask, what do we want to gain from this? What do we want to come out with after this?

sShawna 17:47

What is the purpose of what we’re doing here? And I do think that if the fair fighting doesn’t work and if you are headed for our office, there’s also fair fighting and a divorce. And I think it’s very important that you find the attorney that will support your fair fighting. That will say, that’s definitely some boundaries, let’s put them around.

sSara 18:00

100%.

And when they build the strategy with you, they are clear on you’re below the belt and they hear from you what your ex-spouse is below the belt is so that we can do the strategy and the yin and yang of the movement with respecting the rules of engagement, the fair fight.

sShawna 18:36

I think that’s perfect.

sSara 18:38

Awesome. Thanks for listening to the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast. If you’d to learn more, go to atlantadevorceloggroup.com forward slash resources.