Summary
Joe and Tara share a raw personal story about the intensity of their early fights—her revving a car engine, him holding a pitchfork—to illustrate that relationship conflict can either heal or re-traumatize depending on how it’s handled.
The critical distinction: disagreements can heal trauma when they stay within safe limits, but certain behaviors—physical violence or threats, yelling insults, threatening divorce or infidelity—cause damage that takes a very long time to repair. These behaviors erode trust and dysregulate the nervous system regardless of what the mind rationalizes.
The turning point for Joe and Tara was making explicit agreements about what’s off-limits in fights. Creating a safe playing field was the first and most important step in transforming their fights from destructive to evolutionary.
Key Concepts
- Fights can heal trauma or re-traumatize depending on safety
- Relationship agreements create a safe playing field for conflict
Key Quotes
“You can have a disagreement that heals the trauma. You can have a disagreement that fights.”
“If you go past a certain limit it’s going to actually be traumatizing instead of healing the trauma.”
“The nervous system—even if our minds say ‘oh I know that they were just’—our nervous system is like ‘oh that’s real.‘”
“Making it a safe playing field… that is absolutely critical.”
Transcript
so Tara and I used to live partially in the city and partially on these 200 acres and there was this moment where she’s sitting in her Miata revving her engine threatening to run me over and I am sitting AB above with a pitchfork which was the closest thing threatening to hit the hood of her car like that’s how bad our fights got at the beginning and oh it was just it was brutal I I never physically hit her right but and she never physically hit me but the but it was it was like those fights were brutal and something that we realize is that there’s certain things in fighting and I think everybody knows this but I I think it’s important to say it which is there’s certain things in fighting that take a long time to heal if you if you do in a fight it’s going to take a long time to heal the threat of any kind of physical violence is is going to take a long time to heal any kind of physical violence like the nervous system our nervous system even if our minds say oh I know that they were just our nervous system is like oh that’s real and we’re going to we’re like we’re going to be like this around them every time they get angry and then their anger can’t be okay and then we can’t heal through that anger yelling um insults is another like insulting somebody that can have the same kind of big emotional like hit and that it erodes trust over a long period of time generally threatening somebody with future stuff I’m going to divorce you I’m going to cheat on you any of those big threats are going to be incredibly damaging and it’s going to take a long time to heal out of those and so the thing about a fight is if you go past a certain limit it’s going to actually be traumatizing instead of healing the trauma so you can have a disagreement that heals the trauma you can have a disagreement that fights if you’re threatening if you’re any kind of physical violence if you’re um making threats in the future if you are insulting anything like that you’re going to be incredibly important or you’re going to start going in the wrong direction it’s going to get ret traumatizing instead of healing of the trauma that the fight is eliciting in you and so that’s that’s like a critical piece and when tar and I made those agreements and we talked about agreements and I highly recommend putting these things in the agreements that was like the first and most important step in turning our fights into something that became healing that became evolutionary for us that became transformative that helped us become better people is just like making it a safe playing field and so that is absolutely critical [Music]