Art of Accomplishment

How To Transform Any Relationship (Complete Toolkit For Healthy Relationships)

24 min read

Summary

This comprehensive video is Joe Hudson’s complete relationship toolkit, covering how to transform fighting from destructive to healing. He begins with the crucial reframe: don’t judge a relationship by how often you fight, but by how you fight. All living systems require tension — the avoidance of friction kills relationships by stagnating them. The question is how to handle tension productively.

Joe shares his journey with his wife Tara — from pitchfork-and-Miata-level fights to three-minute conflicts that observers don’t even recognize as fights. The core tools include: speaking your truth with an open heart, recognizing that losing yourself in fights is trauma being triggered, making fight agreements in advance, leaving fights in connection (not withdrawal), understanding that both people in a fight want to be seen, learning to listen by mirroring, not defending or adjudicating truth, and making upright (shame-free) apologies.

He covers several destructive patterns in detail: emotional abuse (using any emotion — not just anger — to control someone), blame as corrosive shame-passing, the superiority dynamic between “logical” and “emotional” partners, resentment as repressed anger pointing at an undrawn boundary, passive aggression as the response to feeling oppressed, and the chaser-withdrawer dynamic. Throughout, he emphasizes that boundaries are acts of love that open your heart, that fighting productively requires not taking responsibility for your partner’s emotions, and that every repeated fight is an opportunity to heal childhood trauma — especially when partners learn each other’s attuned responses.

Key Concepts

Key Quotes

“We don’t judge it by how much we fight. We judge it by how we fight.”

“Emotional abuse is when you are using your emotion to try to control somebody.”

“Nobody has ever said ‘once I find the truth of this relationship then the relationship will be happy.’ But everybody says, ‘I would love to be seen.‘”

“As soon as someone feels seen, almost immediately, they want to see the other person. And so the fight just almost instantaneously resolves.”

“Whenever resentment was there in the relationship, there was an anger, there was some sort of frustration, that resentment was kind of a sign of a repressed anger.”

“Boundaries are an act of love. As soon as you draw the boundary, no matter what the response is, it needs to make you feel more love for the other person.”

Transcript

Most of us were taught to avoid fighting in relationships at all costs. But as it turns out, the only way to have a truly great relationship is to lean into the tension when it arises. In this video, Joe Hudson, the co-founder of The Art of Accomplishment, shares everything he has learned about how to have great fights in a relationship. All you need to do is watch, apply the lessons that resonate, and see how your relationships transform.

I remember this time with my wife. We had gone through this phase of fighting all the time. I mean our fights were so horrific and we had learned that the fights were just basically verbal abuse that we were abusing each other. And so we had like stopped fighting and we started tracking our relationship by like how often we fought, right? So it was like we were doing good if we weren’t fighting as much and we were doing worse if we were fighting more. And nowadays that idea is like ludicrous to us, right? And it’s not like we don’t judge it by how much we fight. We judge it by how we fight. That’s how we’re judging our relationship.

So we have been in situations recently this happened. We were like preparing for a retreat. We’re both tired. We’re going into this thing that’s just like it’s a super intense thing. The retreats that we do like we work from 7:30 in the morning until 10:30 at night 7 days in a row. And so it’s definitely where we’re going to be like most afraid. And so we have this fight and we do it wherever we want to do it. We don’t hide our fights. We just sort of like yeah this is our fight. So we’re having our fight and we’re doing it and we’re doing it in front of the folks that we are facilitating with. Right. And the end of it was like this three or four minute fight. In the end of it I was like I’m like it’s really hard to fight with you and I’m glad we resolved that. I love you. And the two people who were there were like that was a fight. They just like they didn’t even know it was a fight. But for us it was a fight and it was an important fight.

And so the reason that we don’t judge it by how often we fight anymore is because fighting is really really important. And the reason that it’s important is because it’s like all life requires tension. If I’m going to breathe, my lungs have to have tension. If a cell is going to exist, it has to have tension. So, as we grow, as we live, as we’re alive, as we change as people, there’s going to be tension. And the more transformation that we have in our lives, the more tension there’s going to be there. And so, we need to address that tension for us to be vital and alive and healthy.

There’s this great metaphor. And I think there’s a guy who wrote the black swan and he has this idea that basically financial markets need to have tension on a regular basis for them to be healthy. And so he says big collapses in the market happen because little collapses aren’t allowed to happen because of monetary policy. As that sounds weird, but an easier way to think about it is we’re healthy physically because we physically give ourselves tension through exercise. And if we don’t, then we’re unhealthy and the falls are really, really big. So any kind of system requires kind of a regular tension to stay healthy. And it’s the same in a marriage or in a relationship.

There’s some tension that’s really required. The question is how do you handle that tension? And that’s the really important part. But if you judge your relationship by how many fights you have, well then you have the wrong metric for a healthy relationship. It’s how you fight. Are you fighting with love? Are you fighting with an open heart? Are you fighting with respect? Or have you completely lost your nervous system? Are you completely out of control? Are you being abusive? Are you being mean? Have you lost yourself? Are you being who you want to be in that fight?

So some people might not even call it a fight, but I’m going to call it a fight here because it’s just so important that we have that friction in a relationship. So the avoidance of the friction is an amazingly detrimental thing to a relationship because it basically kills it. It stagnates it. And so the having that friction is just critical. It’s just how you have it that’s important.

So there was this couple that I was working with at this one point. Both of them, one was a high-powered lawyer, one was a venture capitalist. The marriage was just like they would fight over the coffee maker. Like the grounds being left at the espresso machine. Like this was their life. And they had clearly loved each other at one point and their relationship was clearly hot at one point. And now the sex was dead. And it was like all about the interactions of the kids and the administration of life. And there was no intimacy. There was no connection. There was no storytelling. The whole thing had just fallen apart.

And they were both incredibly scared to just tell each other their truths because this happens in almost all the relationships, probably happens in yours, is that one person is scared to tell their truth because the other person’s going to be too fragile. It’s like it’s going to hurt them. It’s going to break them. They’re going to be depressed for even longer or something like that. And the other one isn’t scared to tell their truth because of the anger. Oh, they’re going to get angry at me. They’re going to yell at me. They’re going to be upset or they’re going to remove their love and then I’m going to be chasing them for their love and so I’m just not going to say the thing that’s important to me.

And so they’re both not showing up in the relationship. And so they committed to telling each other their truth which means that there was going to be conflict. It means that the fighting had to happen but the fighting had to happen differently. And so when they committed to both having the fights in a respectful manner and speaking their truth even when the other person might be hurt. It was 6 months maybe eight months and their whole relationship had changed.

And this is an incredibly common story in the work that I do. It’s that you have to speak your truth in a relationship despite what it might do to somebody else. Despite the idea that oh I’m not being compassionate even though you are. It’s just maybe not nice or it’s not convenient or it’s just an emotional experience that you don’t want to have in the moment. But it’s deeply compassionate because showing up for a person and saying this is where I’m at so that they know where they’re at. That is compassion if you can do it with an open heart, if you can do it lovingly.

One of the things that people get caught up in in fights is that they just feel like they’re completely out of control. They’re like, “What the hell? I’ve completely lost myself. I don’t know what I’m doing.” And we’ve all felt this. We’ve all been in a situation where it literally feels like somebody animated us, like stuck their hand up us and made us like a puppet. And it wasn’t who we are. It wasn’t who we wanted to be. The important thing to know about that is that’s trauma.

So, think about it this way. Someone’s got PTSD, some known kind of trauma, and they were in a war in Iraq, and there’s big bombs going off, and now they’re in Cleveland, Ohio, and a car backfires, and they think they’re back in Fallujah. The way trauma works is it brings you back to a place where you aren’t right now. It brings you back to the place where the trauma happened and asks you to relive that trauma. The whole fight, the whole purpose of the whole thing is so that you can actually process the emotions that you couldn’t process at the time of the trauma.

But what occurs instead is we go, “Oh my god, we lost.” We don’t feel anything. We have the same reaction we did when we had the trauma the first time. And so this is a big capital T trauma. PTSD, war, Fallujah. But there’s other traumas like, you know, every time I was scared, my mom was like, “Be strong.” So, I never actually got nurtured in my fear. And so, fear became the enemy.

And now, when I’m scared, fear is the enemy. I won’t feel that. I won’t feel it in my partner. My partner’s scared. I’m trying to control them so that they don’t feel fear. So, I don’t feel it because I don’t want to feel it. And that’s a different kind of trauma. But what the trauma is asking of me to heal is to actually feel that fear that I didn’t get to feel when I was a kid.

Now, there’s a whole bunch of very cool tricks on keeping your nervous system calm. The easiest one is just breathe. You can do box breath. You can just do six-six breath. Just slow down your breath, be conscious, and that can totally calm your nervous system. You can put your hands on your body, feel your body, that can completely calm your nervous system. But the idea is when that’s happening, that’s your opportunity. The opportunity is calm your nervous system so you can be back in yourself and then feel the thing that you didn’t get to feel.

And hopefully you’ve gotten far enough with your partner where you can have that kind of agreement like, “Oh, I’m in my trauma. I need to feel some stuff. Oh, cool.” And that’s an amazing thing. Where Tara and I got to a point in our fights where it was like, “Oh, I recognize I’m not here right now. I’m in my trauma. I need to feel my stuff.” Amazing thing happened. The fight just ended. The fight was like, “Oh, this is why we’re having the fight. The fight is for you to heal this trauma. Great. You’re in it. You see it. I’m right here for you.” And she would just come to me and just be with me while I felt it. And I would just come to her and just be with her while she felt it. And it was just this — every one of our fights became a way to relieve the trauma that put us in the place to have the fight for the first time.

And I remember this story. My friend was in this relationship. He had never been in a long relationship before. Like he was one of those one month sleep with everybody types. But he found this relationship and he was really into her and she broke his heart and crushed him. And we were sitting there talking about it and he’s like, “What do I do?” And I’m like, “You cry. You grieve.” And week one and two was he was crying over the loss. But then in week three, four, five, he was crying over what got him there. Like the upbringing, the parents, the way he was raised, his ideas of love. And he just kept on grieving. Before this happened, he was kind of overweight. His business wasn’t doing well. He was drinking too much. And at the end of this four or five months of grieving, he was in shape. His business was thriving and he wasn’t drinking. And it was an amazing switch just because he had felt all that trauma all the way through.

So there’s this guy that I was coaching. He was an incredibly successful human being. He had built a multiple billion dollar company. And when it came to his marriage, he just didn’t believe that he could change the marriage. And I said to him, “So what is it that makes you think that you could build a ten billion dollar company, but you can’t fix a relationship?” And it allowed him to see like, oh wait, this is ridiculous.

And it’s the most critical thing if you’re going to start working on the relationship is to actually have belief and faith that there’s change that’s possible. If you don’t, then you’ll be undermining yourself the whole time. The way the brain works is that we have something, I think it’s like the habenula, and it prevents us from failing over and over again. And so you need to think about it as experiments — here are the 10, 20 experiments that I’m going to do working with the relationship. And it’s much better if it’s together. If both people are saying hey let’s work on this relationship.

If you’re in a situation where your boyfriend or girlfriend doesn’t want to work on the relationship with you, that’s the conversation you have to have. If they don’t want to work on making a better relationship and you want a better relationship, it might not be a match. Working on a relationship on your own is an incredibly effective important thing to do for your own personal growth, but it’s not going to make the relationship better unless both people want a better relationship.

There was a time in our relationship, Tara and I, where I very much thought that I was superior. If you feel like you’re better than somebody when you’re fighting with them, it makes it incredibly hard for that fight to be constructive. So typically in relationships, one person is more intellectual and one person is more emotional. The person who’s intellectual often feels like they’re right more of the time and the person who’s emotional often feels like they’re wrong more of the time.

The reason that people feel like they’re right, that they need to feel superior, is because there’s emotions that they don’t want to feel. Whenever we’re judging anybody, including ourselves, it’s because we don’t want to feel a certain emotion. And by putting yourself above the other person, it just completely cuts off the possibility of productive conflict. There is always with the “I’m feeling better than you” an underlying shame of “I’m not good enough.” They go hand in hand.

So, I think Tara and I hadn’t quite gotten married yet. I remember going over to her parents house. It was like a crazy yell fest. When Tara and I got married, we just followed the pattern. And we had this great therapist who said, “You’re emotionally abusing each other.” Both Tara and I were like, “No, we’re not. We’re just yelling.” She’s like, “No.” And her definition which has stuck with me forever is emotional abuse is when you are using your emotion to try to control somebody.

Now the one that our society says is the worst is anger. But it’s just as true using guilt to try to control somebody. Or using your sadness — “Look how hurt I am. See how bad you are.” Or using your fear — “Take care of me. Take all my fear for me.” Anytime when you’re putting the emotion at the person and you want to control them, bend them to your will through your emotions, that’s abuse.

You can go out of the room and yell and scream and get sad and guilty and it doesn’t matter. You can get angry and sad and scared in a fight too. That’s all fine. It just can’t be at the other person. It can’t be trying to control them and it can’t make them feel unsafe. But if you’re using it to control somebody, it becomes incredibly unproductive because it’s abuse.

Similarly, if you have to control and push somebody into doing something so that you can be happy, you’re going to have to maintain that pressure to keep them in that spot. It doesn’t work. There’s this way we talked about venture capital — the amount of energy it took to make the deal is the amount of energy you have to use to maintain it.

One of the biggest tricks for fighting well is making some agreements before you fight. Not when you’re about to fight, because your nervous system is already riled. Sit down and say, “How do we want to fight together?” And I remember friends in Colorado who got in a fight and they had agreements — they literally had a piece of paper. At one point their agreement was that whenever they got in a fight they get naked. It totally changed the way they fought.

You can have agreements about words you won’t say, not threatening divorce, sentences to say when someone is in trauma. Like when I feel in a rush, Tara just says “I see how much you care” and it totally makes me go soft. When somebody’s crying, our agreement is we don’t try to stop them or fix it, we just be with them.

When you’re leaving a fight, it’s really important to do it in connection. Say, “Hey, I need a break. I want to start again in 10 minutes.” That’s a precise time. “I’m not leaving you. I’m just taking a minute for myself.” As compared to “Well fine, I’m going to bed.” One feels like the removal of love and one feels like they just need space.

There’s certain things in fighting that take a long time to heal. The threat of any kind of physical violence. Insults that erode trust. Threatening somebody with future stuff — “I’m going to divorce you.” Any of those big threats are incredibly damaging. You can have a disagreement that heals trauma. You can have a disagreement that retraumatizes.

Boundaries are an act of love. The rules I have with boundaries are easy. One: as soon as you draw the boundary, no matter what the response is, it needs to make you feel more love for the other person. Two: it’s not telling the other person what they need to do. It’s telling them what you’re going to do under certain circumstances. “When you’re guilt tripping me, I’m going to leave. I’ll be back in 20 minutes.”

The boundary is mostly about you learning for yourself that something’s not okay. You’re drawing it externally to learn that in a concrete way. And it opens up your life to people who are ready to treat you the way you actually want to be treated.

Our oldest daughter was raised where we always allowed her to have her emotions, but somewhere she was like 17 years old and I was having an off day and trying to give her advice and she was like, “Dad, just let me have my emotions.” And I realized that is the cause of so much tension — somebody feels like they’re responsible for the other person’s emotions.

If you’re trying to constantly make someone happy and chase their happiness or make sure they’re not scared or angry, that is nothing but a disaster. Every emotion that I have a hard time sitting with — with Tara or my kids — is an emotion that I wasn’t allowed to sit with as a kid. What I’m actually doing is trying to make them feel a certain way so I don’t have to feel a certain way. It’s even more manipulative than I thought.

It’s deeply disempowering to try to take somebody’s emotion away from them. It breeds resentment. And eventually it’ll kill the sex in the relationship. You want to have sex with equals. You don’t want to have sex with someone you’re caretaking.

At the beginning of the path, you blame somebody else. In the middle of the path, you blame yourself. At the end of the path, you don’t blame anybody. Blame is not true. Am I going to blame you or your parents or your grandparents or your blood sugar? If I blame you, I don’t feel better and I haven’t motivated you to fix anything. All it does is pass shame back and forth.

If I blame myself, I’m abdicating accountability for the other person — telling them they’re weak. And I can’t objectively look at things in a shame-free way where I want to improve. Every addict who knows they’re an addict is telling themselves they’re bad, and it’s not changing anything.

The way fights typically work is passing shame back and forth. If you can get over the idea that somebody’s bad, the fight falls apart. The other thing that makes the fight fall apart is dropping the need to defend yourself. Each person’s defense is heard as an attack by the other. If you can stop needing to be seen for just a moment and actually listen and see the other person’s truth, when they feel heard, they almost immediately want to see you back. The fight almost instantaneously resolves.

Not defending yourself requires seeing yourself. If you see yourself as potentially bad, there’s always something to defend. But when you drop the defense, you start to notice your inherent goodness. You become immune to shame.

I had this amazing learning with mirroring — where one person says something and you just repeat what you heard. I got it wrong every time. Little nuances of blame placement, inferred intentions. And I realized: oh, I don’t really get what she’s saying to me. We were fighting over semantics plus perspective. Once you realize they mean something different than what you’re hearing, you start realizing: we might not even be disagreeing. This isn’t them rejecting me. This is them not understanding me.

The most important thing in listening is to listen like they’re right. Like they’re the best guru saying pearls of wisdom. With full wonder — curiosity without needing to know the answer. Not adjudicating truth but understanding their truth.

There was always somebody being passive aggressive. Our rule of thumb was: if we see someone being passive aggressive, we’re going to ask you to be just outright aggressive. A lot of times people who are being passive aggressive don’t know they’re being passive aggressive. Guilt is a perfect example — it’s an aggressive act where you get to play the victim. Nagging is passive aggression. It’s anything where the person feels like they don’t have control but they’re still exerting control.

Resentment typically works like this: one person is caretaking another person in a way they don’t want to be taken care of. Then the person starts resenting them. Resentment is a sign of repressed anger, and that anger is pointing at a boundary. It lingers because the boundary hasn’t been drawn. If you can draw the boundary, you don’t have to hold on to resentment.

When we’re in fights, we are in our trauma and we’re not being seen the way we weren’t being seen as a kid. I needed to hear “I see how much you care” and it dissolved my rushing. That’s an attuned response to the trauma. Sit down with your partner and talk about: what do you most want in that moment? What’s the thing you want most that you never got as a kid? Finding that attuned response takes many iterations, but it’s incredibly powerful.

Apologies need to be upright — not shame-based. “This is genuinely what I don’t want to do. That’s not how I want to be with you.” An upright apology actually reduces the chances of the behavior happening again. A shame-based apology guarantees it will happen again. There’s also a sweetness apology: “I’m sorry you’re having a hard day” — not taking responsibility but acknowledging and being present.

So many of my fights with Tara were because I was not attuned to what she wanted. We came up with: “Do you just want to be listened to? Do you want some questions? Or do you want advice?” We realized we almost never wanted coaching — we wanted someone to be with us. And the empathy piece is critical: empathy is being with somebody without being in somebody. Put 10-20% of your attention in your body, feel your own system. Then you can attune to them without buying into their story.

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