When you feel like a puppet in a fight—saying things you don’t mean, acting in ways that aren’t you—that’s not a character deficiency. It’s trauma. Your nervous system has transported you back to an earlier time when you couldn’t process a particular emotion, and it’s asking you to relive it so you can finally feel what you couldn’t feel then.
Joe draws the parallel explicitly: a war veteran hears a car backfire and thinks they’re back in Fallujah. That’s big-T trauma, and everyone recognizes it. But the same mechanism operates with small-t trauma. A child whose mother said “be strong” every time they were scared grows up unable to feel fear—and unable to tolerate it in their partner. In a fight, they’re not in the present moment; they’re back with their mother, being told their feelings aren’t allowed.
“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 opportunity is to calm the nervous system (breathe, feel your body) so you can return to the present and then feel the emotion that was originally blocked. This reframes the fight entirely: it’s not a failure of the relationship but an invitation to heal.
Related Concepts
- Every fight can bring you closer
- Relationship triggers are yours
- Name your trauma in the fight
- Breath regulates the nervous system
- Fights can become healing opportunities within relationships
- Fights can heal trauma or create more of it
- The childhood freeze response becomes the adult trap