Come here. Let me tell you something real about this.
When you’re in the middle of an argument, your listening doesn’t fail because you’re a bad listener. It fails because you’re scared. That’s it. That’s the whole story.
I know this personally. I’ve said it out loud about myself. When I get frightened during a hard conversation, my listening skills go right out the window. The more threatened I feel, the less I can actually hear what’s in front of me. And I’m a couples therapist. This is what I do for a living. It happens to me too.
So the first thing I want you to understand is this: you are not broken when you can’t listen during a fight. Your brain has been hijacked. Your limbic system has taken the wheel. The part of you that’s supposed to stay curious and open is now running a threat assessment. It is literally, physiologically harder to listen when you feel like you’re in danger.
Here’s what that danger usually looks like in a relationship. One person says something, and underneath the words, the other person’s nervous system hears one of two things. Either “you’re not important to me” or “you’re not good enough.” That’s it. Those are the two wounds that get activated. And the moment one of those lands, you’re no longer listening to your partner. You’re defending yourself from the story your nervous system just told you.
So practically, what do you do?
First, notice when you’ve left the building. There’s a 30 second test I use. If you cannot answer the question “what am I feeling right now,” you are not in a state where listening is going to happen. You have to feel yourself first before you can feel your partner. So pause. Not to win, not to make a point. Just to find out what’s actually happening inside you.
Second, separate feeling from fixing. So much of what passes for “not listening” is actually a very anxious attempt to solve the problem before you’ve actually heard it. The moment your partner starts talking, part of your brain is already three steps ahead building a rebuttal or a solution. That’s not listening. That’s self-protection wearing a helpful mask.
Third, try to accept what they’re telling you is true. Even if it doesn’t match your version. Even if you wouldn’t feel that way. If your partner says they felt alone, that is not debatable. It is a fact about their inner experience. You don’t have to agree that you abandoned them. You just have to accept that they felt alone. That’s the doorway. Reflect it back. “That must have really hurt.” Simple. Real. And it changes everything.
The goal underneath all of this is to get to a place where you can step off the stage of your own experience and see the whole scene. Because when you’re in it, all you can see is your own pain. But there are two people hurting in that room. And once you can see that, once you can say “we’re both hurting here,” you stop needing to win and you start being able to actually hear each other.
That’s where real listening lives. Not in some calm, perfect version of the conversation. It lives on the other side of the fight, when you come back and say, “come here, you made sense and I made sense, and we both just got scared.”
That’s the repair. And that repair, that moment of genuine seeing each other, that is worth more than a thousand perfect conversations where nobody got triggered in the first place.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: How to Stop Fighting and Start Communicating in Your Relationship
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