Oh, that one lands hard. I can feel the weight of that just sitting across from you right now.
Let me tell you what I actually think is happening when your partner says that, because I don’t think it means what your nervous system is telling you it means in that moment.
When someone threatens to leave during a fight, their amygdala has taken the wheel. Remember, the body is six seconds ahead of the thinking brain during those moments. Your partner is not sitting there calmly calculating, “I have weighed the pros and cons and I am leaving this relationship.” They are in full biological panic. They are a little field mouse that feels like a threatened crocodile. And the loudest, most desperate thing their nervous system can do to protest the disconnection is to say, “I’m out.”
Here is the part that is going to sting a little, but I want you to hear it: the fact that it hurts you that badly? That is actually the proof that you love each other. If their words can bring you to your knees, it means they matter to you in the deepest possible way. Your organism recognizes their organism as your person. That terror you feel is not a flaw. It is love.
Now. What is actually happening in that moment is both of you have been pushed outside your window of tolerance. You are both dysregulated. You are both hurting. And you are both, in your own ways, doing some version of fight, flight, freeze, or placate. Their version just happens to look like threatening to leave, which I will admit is one of the more brutal protest behaviors because it goes straight for the attachment wound. It says, “I might abandon you.” And of course that is devastating.
But here is what I want you to really sit with. They are not threatening to leave because they want to leave. They are threatening to leave because staying in that moment of disconnection is unbearable for them. That threat is a protest. It is their organism screaming, “I am in so much pain right now that I cannot stay here.”
The work is not to get them to stop saying it by arguing with them about it in the middle of a fight. You cannot solve that problem from inside the fight. You cannot solve a content problem with a disconnected nervous system. What has to happen first is that both of you have to come back into some kind of shared recognition that you are both hurting at the same time.
That is the still image I want you to focus on. Not the video of everything that led up to the threat. Not the video of every time they have said it before. Just this one frame: two people who love each other, both in so much pain that they cannot get to each other.
When the dust settles, and I mean after the fight, not during it, that is when the real conversation can happen. That is when you might be able to say something like, “When you say you’re leaving, it terrifies me. And I know you’re in pain when you say it. I want us to figure out what is happening for both of us in those moments.”
That is the beginning of earning the right to have a different conversation. The good news is this is workable. The box of suffering does not have to stay this big. But you cannot jump over the mess to get there. You have to go through it, together.
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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: Communication Exercises for Couples (That Actually Work)
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