01/30/2026
Something I notice again and again in my couples work is how quickly people rush to accountability or reaction after conflict.
And I am making sense of this neurobiologically - rather than just teaching couples skills.
When there is a rupture via a tone shift misreading your partner's feelings, the nervous system often goes straight into threat physiology.
Heart rate rises.
Muscles tighten.
Attention narrows to all the bad stuff and all the good is forgotten.
The brain shifts toward protection via judging and blaming stories.
From that state, the courtroom litigation vibes begin.
Who is right.
Who is wrong.
Who owes whom.
Who needs to fix this first.
Winning, blaming, withdrawing, over-explaining, or delivering empty apologies become stand-ins for moving that threatened nervous system back into safety.
This is not people being jerks or being manipulative.
These are threatened nervous systems still in protective mode.
Most of us never learned how threat gets activated and what the mind does under threat.
So we reach for whatever strategy helped us survive earlier in life (the blaming, withdrawing, empty apologies, dominating etc etc etc).
Real repair starts when the body has been helped out of threat.
It slows physiology first.
It centers reconnection rather than verdicts.
It helps two nervous systems find each other again before the accounting begins.
From there, accountability becomes possible without collapse or performance.
Apologies land because they are carried by emotional presence.
If conflict keeps looping even after someone says sorry, it isn't because there is a jerk over there.
It is usually about a threat state.
Shift the state first.
Then repair can actually happen.
