Fighting is part of every relationship, even healthy ones. And we all know the routine: The merest whiff of criticism, or being caught leaving the toilet seat up again, can escalate to shouting, accusations, defensiveness, histrionics, self-righteousness, and the egregious misuse of conflict-resolution tools. How quickly we can find ourselves letting fly all the hurled plates of our hurts and angers.

And we all know how we patch things up—until the next time. How often our remedies end up as little more than temporary treaties and grudging concessions, the emotional equivalent of exchanging prisoners at the border.

Only late in the game have I come to understand an elemental truth about why we fight and what undergirds the impulse to lash out, whether in offense or defense, whether as partners or nations. As Andrew Bard Schmookler argues convincingly in his book Out of Weakness: Healing the Wounds that Drive Us to War, it’s a sense of weakness that often makes us pull our six-guns out on one another, that drives our preoccupation with displaying power and strength.

When someone crosses you—criticizes you, challenges your position, threatens you, even just disagrees with you—you go into fight-or-flight mode, whether you’re aware of it or not, your brain hijacked by stress hormones. You feel vulnerable and knocked off balance, and desperate to avoid feeling or appearing flawed. So you try to regain your footing, your advantage, your lost ground, your sense of control, if not your sense of self. And out of weakness, you get primed for war.

If the other person happens to push one of the heavy-metal buttons on your emotional jukebox, the ones that predictably send you into a fury, you’re also in danger of over-reacting, retaliating out of proportion to the offense. And probably against the wrong person. Meaning that the one (or ones) who actually set those tectonic hurts and angers in motion most likely isn’t the person in front of you, the one pointing at the........

© Psychology Today