The Stories We Tell Ourselves in Conflict

It's a phrase Brené Brown uses in *Rising Strong* to describe the narrative your brain generates when you feel hurt or threatened by someone close to you. Your mind fills gaps in the evidence with assumptions — usually the most threatening ones available. In a relationship, this sounds like: 'She went quiet, which means she's furious with me and pulling away.' The event is the silence. The story is the meaning you assigned to it. Separating the two is the foundational move in conflict repair.

**Negative sentiment override** is a term from John Gottman's research: when a relationship has accumulated enough unresolved hurt, partners start interpreting even neutral or positive behaviour through a negative lens. Your partner smiles and you read it as sarcastic. They offer help and you hear control. Gottman found that couples in negative sentiment override rated even their partner's neutral bids as hostile roughly **50 percent** of the time. It's not dishonesty — it's a calibration failure caused by accumulated grievances that were never repaired.

Start by naming the assumption rather than acting from it. When you notice an 'always' or 'never' thought — 'she never takes me seriously,' 'he always makes it about himself' — treat that as a signal, not a verdict. Alexandra Solomon (*Loving Bravely*) calls this moving from a black-and-white narrative to a **dialectical story**: both things can be true. Your partner can be genuinely forgetful _and_ genuinely caring. Holding two truths simultaneously prevents the cognitive compression that turns irritation into contempt. See our guide on [perspective-taking in relationships](/en/blog/perspective-taking) for a practical method.

'Always' and 'never' language is almost always a sign that the **core negative image** has activated — a term Terrence Real uses in *Us* for the cartoon-villain version of your partner that your mind locks onto under stress. When that image takes over, your partner stops being a flawed person and becomes a fixed type: 'the one who dismisses me,' 'the one who never shows up.' This absolutism makes repair nearly impossible, because the accused partner becomes defensive instead of curious. The fix is to catch the word and swap it for something specific: 'this morning' instead of 'always.'

A concept from Terrence Real's *Us*: every long-term partner holds a compressed, worst-case mental image of the other — built from past hurts, unrepaired conflicts, and old wounds. Under stress, the brain retrieves this image instead of seeing the person in front of you. **Real argues this is the single biggest obstacle to conflict resolution** — you can't negotiate with a cartoon. Noticing when you've switched from 'my actual partner' to 'that version of them' is what breaks the loop. It usually requires naming what you're feeling rather than building a case.

Susan David (*Emotional Agility*) argues that when we misread our own emotions, we project the misreading onto the nearest relationship. A common example: you snap at your partner over a small thing, but the real fuel is stress from work you haven't named. The snap felt like a relationship problem; it was actually a **misattributed emotion**. Getting emotionally agile means pausing to ask 'what am I actually feeling, and where did it start?' before attributing the source to your partner. This single question can prevent a significant proportion of arguments that seem to be about the relationship.

Yes — and Brené Brown is specific about how. The phrase 'the story I'm telling myself is...' functions as an explicit disclaimer: you're flagging that what follows is your interpretation, not established fact. This shifts the conversation from accusation to inquiry. Instead of 'you clearly don't care about me,' you say 'the story I'm telling myself is that you don't care, and I want to check if that's accurate.' It's a **vulnerability move**, which is why it works — it invites your partner into correction rather than triggering their defences. Our piece on [how to raise a difficult topic without starting a fight](/en/blog/how-to-raise-a-problem) covers the full structure.

Eric Berne (*Games People Play*) described 'the blame game' as a transaction where both partners unconsciously avoid examining their own contribution by focusing entirely on the other's fault. Each accuser becomes temporarily convinced they are the injured party — because inside the game, that's structurally true. The problem is that **both partners are playing** and neither sees it. Stepping out requires one person to name the cycle rather than the culprit: 'I notice we're in a loop where we keep trading blame — I'd rather figure out what's driving it.' This breaks the game without declaring a winner.

Contempt is conflict that has calcified into a judgment about who your partner fundamentally _is_. Ordinary conflict is about what happened; contempt is about what's wrong with them as a person. Gottman's research identified contempt as the strongest predictor of relationship breakdown — stronger than the frequency of conflict or the severity of individual arguments. It typically emerges after a long period of negative sentiment override: the stories about your partner have solidified from 'she did a hurtful thing' to 'she is a person who does hurtful things.' Catching the stories early is how you prevent that shift. The [four horsemen of relationships](/en/blog/four-horsemen-relationships) explains where contempt sits in the breakdown sequence.

Alexandra Solomon (*Loving Bravely*) uses 'dialectical story' to mean a narrative that holds two seemingly contradictory truths at once: 'my partner is both forgetful and genuinely caring.' The brain under stress prefers binary judgments — good or bad, caring or neglectful — because they're faster to process. But **binary judgments are almost always incomplete**, and acting on an incomplete story makes conflicts worse. A dialectical story forces you to stay in complexity, which keeps curiosity alive. Curiosity and contempt cannot occupy the same moment — choose one.