Turn down the heat before everything burns
This is the third Above Our Pay Grade, feat. couples therapist Dr. Marina Rosenthal.
Welcome to our third installment of Above Our Pay Grade, where we speak with subject matter experts who can take you deeper on certain topics than we can. This time, Heather’s sharing a conversation around conflict that you won’t want to miss.
Today as our guest, we are so thrilled to have Dr. Marina Rosenthal, a licensed psychologist dedicated to helping couples navigate high-conflict problems. In other words, she can help you get through some pretty heated fights. She shares practical thoughts on the “mess (and magic) of lasting love” in her weekly newsletter, Love Notes for Real Life, and with her many followers on Instagram. She also has a book coming out next year, which I cannot wait to get my hands on!
I previously interviewed Dr. Rosenthal for Money Together on a tough topic: careers, ambition, and the inherent sacrifices some people end up making for their spouse’s career. But today, she’s here to share evergreen insights on working through patterns of conflict, de-escalation, and repair in our relationships.
Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity:
Heather: You work with couples in high-conflict relationships. If you had to rank “money” on the list of issues that arise in your office, where would it fall?
Marina Rosenthal: Very often, it’s not labeled as one of the issues that high-conflict couples are struggling with. Sometimes it is, of course, but more common is that while it’s not being labeled as fighting about money, money lies underneath the problems that they’re fighting about. It’s implicitly there a huge percentage of the time.
H: So, what are couples fighting about?
M: Sometimes, they’re fighting about power. Sometimes, they’re fighting about worthiness and value. Sometimes they’re fighting about autonomy and the right to be your own person. These are big, deep themes that go right down to identity and our own upbringings, and that’s what they’re grappling over.
H: Is there a difference between passion and volatility?
M: I sure hope so. Because I think what people want is passion within safety. We want to feel loved and desired and like there’s that spark, but we also want to feel safe and cared for. Those things don’t always play well together.
Volatility is sometimes referred to as a cheat code to passion, and it can give the semblance of passion, but it’s not the real deal. You’ve gotten there through an illegitimate route. So, people who might think they enjoy makeup sex, they might feel so in love, but that’s not the real deal. They’ve conflated the two concepts to believe that the roller coaster is a healthy part of their existence as a couple.
H: I can see how that happens.
M: I think especially if you didn’t have the greatest modeling of what healthy relationships look like, you can assume that if you’re fighting, it means you’re okay. People do get almost addicted to the makeup cycle. That can be part of an abusive relationship: where there’s repair and a honeymoon and then back into the abuse.
But it also happens in non-abusive relationships where people like the dopamine rush of having a terrible fight then feeling closer than ever, because they put everything on the table. That can be weirdly compelling.
H: Does that mean some couples are just more prone to destructive cycles?
M: Absolutely, but I don’t think anyone consciously enjoys it. I think that it always kind of hurts. It’s kind of like pressing a bruise when it feels bad: there’s something comforting about it. Often, people are replicating things they saw growing up or running from things they saw growing up.
But not all two people, if put together, will have a high-conflict relationship. Some combinations of partners are just not going to bring that type of intensity. And then there’s other partnerships where the context or what’s going on in their lives can just be a magic recipe that brings forth a certain level of intensity.
H: So, let’s say you’re just starting to ramp up into the same pattern of your heated argument cycle. You’re thinking, oh, we’re about to do this again. I know Douglas and I have been in that space before. Is there anything couples can do to lower the temperature?
M: Well, that “meta-awareness” you’re describing—that “oh, this is the moment before we have a bad fight”—just pausing there and naming it is incredibly helpful. We often have that in retrospect, but we don’t always articulate it as a preconscious seed. So, pausing enough to say, “this feels like the point in the conversation where things usually fall apart for us, and I don’t want it to go that way this time,” can be really helpful. Not “this is when you say all the terrible things about me,” but naming the crux in a non-blaming way is a helpful tool.
Something else I teach and talk about a lot is very basic deescalation: pausing to take a break separately, say 10 minutes, splash some water on your face, just do things that bring your temperature down. People resist this so hard. We’re like, no, that won’t work! I’ll be just as mad! No, you won’t. Your body will not let you be just as mad in 10 minutes if you actually engage in regulating strategies, but we kind of don’t want to do it. We want to stay mad. But having just a short pause that you can agree upon to bring the heat down is really helpful.
H: Where is the line? I don’t want to say the line of “no turning back,” but where is the line in an argument that once you’ve crossed it, you’re doing real damage to your relationship?
M: I think it it’s when you start attacking your partner with your words and saying really harsh things about them. Not just their behavior but about their identity, their personhood, things that you can’t take back, right?
When it comes to money, I think threats to remove or control resources create a fundamental change in the power dynamic in a problematic way.
“Here’s a simple litmus test: will this ring in your partner’s head and they won’t be able to get it out? Then that’s probably doing some hard-to-repair damage.”
H: Let’s say you’re coming off a blowout fight. It’s understandable that you might want to avoid talking about that topic again. I think that’s how a lot of couples find themselves avoiding conversations about money, because they associate them with fighting. How do you get back to the table when your last attempt was so painful or difficult?
M: I think it’s good to set aside solutions, at first. Money is a great example of where people want to solve the problem, but that could lead to finger-pointing. So just talk about how you feel about this hard topic. Talk about the fears, the worries, the negative thoughts, and you’re not going to offer a single solution. The whole first conversation—or maybe multiple conversations—is just emotion-oriented. And when you feel really heard, then you can decide together to have a brainstorming conversation and discuss options.
H: We’ve talked a lot about fighting, but how important are apologies?
M: People have baggage about apologies. Maybe it comes from childhood and being made to apologize and viewing it as a sort of transaction. But apologies are an important part of the repair process. Some people really crave apologies while other people could care less and just want to know what you’re going to do different in the future. For most people, we need both, but you might weigh them different depending on the situation. So, apologies definitely matter, and I always encourage people to apologize for whatever you can authentically apologize for, because you might find that it’s enough.
Now, when you’ve taken away safety with your words, I don’t think a verbal apology is ever going to be enough. We need action to restore safety and often quite a bit of time living with that action to demonstrate that it’s not something you’re just going to take away whenever you’re angry or hurting. I’ll just take away your financial freedom. If that’s something that happens repeatedly to any extent at all, that’s really a sign the relationship isn’t safe.
Thank you again to Dr. Marina Rosenthal for helping us go Above Our Pay Grade! Please don’t forget to subscribe to her newsletter and follow her on Instagram—she’s amazing.
If you’re enjoying the Above Our Pay Grade series, paid subscribers have access to all archived posts, a monthly AMA, and they will soon have access to full video recordings of these expert conversations!
What a week!
We’re not running a mini series this week, because I’d rather tell you about last week. It felt like every area of our lives came together in a very poetic, chaotic, great-yet-how-are-we-still-standing kind of way?!
Where to start…well, I recorded a podcast on navigating money in friendships that was so thought-provoking, I might write a newsletter about it (stay tuned). Then, my manifesto on the memoir Strangers resulted in a feverish DM convo with Farnoosh Torabi, who graciously invited me back on her hit podcast, “So Money.” Here’s a clip, but the whole ep was great:
On Wednesday night, Douglas and I presented Money Together to an intimate group of 15 couples, and our knowledgable sommelier Alfredo paired a different wine with each section of our book. For example, Mistakes came with champagne, because champagne was created by accident (OMG)! Couples opened up, leaned into conversation, and connected in ways that just can't happen in a conference or Zoom room. I'm sure the wine helped, too. Anyway, it was incredible. Book events hallelujah!
Thursday was Take Your Kid to Work Day. Usually, we plan a fun city day that’s more “work-adjacent,” but as fate would have it, I previously scheduled an in-person podcast hosted in partnership between Babylist and my dear friend Lindsey Stanberry of The Purse. So…we took the girls to work! They were wonderful stand-ins for lighting and sound, and honestly, it warmed my heart for them to finally meet Lindsey and catch a glimpse of us in action.
Finally, in a move that makes me feel we’ve earned our summer Fridays this year, we snuck in one more virtual book talk on Friday afternoon with the Colorado Therapy Collective. We were there as guests, but we could have just as easily been the ones seeking guidance from them! That’s how you know the work between financial advisors and therapists is truly symbiotic.
I’ll speak on my own behalf here and just say that I am forever grateful this work brings me into great rooms, great partnerships, and great friendships. But damn…it also felt great to have the weekend off!
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