If you’ve ever wondered whether what’s happening in your relationship is “just how couples fight” or something more dangerous, you’re asking the right question — and you’re not alone in finding it hard to answer. Not all conflict is created equal. Many couples get caught in reciprocal patterns of escalation fueled by fear and disconnection — the kind of fighting that’s exhausting and painful but ultimately repairable. Other relationships involve intimidation, coercion, or violence that fundamentally changes what safe, effective treatment looks like. Knowing which one you’re in matters more than almost anything else in deciding what kind of help to seek.
I’ve spent over 25 years working with couples — through infidelity, gray divorce, and relational trauma — and one of the most consequential clinical judgments I make, often in a first session, is which kind of conflict I’m looking at. Get it wrong, and couples therapy can do real harm.
I think about this every time I remember a neighborhood I used to live in. There was a house a few doors down where, if you were out walking your dog in the evening, you could hear the arguing from the sidewalk. That family became the neighborhood’s open secret — the kind of thing everyone had a theory about and nobody actually intervened in. We watched from a safe, uninvolved distance, never knowing the true extent of what was happening inside those walls. Eventually the teenage kids started running — literally running away — and getting into their own kind of trouble, the sort that looked, from the outside, like a separate problem entirely. Nobody connected it out loud. I’d go on to see that pattern again and again in my career: conflict sealed inside a house doesn’t stay contained to that house. It finds its way out through the people living in it, especially the kids, usually wearing a disguise.
Not All Violence Is the Same
Researchers distinguish between different forms of intimate partner violence, and that distinction isn’t academic hairsplitting — it changes what treatment should look like. Michael Johnson’s typology, now more than 25 years into shaping the field, separates situational couple violence — aggression that erupts out of poorly managed conflict, on both sides, without an ongoing agenda of control — from coercive controlling violence (sometimes called intimate terrorism), where violence is one tool among several — isolation, surveillance, financial control, intimidation — used to dominate a partner (Springer Nature, 2023).
Treatment decisions should be guided by the nature, severity, and function of the violence, not simply its presence. Recent clinical commentary on Johnson’s typology is direct about this: situational couple violence may respond to conjoint treatment designed specifically for it (Stith & Spencer, 2024, cited in Springer Nature); coercive controlling violence generally does not belong in the same room, because the safety conditions that make couples therapy work — honesty, vulnerability, a partner’s freedom to disagree without consequence — aren’t present. Misreading one for the other isn’t a minor clinical error. It’s a safety risk.
One of my earliest client couples, decades ago, has never left me. Theirs was a prominent, well-regarded family — the kind nobody would have guessed. Their teenage daughter, who didn’t even have her driver’s license yet, was the one who routinely drove her mother to the hospital for stitches or to be checked out after a beating, and then drove herself to school afterward (I’ve altered identifying details here, as I would for any case discussion, but the shape of it has stayed with me for twenty years). That is not two people caught in an escalating fight. That is a household organized around one person’s control, severe enough that a child was pressed into service as emergency transportation and cover story. Coercive controlling violence like that doesn’t announce itself with a black eye at the grocery store. It hides in plain sight, in families everyone assumes are fine, precisely because so much effort goes into making sure it looks that way.
Safety Is the Foundation of Attachment Work
Everything I do clinically — Emotionally Focused Therapy, Gottman Method, PACT — rests on one premise: emotional accessibility and vulnerability can only occur when both partners feel psychologically and physically safe. You cannot ask someone to soften, to reach for their partner, to risk being seen in their rawest moments, if reaching for that partner has ever been dangerous. Attachment repair requires a floor under it. Where that floor doesn’t exist, my job isn’t to referee the relationship — it’s to help build safety first, sometimes individually, before any “we” work can responsibly begin.
Why We Get This Wrong — Thanks to the Soundtrack of Our Lives
Here’s what makes all of this harder to see clearly than it should be: we’ve been humming along to a version of romance that quietly rehearses control as devotion since before we could drive.
“Every Breath You Take” has been played at weddings for four decades. Sting has said plainly, more than once, that the song is about surveillance and obsessive possessiveness, not love — he’s called it “quite sinister” and has expressed surprise it’s read as romantic at all (Songfacts; Collider). Tom Jones’s “Delilah” — a song about a man killing his partner in a jealous rage — was sung as a stadium anthem for decades before Welsh rugby finally pulled it from official use in 2023, citing its normalization of violence against women (CNN). Even John Lennon, decades later, expressed open regret for writing “Run for Your Life,” a song built around jealous threats toward a partner — he called it one of his least favorite Beatles songs and acknowledged it reflected something ugly and controlling in him at the time (Beatles Bible; Far Out Magazine).
None of these are obscure deep cuts. They’re wedding songs, sports anthems, and classic-rock radio staples — which is exactly the point. When surveillance gets scored like devotion and jealousy gets scored like passion, our ears get trained early to mishear control as love. That’s not a reason to swear off the radio. It’s a reason to notice, in your own relationship, when something that sounds romantic in the retelling — “he just wants to know where I am because he cares,” “she gets so jealous because she loves me that much” — is actually a description of control.
Signs You Might Be Minimizing
A few patterns clients often name only after they’ve already called them something softer for years:
- Tracking your location, checking your phone, or monitoring who you talk to, framed as care rather than surveillance.
- Escalating jealousy that requires you to shrink your friendships, your work, or your independence to keep the peace.
- Walking on eggshells to manage someone else’s temper, rather than two people managing conflict together.
- Feeling afraid to disagree, not just annoyed or hurt.
If any of that sounds familiar, that instinct to explain it away is worth paying attention to — not because you’re wrong to love someone complicated, but because the explaining-away is often the first sign the story doesn’t match what’s actually happening.
What This Means for Couples Therapy
Part of my job in an initial consultation is screening for exactly this distinction, because it determines everything downstream. If what’s happening between two people is situational — conflict that spirals because both partners are dysregulated, disconnected, or under-resourced — couples work, done well, can be the fastest path back to each other. If what’s happening is coercive control, I’m not going to pretend a joint session is a neutral, safe container, because it isn’t, and treating it like one puts the more vulnerable partner at greater risk, not less.
This is also why “we just fight a lot” is not, on its own, a diagnosis — and why it’s worth talking to a clinician trained to tell the difference before assuming either “this is normal” or “this is unfixable.”
A Few Questions I’m Often Asked
Is couples therapy safe if there’s been violence in the relationship? It depends entirely on the type. Situational couple violence, where both partners contribute to an escalating pattern without an underlying agenda of control, can often be addressed in conjoint treatment designed for it. Coercive controlling violence generally requires individual, safety-focused intervention first — not joint sessions — because the power imbalance makes honest, safe disclosure impossible in the room together.
How do therapists actually tell the difference? Through careful history-taking: who initiates, whether violence is bidirectional or one-directional, whether it’s accompanied by fear, whether there’s a broader pattern of isolation, monitoring, or control, and what function the violence serves. It’s a clinical assessment, not a single question with a yes-or-no answer.
We don’t have “violence,” just constant conflict — do we still need to worry about this? Coercive control doesn’t require physical violence to be dangerous. Constant monitoring, jealousy that limits your world, or fear of disagreeing are worth naming and assessing even in the absence of a single physical incident.
If you’re trying to figure out which kind of conflict you’re in, that’s exactly the kind of question worth bringing to a first session rather than sitting with alone. At The Relationship Center of Hampton Roads, we work with couples and individuals navigating everything from ordinary disconnection to relational trauma, across our Williamsburg, East Beach, Waterside, Old Town Alexandria, and Orchard Park, NY offices, and via telehealth throughout Virginia, New York, and DC. If any part of this piece felt uncomfortably familiar, that discomfort is worth a conversation. Reach out today to schedule a consultation!
