19. Juni 2026
What the Rainbow Knows About Conflict
I've been reading Julie and John Gottman's book, *Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection*, and one image from it has stayed with me: Asked as a child what she thought would happen if parents fought all the time, she said: I guess there wouldn't be any rainbows in the house.
A rainbow only happens when sun and rain are both there at once. Not after the storm passes — while it's still raining, while the light is still finding its way through.
She wasn't picturing a house without conflict as the safe one. She was picturing a house with conflict and no light reaching through it. What she feared wasn't the fighting. It was the fighting with nothing getting through.
Some couples turn that same weather into a tornado — the rain and pressure still there, but nothing softening it, until it tears through the relationship instead of illuminating it. Some turn it into a desert — no storms at all, which can look like peace, but a relationship needs the rain. Without it, things just quietly dry out.
Conflict was never the threat to what two people are building together. It's one of the conditions it grows in. The real question is what turns it into a rainbow instead of a tornado, or a drought. And the more I sit with that question, the more it leads me back to something I think about in my work: whether a person can hold two things at once.
The same question
I've written before about secure attachment, which Judy Ho calls the connected explorer. Someone who carries the beliefs:
I believe in and like myself.
I can handle what comes my way.
I can affect positive outcomes in my life.
I can be independent and rely on others, too.
That last one is the one people struggle with most. Not because they lack independence, many of my clients have that in abundance, but because independence and reliance get treated as a trade-off. As if relying on someone is something you graduate out of once you're capable enough.
That's the same quality Gottman's research on couples' conflicts describes. Secure attachment begins with a child learning that reaching out works, that their need gets met and that they're not alone in what they're carrying.
Sue Johnson names the adult version of that same question: Are you there for me?
The Gottmans have phrased it slightly differently: Can I trust you in this conflict? Can I trust you to have my best interests at heart?
It's not a coincidence that attachment styles and couples' conflicts both revolve around the same question. Conflict doesn't introduce a new test into a relationship. It just turns the original one up loud enough to hear.
Why the desert isn't peace
The couples who go quiet aren't always doing better. Some of my clients have built genuinely impressive lives on drive and self-sufficiency — often, underneath, powered by a fear of failure rather than confidence. What they've usually learned early on is that relying on someone doesn't work, or that needing help is a kind of weakness, or that they have to keep earning the right to be seen.
That doesn't disappear in a romantic relationship. It shows up as conflict that never quite happens, needs that get rationalised instead of named, and disagreements that get smoothed over before they're actually resolved. It can look like an equilibrium. But a relationship that never gets rained on doesn't get to grow, either. It slowly dries out, and both people usually feel that long before they can name it.
Why the tornado isn't honesty
The opposite failure looks more obviously like conflict, which is partly why it gets more attention. This is where flooding lives: the nervous system tips past its capacity to stay present, and what follows is rarely chosen on purpose. Gottman's four horsemen show up here: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Negative emotions get dismissed instead of met (*don’t be silly…*), the feeling intensifies because it has nowhere to land, and the conversation stops being about connecting at all.
What's easy to miss is that flooding isn't a character flaw, but a physiological state, and the only real way out is to regulate it. Most often, a break long enough for the nervous system to actually come down will do the job. People who keep talking through flooding because stopping feels like losing aren't failing at communication. They're trying to resolve something with a part of the brain that's already offline.
This is also where I think the connected-explorer image of secure attachment earns its keep. A tornado isn't what happens when two people disagree. A tornado happens when the disagreement stops reaching the part of each person that's still trying to stay connected. "Are you there for me?" gets dismissed.
What actually grows the rainbow
A few things, and none of them are complicated, even if they're not easy.
Naming a need without having to justify it.
I feel — the problem is — what I need.
Said plainly, it's easier to hear than the same need wrapped in three paragraphs of explanation, because justification often reads as defensiveness before the other person has even heard the ask.
But saying it plainly is its own skill, and a harder one than it sounds. What EFT has shown, and what I see constantly in the room, is that most people struggle to say what they feel while they're still feeling it. The feeling and the words seem to compete for the same resource, and the feeling usually wins — so what comes out instead is the analysis of it, or the story around it, or the version that's already been edited for defensibility. Anything but the feeling itself, live.
And when in doubt, we don't believe the words anyway. Mirror neurons and physiological resonance mean we're picking up on each other's actual state underneath whatever's being said, so if the words say I'm fine and the body says otherwise, the body is what gets believed. My clinical work is mostly about helping someone find the words for what they're feeling while they're feeling it, and staying there longer than they feel comfortable. Going that deep with a feeling isn't something most of us were ever taught to do in public. We learned to avoid it. But it's exactly what the people who love us can understand, clearly and immediately, without translation. Anything less, however articulate, tends to land as static.
It’s worth recognising your own conflict style without pathologising it because the variable isn't the style, but whether two people's underlying ways of handling emotions are compatible enough to meet.
Holding both - sun and rain
None of this asks a person to stop being independent, or to stop being themselves, in order to stay close. It asks for the harder thing: holding both. Bringing your full self into the room — your feelings, your perspective, your right to disagree — while staying reachable enough that your partner can still find you.
That's the sun and the rain, both at once. Not a relationship without weather. One that can hold it.