The Enemy at the Breakfast Table
There's a moment in couples therapy that I've witnessed more times than I can count. One partner is speaking, and I watch the other's face change. The jaw tightens. The eyes go flat or roll slightly. The body shifts away, sometimes imperceptibly. Whatever is being said, it's no longer landing as information. Instead, it lands as an attack. The listener isn't hearing their partner anymore. They're hearing their enemy.
This is the thing that strikes me most in my work with couples: how completely two people who chose each other, who may still love each other somewhere underneath the rubble, can come to experience one another as threats. I am not exempt from this as a therapist. It is so human to be driven bonkers by the person you love the most.
The person across the breakfast table becomes the source of danger. The one you built a life with becomes the one you brace against. Somewhere along the way, your nervous system learned to register your partner as the enemy, and now it responds accordingly—with defensiveness, withdrawal, counterattack, or a kind of cold, protective absence.
I've been reading Nancy Dreyfus's book Talk to Me Like I'm Someone You Love, and the title alone has become something I return to in sessions. It's so simple that it almost sounds naive. Of course you should talk to your partner like they're someone you love. Why would anyone need to be told that? Alas. Here we are. Couples who haven't spoken kindly to each other in months. Years, sometimes. Couples who wield words like weapons or withhold them like punishment. Couples who have forgotten, entirely, that the person they're speaking to was once precious to them and might still be.
What the Research Agrees On
The major couples therapy modalities come from different theoretical traditions, but they converge on something essential.
Gottman's research identifies contempt as the most corrosive element in a relationship. Contempt is something you might have felt if not know the name of. It is essentially a fine-tuned knife of anger. It's a communication from a position of superiority, a message that your partner is beneath you and you loathe them. It predicts divorce more reliably than any other factor. What contempt reveals is that one partner has stopped seeing the other as someone worthy of respect. They've become, in the internal landscape, an enemy deserving of scorn rather than a flawed human deserving of compassion.
Stan Tatkin's PACT model focuses on the nervous system. Tatkin argues that partners must learn to regulate each other (co-regulation), to become each other's safe harbor rather than each other's threat. When couples are stuck in adversarial patterns, they're triggering each other's attachment wounds constantly, and both nervous systems stay in a state of vigilance. The partner is no longer a source of safety. They're a source of danger.
Imago therapy, developed by Harville Hendrix, suggests that we unconsciously choose partners who resemble our early caregivers, particularly in the ways those caregivers wounded us. The very qualities that drew us to our partner often become the qualities that most irritate or hurt us later. This isn't accident or bad luck. It's the psyche seeking an opportunity to heal old wounds in a new context. The catch is that without consciousness, we just re-enact the wound rather than healing it. Darn it! The partner becomes a stand-in for an older enemy.
Emotionally Focused Therapy, developed by Sue Johnson, frames relationship distress in terms of attachment. When partners feel disconnected or insecure, they fall into rigid patterns of pursuit and withdrawal, criticism and stonewalling. Underneath the conflict, Johnson argues, are desperate attachment needs: Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Will you respond when I need you? The "enemy" behavior is almost always a protest against disconnection, a maladaptive attempt to get a response from someone who feels dangerously out of reach.
What all of these approaches share is this: they recognize that when couples are in distress, they have stopped seeing each other clearly. The partner has become a symbol, a trigger, a threat, a stand-in for old pain. The work of therapy is to help them see each other again—as flawed, scared, wounded and lovable humans rather than as enemies to be defeated.
How It Happens
Most people do not start out wanting to treat their partner like an enemy. It accumulates.
Such as, a small hurt goes unaddressed. An attempt (bid as we often call it in therapy) for connection gets missed. Resentment builds and solidifies into something harder. You stop giving the benefit of the doubt. You start keeping score. You interpret neutral actions as hostile ones (whew, I am guilty of this one). You forget that your partner has an inner world as complex as your own, that their behavior might be driven by fear or pain rather than malice.
Trauma plays a role here, both individual and relational. If you grew up in an environment where closeness was dangerous, where the people who were supposed to love you also hurt you, your nervous system learned that intimacy and threat go together. You might unconsciously re-create that dynamic in your adult relationships, pushing away the person you love most because some part of you expects them to become the enemy eventually. Better to arm yourself now.
Then there's the trauma that happens within the relationship itself. Betrayal. Neglect. The slow erosion of feeling unseen. Each wound adds a layer of armor. Each disappointment becomes evidence for the case you're building: See? They don't care. They can't be trusted. I have to protect myself.
At some point, the armor becomes the relationship. You're both so defended that nothing tender can pass between you. You're two fortresses facing each other across a battlefield that used to be your living room.
The Question Underneath
Something I don’t always ask couples directly but often find myself wanting to, is this: Is your partner actually your enemy?
Not, "Have they hurt you?" They probably have. Not, "Is your anger valid?" It most likely is. The question is more fundamental than that. Is this person, the one sitting next to you right now, someone you're trying to destroy or escape? Or is this someone you're trying to reach?
Sometimes the honest answer is that you do need them to be the enemy right now. The enemy role serves a function. It protects you from vulnerability. It justifies your withdrawal. It lets you stay angry instead of feeling the grief or fear underneath. It maintains a certain equilibrium, even if that equilibrium is miserable.
I don't say that with judgment. Defense mechanisms exist for a reason. If you've been hurt badly enough, turning your partner into the enemy might be the only way you know how to survive the relationship. The question is whether you want to keep surviving it or whether you want something else.
This is the kicker: you cannot repair with an enemy. You can only repair with someone you're willing to see as human, as struggling, as doing their best even when their best is falling short. Repair requires a fundamental shift in perception: from this person is against me to this person is with me, and we are both caught in something painful. We are trying and that is meaningful. We will get through it together.
Talking Like You Mean It
Dreyfus's prompt, "Talk to me like I'm someone you love," is deceptively simple. It's also a radical act when you're deep in resentment.
It doesn't mean pretending you're not hurt or performing warmth you don't feel. It means choosing, especially in moments of conflict, to remember that the person in front of you is someone you chose. Someone who, underneath whatever is happening right now, probably wants to feel loved by you as much as you want to feel loved by them.(abusive relationships aside).
This is not about attaining monk-like communication or suppressing important feelings. It's about asking yourself, before you speak: Am I talking to my enemy or my partner? Do I want to win this fight or do I want to find my way back to the person I love?
I've watched couples practice this in session. It's awkward at first, sometimes painfully so. The words come out stiff. The old patterns pull hard. People feel it is robotic or insincere. One person softens and the other, not trusting it, stays defended. It takes repetition. It takes the slow, arduous work of choosing connection over and over, even when your nervous system is screaming that connection isn't safe.
With time and guidance, patterns rewrite themsleves The armor starts to feel less necessary. The person across from you starts to look less like a threat and more like the person you fell in love with, older now, more complicated, carrying their own wounds and defenses. Still human. Still reachable.
What Couples Therapy Offers
We can't make two people love each other. That's not what therapy does. What therapy offers is a space to figure out whether you want to try—and if you do, a way to practice.
We slow things down. We look at what's happening beneath the surface of the conflict: the fears surrounding true intimacy, the old wounds getting activated, the difficulty of being honest about feelings. We experiment with new patterns, new ways of speaking and listening that might feel foreign at first.
We also make room for the grief. Sometimes couples discover that the resentment has built up for too long, that the damage is too extensive, that they've grown into people who no longer fit together. That's a valid outcome, too. Therapy doesn't always end with the relationship intact. Sometimes it clarifies that the relationship has already ended and helps two people separate with more understanding than they came in with.
What I hope to offer, either way, is a chance to see each other clearly one more time. To drop the enemy frame long enough to ask: Who is this person, really? What are they afraid of? What do they need? And can I offer them anything, even now?
The answer might be no. It might also be yes. You won't know until you stop fighting long enough to find out.
If This Resonates
I work with couples who are trying to find their way back to each other, or trying to figure out if that's still possible. If you're caught in patterns that feel stuck, I'd welcome the opportunity to sit with you both.
