@Helcat – interesting that you mention abuse. I’m sorry to hear that by the way, it’s not easy at all to deal with such baggage in romantic relationships. It really makes me wonder about the root cause of our situation. I know that my husband has struggled with bullying as a child, and that applies to myself too. I also know that my husband has a toxic sister, who has a history lying, gaslighting, manipulation, etc… And they used to share a home all the way into their thirties. Neither of them wanted to move out! I think this has set up my husband with a very poor template of communication. Maybe it has conditioned him to respond in certain ways. He has had so many issues with his sister…
You’re right, it does help with resilience when there is enough stability still. When arguments keep coming and going all the time we never return to a healthy baseline so things get out of hand more quickly. Some months are a lot worse for us than others.

With our conflict styles, it’s typically my husband who will be unhappy/withdrawing and myself who is the pursuer, desperately trying to set things right and create a sense of harmony. This makes it extremely hard for me to walk away to pause a conflict, because I become very clingy when I sense this “threat”. I think my husband’s way of handling conflict triggers something visceral inside me that signals danger to me. I’d literally beg him to stay and “talk things out”. Unfortunately, this isn’t a very healthy approach either. I become so emotionally hyper-aroused that I can’t think straight to make decisions like “let’s take a break”, which are actually much better for us to work things out. I don’t like the fact that this always makes me act as though I’m indeed in the wrong. Sometimes my husband is not calm enough in the way he brings things up, even if he has the right to be discontent about something, and yet I still go on saying sorry. I think I’ve learnt to deal with it this way because going against him and standing up for myself doesn’t usually work well either. Somehow I’m just desperate for closeness.