Conflict is Not About the Other Person, It is About the System You Enter
Anastasiia Puzyrina is an esteemed relationship counselor and expert in couple dynamics. She is also a certified cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) therapist with over 20 years of experience. She is the author of Relationship Workbook for Couples and the founder of Restore Connections Development Centre.
When conflict repeats, the problem may not lie in either person's behaviour alone but in the system of expectations, roles, and responses that emerges between them. Understanding conflict requires looking beyond individual reactions to examine how the interaction is organized, what keeps it functioning, and why both people repeatedly find themselves participating in something neither consciously intended to create.
Why do we keep seeing the other person as the problem?
Because the other person's behaviour is usually the most visible part of a conflict, while the conditions that give that behaviour its meaning are much harder to recognize. When a disagreement becomes painful, our attention naturally moves toward what the other person has done. We remember the dismissive remark, the refusal to engage, the criticism, or the silence that followed an important question. These are observable events, and they provide a seemingly reasonable explanation for our distress.
But there is something curious about recurring conflict. The more familiar the disagreement becomes, the more certain each person often feels about its cause. After years of arguing, partners may no longer need to hear an entire sentence before deciding what it means. They recognize the tone, anticipate the response, and prepare themselves for what they believe will happen next.
By the time the conversation has properly begun, both may already be responding to a conflict they know well. This is where focusing exclusively on the other person becomes limiting. Their behaviour matters, certainly, but it does not tell us everything about the situation we have entered.
What does it mean to enter a system during conflict?
A relational system is not simply two people interacting. It is the organization of expectations, responsibilities, interpretations, and responses that develops through their repeated participation.
Consider a couple in which one partner is increasingly concerned about financial stability while the other is trying to protect a sense of independence. A conversation about an unexpected purchase may appear to concern money, but the interaction can quickly become organized around something else.
One person assumes responsibility for anticipating risks and preventing future problems. The other experiences that responsibility as an attempt to control decisions. The more the first partner insists on planning, the more the second defends personal autonomy. Eventually, both begin to behave in ways that confirm the other's expectations.
The interesting question is not simply who started the argument or whose financial reasoning is more accurate. It is how an ordinary decision turned into a struggle between responsibility and autonomy.
Neither person necessarily intended to create this arrangement. Nevertheless, their responses now help sustain it. This is what makes systems difficult to recognize from within. Each participant experiences their own behaviour as a reasonable response to the other person's actions.
Why can changing one person's behaviour leave the conflict unchanged?
Because an established relational system can preserve its organization even when individual behaviours begin to change. Imagine that the partner who usually insists on discussing problems decides to stop pursuing difficult conversations. From an individual perspective, this may seem like a meaningful change. There is less pressure, there are fewer questions, and there may be a sincere attempt to create more space.
Yet the other partner may interpret the new silence as indifference, emotional withdrawal, or evidence that something is wrong. Instead of producing relief, the change generates a different kind of anxiety, and the couple gradually finds another route into the familiar conflict.
This does not mean that individual change is ineffective. It means that behaviour acquires its meaning within an existing organization of expectations. A different action does not automatically create a different system, particularly when both people continue interpreting one another through the assumptions established by earlier interactions.
This is also why some couples can resolve a specific disagreement without changing much about their relationship. They reach an agreement about finances, parenting, or household responsibilities, only to discover that another issue soon produces a remarkably similar struggle. The immediate problem was addressed. The conditions that organized the struggle were not necessarily altered.
How does a relationship maintain a pattern nobody wants?
A relational pattern can persist because each participant's attempt to manage the situation unintentionally helps reproduce the conditions that make the other's response more likely. This is one of the more uncomfortable aspects of systemic thinking. People may sincerely want a conflict to end while continuing to participate in the very organization that sustains it.
A partner who fears disconnection may increase their efforts to restore closeness, while the other, overwhelmed by those efforts, seeks distance. Neither person is necessarily trying to hurt the other. Yet their attempts to manage discomfort become mutually reinforcing.
Still, not every recurring conflict is a cycle of emotional pursuit and withdrawal. Sometimes the system is organized around unequal responsibility, incompatible expectations, competing priorities, or an arrangement that has never been explicitly negotiated.
A couple may communicate respectfully and understand one another's feelings while remaining trapped in a practical structure that consistently leaves one person with the burden of making decisions. In such a case, further emotional exploration may provide insight without resolving the conditions that keep producing the disagreement.
The distinction matters because a system is not merely a pattern of feelings. It also includes the distribution of responsibility, the possibilities available to each participant, and the implicit rules governing what happens when their interests collide.
Does systemic thinking mean both people are equally responsible?
No. Understanding conflict as a system does not imply that responsibility, power, or consequences are equally distributed. This distinction is essential, particularly in relationships where one person exercises coercive control, intimidation, or violence. Describing an interaction systemically must never become a way of assigning blame to someone who is being harmed.
Even in relationships without abuse, participation does not necessarily mean equal influence. One partner may have greater financial authority, social freedom, or control over important decisions. These differences are part of the system itself and cannot be ignored simply because both people participate in the relationship.
Systemic thinking becomes useful when it helps us see these differences more clearly, not when it dissolves them into a vague claim that everyone contributes equally. Responsibility belongs to people. The organization of their interaction, however, cannot always be understood by examining each person separately.
What changes when we begin to see the system?
The most significant change is not necessarily in how people communicate but in what they become capable of observing. When attention remains fixed on the other person's behaviour, the central question is usually how to make that person understand, respond, or change. From a systemic perspective, another set of questions becomes possible. What arrangement are we repeatedly entering? Which expectations make certain responses predictable? What does each person attempt to protect, and how does that attempt affect the possibilities available to the other?
These questions can reveal that the apparent disagreement is only one expression of a much more stable organization. They also introduce a different understanding of agency. If people participate in reproducing a relational system, then they may be able to reflect on and change some aspects of their participation. Not everything is under individual control, and recognizing a pattern does not guarantee that it can be transformed. But what previously appeared inevitable may begin to look contingent on conditions that can be examined.
That is a meaningful shift. Instead of treating conflict as an endless series of reactions to another person's behaviour, we begin to recognize the organization within which those reactions become possible.
Questions that shift observation
When a familiar conflict begins, it may be worth considering the following questions.
What system of expectations and responsibilities are we entering before the disagreement fully develops?
What does my response make more likely in the other person, and what does their response make more likely in me?
Are we trying to resolve the visible disagreement while leaving the conditions that repeatedly produce it unchanged?
These questions are not intended to turn every argument into an intellectual exercise. Nor do they suggest that people should remain in harmful relationships in order to understand their dynamics. They point toward a different level of inquiry.
We often enter conflict believing that we already know what the problem is because we recognize the person standing in front of us. We know their habits, their explanations, their familiar reactions. What remains less visible is the system that has developed between us and the extent to which it shapes what each of us can see and do.
Perhaps the most difficult part of understanding recurring conflict is accepting that the other person, however frustrating their behaviour may be, is not always a sufficient explanation for what happens between us. Sometimes we have to examine the system we enter together, including the parts of it that have become so familiar we no longer notice them.
Read more from Anastasiia Puzyrina
Anastasiia Puzyrina, Couples and Relationship Psychotherapist & Methodologist
Anastasiia Puzyrina, a renowned authority in relationship counseling and cognitive behavioural therapy, brings a unique approach to her practice in Canada. With over 20 years of experience and a Master's in Psychology from Ukraine, she excels in addressing relationship challenges among couples and families. Anastasiia integrates cutting-edge neuroscience with proven psychotherapy techniques to foster personal and interpersonal development. She actively promotes healthy parent-child dynamics and leads initiatives in this area. Anastasiia founded the Restore Connections Development Center to support couples, co-founded a service for enhancing parental relationships, and authored the Workbook for Couples.
