You Call It Incompatibility, Your Nervous System Calls It a Trauma Response
Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain is a licensed clinical social worker, somatic therapist, and founder of Healthemindset. He specializes in nervous system healing, ancestral wisdom, and trauma recovery for empaths, highly sensitive persons (HSPs), Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ+) communities.
Most people come to therapy convinced that the fights with their partner are about the dishes, the money, or their partner’s parents. Underneath almost every recurring fight, something older is running the show: the same four trauma responses that show up in survival situations, showing up instead at the dinner table. Here is how to recognize them and what actually helps.
I want to tell you about a client I worked with (details changed, pattern intact). Every few weeks, they described having almost exactly the same fight with their partner. It started small, with a comment about chores, a missed text, or a tone of voice, and within minutes it had escalated into something neither of them fully understood. My client would get louder, more insistent, pressing for resolution right now. Their partner would go quiet, agree to everything, and then disappear emotionally for the rest of the evening.
Neither of them was doing anything wrong, exactly. They were doing something old. What looked like incompatibility was actually two nervous systems, each shaped by a different history, running two different survival strategies in the same room.
The 4 responses in your living room
Fight, flight, freeze, and a fourth response that gets far less attention: fawn. Therapist Pete Walker first named fawning as a survival strategy built on appeasement, merging with another person's wishes and needs to avoid conflict and preserve the relationship at any cost.
In a relationship, fight can look like escalating a small disagreement into a full argument. Flight can look like leaving the room, the conversation, or the relationship itself the moment things get uncomfortable. Freeze can look like going blank, shutting down, or being unable to access words at all. Fawn, the quiet one, can look like agreeing with everything, apologizing for things that were not your fault, and losing track of what you actually wanted in the first place.
None of these are character flaws. They are what a nervous system learned to do, usually a long time before this relationship began, to survive feeling unsafe, unseen, or unheard.
Why the same partner can trigger 4 different reactions
This is where attachment theory becomes clinically useful. The patterns we developed with our earliest caregivers, whether we could count on them to be present and responsive, or whether we learned to anticipate inconsistency, absence, or intrusion, become the template our nervous system uses to predict what closeness means. Two people can experience the exact same moment of conflict and have their nervous systems interpret it completely differently because they are running two different templates for what happens next when someone they love pulls away or gets upset.
This is why the same argument can look like abandonment to one partner and like being suffocated to the other. Both reactions are real. Neither partner is imagining the threat. They are both responding, accurately, to what their nervous system learned to expect.
When it turns into flooding
There is a point in an argument where productive conversation becomes physiologically impossible, and most people have never been told this is a real, measurable state rather than a character issue. The Gottman Institute calls this flooding, a state of physiological overwhelm in which heart rate spikes and the ability to process nuance, empathy, or your partner's actual words drops away almost entirely. Once flooding sets in, you are no longer having the conversation you think you are having. You are two nervous systems in survival mode, doing everything except actually communicating.
This is not a failure of love or commitment. It is biology. It means the fix is not trying harder to talk it out in the moment. It is learning to recognize flooding early enough to pause before the survival response takes the wheel.
Regulation is relational, not individual
Here is the part that surprises most people: you cannot fully regulate your own nervous system in isolation from the people closest to you, and you are not supposed to have to. Research in interpersonal neurobiology has found that warm, attuned connection actually lowers the stress hormone cortisol and increases emotional resilience over time, a phenomenon Psychology Today describes as coregulation, the same process by which an infant is soothed in a caregiver's arms, still operating in adult relationships.
A secure, attuned partner is not a luxury. It is a genuine regulatory resource for your nervous system. This also means dysregulation moves in both directions. When one partner spirals, the other's nervous system often follows, which is exactly what happened, night after night, with the client and partner I described earlier.
What this looks like in the work
In my practice, I work with individual clients using Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), and we do not start by analyzing the argument about the dishes. We slow down and ask what happened in the body in the moment things shifted. What did it feel like right before you raised your voice? What happened right before you went quiet? Often, for the first time, a client can name the exact moment their nervous system decided it needed to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn its way to safety.
That moment of naming changes the whole conversation. It is very hard to stay angry at a freeze response once you understand it as a nervous system trying to protect someone, rather than a person trying to punish you with silence. It is very hard to keep pushing once you recognize that pushing harder is what triggers your partner's shutdown in the first place.
Sometimes, when it will help, a client invites their partner to join a session so we can work through a specific issue together. With support, both people can slow down, notice what is happening in their bodies in real time, and start to see each other's reactions as protection rather than attack.
You are not incompatible
If you recognize your relationship in any of this, I want to offer you something other than a verdict on whether you are right for each other. You may not be incompatible. You may be two sufficiently regulated people whose nervous systems have not yet learned how to feel safe together, which is a very different and far more hopeful problem to have.
Bring your whole nervous system to your relationship
Understanding your trauma responses conceptually is a start. The real shift happens in the body, in real time, ideally with someone who can help you recognize what is actually happening underneath the argument. At Healthemindset, I work with individual clients using AEDP and somatic therapy to help nervous systems learn what safety actually feels like. When it is useful, I invite a partner to join a session to work through a specific issue together. To explore working together, visit here.
Read more from Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain
Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain, LCSW, Psychotherapist & Ancestral Healer
Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain, LCSW, is a somatic therapist, AEDP-trained clinician, and founder of Healthemindset. Drawing on polyvagal theory, Curanderismo, and his Choctaw and Chickasaw ancestral healing traditions, Christopher offers a deeply integrative approach to trauma recovery and nervous system regulation. He specializes in supporting empaths, highly sensitive people, and members of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities navigating the intersection of identity, culture, and healing. His work bridges clinical rigor with cultural reclamation, creating space for clients to reconnect with their bodies, their lineages, and their wholeness. Christopher is based in Los Angeles, California, and works with clients remotely all over California.
