Finding Common Ground with Your Partner: Part 1 | Couples Counseling California
Part 1: All about Finding Common Ground
Finding Common ground means finding a place of safety, understanding, and communication in your relationship. If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably looking for a way to find common ground with your partner. In this blog, we will offer you handouts, exercises, explanations, and real research on ways to find common ground. First, know that you don’t have to agree on everything to find common ground. The common ground you find with your partner may indeed be small, but it is the first step to a better relationship and increased loving communication. Even finding some common ground can help build a strong foundation for your relationship. Our goal in this blog is to help you strengthen your relationship through new language and understanding around finding common ground, a necessary step to coming back into a loving relationship with your partner.
To find common ground with your partner, you have to learn to communicate effectively. This skill is crucial for having meaningful and flexible conversations, especially when things get tough. Sometimes, we hit a moment with our partner when it feels like we’re speaking different languages. Communication breaks down, and we may feel as if we will never understand each other.
Think of it this way: you’re in a foreign country. You have no translator and can’t ask for help. Meeting your basic needs feels tough. This is similar to couples facing an impasse and trying to fix it alone. Needs get ignored, or aren’t understood at all. When you reach an impasse with your partner, your best move is to find a relationship therapist. This person can help translate your various "languages."
This blog will help you understand some of the ways that relationship therapy can help you and your partner. You'll also learn how to find common ground with your partner, and why it is important. If you're ready to make a change and learn how to communicate with compassion, keep reading.
Why Finding Common Ground Matters
In this section of the blog we are going to introduce some important concepts in a relationship that lead to relationship success when addressed in therapy and worked on as a couple. We will start with our values, a vital part of why we are who we are and why we choose our partners.
Aligned Values
We often have more in common than we think. Usually, we end up with someone who shares our basic values on some level. This could be a shared faith, a wish to have kids, or a love for travel, for example. Over time, we may forget what brought us together. Disagreements can feel overwhelming. Does this sound familiar?
In relationships, small compromises and changes can help us agree on many issues. Remembering our core values can help us see why we chose each other.
The good news is that we’ve done some work for you on remembering and discussing your core values! If you’d like to try an exercise at home with your partner, simply fill out the form below and sign up for our email. We will send you the handout Explore Your Core Values Together: A Guided Relationship Exercise from Courageous Counseling Center that will help you explore the following questions:
What do you have in common that's strong enough to share a life?
What areas need work to find common ground?
This handout will help you discover what areas of your lives need more communication and compromise, and where your partnership is strong. This is the groundwork you'll do in therapy to create more emotional safety. (We’ll get into this a bit later.) According to a Utah State University study, “Couples who share the same important values argue less and enjoy their marriage more.” Exploring your shared values is a good place to start in setting up your relationship for success.
To sign up for our email and receive the handout on Exploring You Core Values Together, just register below:
Relationship Resilience
Finding common ground with our partners builds respect through the act of compassionate and deep listening skills. The practice of compassionate and deep listening for resolution leads to stronger and more resilient relationships. Couples with strong relationship resilience can navigate tough times. Even when things feel rocky or problems seem huge, they find a way to make it work. Mutual respect builds relationship resilience. With relationship resilience in play, you may disagree, but you still respect your shared values and history. You have the resilience to work on your relationship, even during tough times. The couples that are more likely to stay together are the ones who work on these important skills and build this resilience.
Feeling Stuck in “You vs. Me” Thinking
As humans, we have a natural tendency to stick with those who are "like us" vs. "them." Sometimes, we find ourselves in a relationship where our partner has become "them." Maybe it's something they said or did that made them feel so far away from us. We must be careful not to think of the relationship as a battlefield of you against your partner. Instead, see yourselves as a team with different roles. There's you, your partner, and the relationship. The relationship is the unit that you both need to cherish, nurture, and work for. You are the parts, but you need to come together as a team to keep things running. In addition, both of you must discover your individuality in the relationship to take care of your own needs. In that way, it's never you vs. your partner, but rather what is each individual part doing and how does it help or hurt the team?
Sometimes, a part needs to step back for repairs. The team may also need to pause to focus on a specific part’s needs. Sometimes, one person needs extra self-care, attention, and space in the relationship. That's okay. A relationship is not always 50-50. Some days it's 80-20, or 60-40. And occasionally, it'll be 0-100. A healthy relationship will fluctuate and vary.
Mutual Respect and Emotional Safety:
Respect is essential in a healthy relationship, but lack of respect is often a reason that people end up needing help in their relationships. If you struggle with this, discuss it with your therapist or bring it up in relationship therapy. Using respectful language keeps us kind and prevents hurtful words. This leads to better communication, closer relationships, and greater emotional safety. It’s not true that once you’ve started down the path of disrespect that there is no return. Both partners can work hard to reestablish respect through compassionate communication, deep listening, and consciously loving their partner.
Let’s talk about emotional safety. Emotional safety is the state of knowing that it’s safe to share your emotions with your partner. This state is brought about through deep listening, compassionate sharing, understanding, and respect. Without emotional safety, we won't feel comfortable sharing our true selves with our partners. We won't feel safe sharing our feelings. Learning to communicate with openness and adaptability requires curiosity and understanding. Building emotional safety in a relationship is a key goal of therapy. If you don't feel emotionally safe in your relationship, talk to your couples therapist right away. They can help you learn skills to build a safe environment outside their office.
Why It’s Hard to Find Common Ground
Stress, Stress, and More Stress
Stress wreaks havoc on everything it touches. Our bodies, our brains, and yes, our relationships. When stress triggers the fight, flight, or freeze response, your brain significantly reduces access to the prefrontal cortex. This area is vital for thinking, planning, and memory. When you experience stress over long periods of time due to trauma, we often find ourselves struggling to think clearly. Prolonged stress can really affect our relationship with our partner, as we struggle to think our way through difficulties in a clear way with an optimal working memory. During times of stress, it can be hard to remember why we love and trust our partner. This makes it even tougher to calmly handle a disagreement or problem. If you are experiencing chronic stress, there are many avenues of relief that a therapist can introduce to help you through it.
It’s important to address the stress with our therapist and our partner, so that they have an understanding of why we are finding it difficult to remain calm and compassionate. Then, working on our stress outside of our partnership is also important. We recommend individual therapy side by side relationship therapy to work on issues that affect our partnership, but are ours to deal with. At Courageous Counseling Center, we offer both individual and relationship therapy. Through somatic and traditional therapy techniques, we can help you reduce your stress.
Life Transitions and Relationships
In a typical human life, a person will go through some big life transitions, like moving states, homes, or countries, or having a child, changing jobs, and dealing with the death of loved ones. Life transitions often bring stress to a partnership. It may be that one partner feels the lion’s share of the weight of that stress, while the other may feel more excited or calm about the transition, so we find ourselves feeling misunderstood or on a different page than our partner (remember from earlier how we needed a translator? This applies.). Life transitions also often lead to new values and interests being explored, some of which may isolate us from our partner if they are not interested in that exploration. Life transitions can often lead to misunderstandings in relationships, disruptions in connection, and diminishment of intimacy.
Many people turn to relationship therapists for help at this time. Therapists also help them manage stress in their relationship. There is nothing wrong with seeking help. A therapist can help you navigate life transitions so that your partner feels included, not left behind. A therapist can help you find some common ground.
Unresolved Hurts
We can carry the actions and words of our partners with us for a long time, keeping us from forgiving, moving on, and finding common ground. We often feel an array of confusing emotions around old unresolved hurt, such as anger, grief, sadness, anxiety, worry, panic, fear, and more. Our past, childhood wounds, values, and personal experience all play a role in keeping us trapped in our unresolved hurt. Our past experiences shape our current conflict. When we can’t move on, we can reach what we call an impasse. An impasse is when it seems as if there’s nothing that can be done for two people to meet and move through a problem or issue. At this point, it’s best to bring in a couples counselor so that we can have a professional teach us how to heal and help our partner to understand our feelings. This can help us move forward even when we are stuck in relationship conflict. Many couples face unresolved hurt in their relationship. This is normal, but it can feel like a mountain instead of a hill. Couples therapy can help you to express feelings that are hard to express, and think about the situation in ways that free you and your partner from pain.
Communication Differences and Attachment Styles
Attachment styles are ways we learned to bond with our primary caregiver when we were infants. This learned attachment stays with us throughout our lives and becomes the way we bond with the people closest to us, including our partners and friends. We can learn how to have healthy attachment (also called secure attachment), however we first must be aware of how we are attaching in our relationships. Let’s take a look at the different attachment styles that we learn in our first year of life.
The main four attachment styles are:
Secure
Anxious/Preoccupied
Avoidant/Dismissive
Disorganized/Fearful Avoidant
Take a closer look at this chart to understand attachment styles in relationships:
| Attachment Style | Core Beliefs | Common Behaviors in Relationships | Healing Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Secure | "I am worthy of love. Others can be trusted." | Comfortable with closeness and independence. Communicates needs clearly. | Continue developing emotional intimacy, maintain boundaries, nurture connection. |
| Anxious / Preoccupied | "I’m not enough unless others reassure me." | Craves closeness, fears abandonment, seeks constant validation. | Build self-worth, soothe the nervous system, learn to trust healthy space |
| Avoidant / Dismissive | "I can only rely on myself." | Struggles with intimacy, values independence, shuts down under stress. | Practice vulnerability, name emotions, explore safe closeness. |
| Disorganized / Fearful-Avoidant | "I want closeness, but it’s dangerous." | Push-pull dynamics. Fears both intimacy and abandonment. Often linked to trauma |
Build safety, integrate trauma, learn to regulate intense emotional swings. |
Can you imagine a scenario in which these attachment styles develop? You probably recognize yourself and your partner in one. Knowing your attachment style helps you understand how you show up in your relationships.The goal is to develop a more secure attachment style. In this style, each person is independent but also is available for healthy intimacy, and can share their needs clearly.
Communication differences often originate as a result of different attachment styles. According to a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, individuals with a secure (“confidence”) attachment style experience higher psychological well‑being and relationship satisfaction, whereas those with anxious or avoidant attachments report lower emotional health, especially when single or in less stable partnerships.
Picture a person with a secure attachment style, believing, “I am worthy of love and others can be trusted.” Now, consider them in a relationship with someone who has an anxious or preoccupied attachment style. This person thinks, “I’m not enough unless others reassure me.” In this dynamic, the secure partner offers support and stability. Meanwhile, the anxious partner seeks almost constant reassurance. This contrast can create tension. The secure partner may find the anxious partner's neediness overwhelming. The anxious partner may feel neglected or unvalued. This can lead to increased anxiety.
Both can learn from each other. The secure partner can help build the anxious partner's confidence. The anxious partner can help the secure partner remember how important emotional connection is. Understanding these styles can help them navigate their relationship
Disorganized/fearful attachment is the attachment most likely caused by trauma. In this case, the person will need help in understanding and creating secure emotional safety. However, with a therapist, they can create, recognize, and understand safety within themselves and the outside world.
Avoidant or dismissive attachment often comes from having absent parents or parents who are emotionally distant. This attachment type likely heard phrases like “suck it up” when they were hurt. They learned that the only one they can depend on is themselves. Through therapy, they can begin to understand that other people can be trusted to help them when they are hurt.
This is a very quick overview of attachment types. For more information visit our blog on attachment theory.
We hope that Part 1 of our Finding Common Ground Blog Series has helped you understand why finding common ground is important, and provided some understanding of what you and your partner are going through. In Part 2, we will explore in more depth some tools to help you and your partner find common ground. Stay tuned!
APA References:
Di Sarno, M., Di Santo, D., Belvedere, D., & Maldonato, N. M. (2021). Exploring the association between attachment style, psychological well‑being, and relationship status. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(20), 10871. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182010871
Utah State University. (n.d.). The role of shared values in marital satisfaction. Utah State University Extension. https://extension.usu.edu/relationships/ou-files/shared-values.pdf
