Harm Reduction For High Conflict Relationships

Practical, immediate ways to increase your relationship's health and safety

You know you need to stop fighting so intensely. You know emotional safety (and maybe physical safety too) is compromised in your relationship. You want to stop. But you don't know how. You make promises only to break them in the next fight. You make plans that you later blow past.

I want your relationship to be unshakably safe. And, as a psychologist specialized in high conflict couples, I work with reality. We start where you are.

In public health, there's a philosophy called harm reduction. You're probably familiar with this when it comes to sex or substances. For example, ideally people wouldn't inject unregulated substances intravenously. But we know that people still will, so it makes sense to offer services like needle exchanges to reduce the spread of infection. You might prefer that your teenager not have sex, but still provide them with condoms in case they decide to become sexually active.

Messy relationships need harm reduction too. It simply doesn't work to tell couples "your relationship is fucked up, break up." While couples therapy is not appropriate for situations where there are dynamics of coercive control (self-assess your relationship for coercive control here), it's also true that many couples are denied therapy because of non-coercive aggression that could effectively be treated. These couples don't break up just because a therapist told them to. They stay together, and continue to lack the tools they need.

My work is deeply rooted in harm reduction principles. Today, I'm sharing five simple, practical ways to increase safety in your relationship even if you know you need deeper change.