"Oh, here we go again!" "You never listen to me." "This feels like we fight about this every single month." Have any of those sentences come out of your mouth during a fight before? I bet they have, because if you're in a partnership, you're guaranteed some level of conflict as part of the emotional contract of two messy humans navigating life together. I get this question a lot, as a couples therapist in Oklahoma: "Why do we keep having the same fight over and over again?" And the answer is...

Let's be honest, most of us have done at least one of these. And if you haven't, you probably know someone who has (maybe you're even living with them). Spoiler alert: I've done all 10 of them at one point or another in my 10-year marriage, and I'm a licensed therapist who sees couples for a living. So don't lie to me and tell me you've never pulled one of these in your own relationship. I know you. You know you. (Quick! Name that movie!) I work with people every day who are deeply frustrated...

So you've done therapy before. Maybe you even tried Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). You learned about cognitive distortions, completed thought records, and challenged irrational thoughts. It helped — maybe a little, maybe a lot — but the loop kept looping. The what-ifs kept coming. You figured either you weren't doing it right, or this was just how your brain was wired, or therapy just wasn't going to be the thing that fixed this. "I'm just an anxious person. This is just who I am," you...