Do you find yourself overreacting to little irritations? Your spouse forgot to pick up something on the way home, and it sets you off in a bad mood for the entire evening. Your child tracked mud on the new carpet, and you explode.

What might this look like in your own life? Well, consider your relationship with your parents. It’s quite possible that one of their greatest goals is to keep you safe while one of YOUR greatest goals is to try new things and see what the world has to offer. All sorts of arguments and conflicts can grow out of that.

So why am I talking about this? And what is a rift? A rift is a crack, break, etc. in something. I call this time in our relationship a rift because that’s exactly what it was. Something fell from the sky, made a crack, and wedged itself in.

I didn’t know I had a conflict style until after I got married. I came from a family where there was lots of yelling and tense undertones whenever there was an issue that needed to be tackled. It made me extremely uncomfortable as a child in this environment, as I was also highly sensitive and not well practiced in different techniques of how to handle overwhelming emotion