The Value of Being Out of Sync in Relationships
Revisiting findings from one of the most famous parent-child experiments
One of the best-known laboratory studies of parent-child attachment is “the still-face experiment.” First published in a 1978 paper, the classic version of this experiment involves researchers bringing a mom into the lab to:
Have a normal, baseline interaction.
Have the caregiver to go flat and non-responsive—as in, have a “still face. Finding their caregiver non-responsive, a baby will typically become quite distressed.
Finally, the caregiver turns their face back “on” and reunites with the baby.
(You can click to watch this experiment here.)
Like most psychologists, I had always thought that the distress babies experience when their caregiver goes “flat” on them was an indication of how important it is to avoid such non-engagement. This message, of course, is consistent with parenting guidance highlighting the importance of being highly and constantly engaged with their infants. And, not coincidentally, it also matches oodles of advice to be careful about being responsive to bids for connection from your partner.
Taken together, we all seem to believe that making anyone you love experience the pain of a relationship misses and discord are huge relationship no-no’s. So, the pressure is on to be always responsive and in sync with one another.
But this long-held assumption of the main message from still-face research turns out to be wrong. I recently happened upon the book The Power of Discord, by Ed Tronick (the lead researcher on the still-face studies) and pediatrician Claudia Gold1. This book summarizes the still-face research but offers a different message than the prevailing one out in the ether. That is, the break in connection and resulting distress people feel when they don’t get a response from someone they love isn’t an indicator of a problem in the relationship. Instead, it can be a vehicle for rich growth.
In their book, Tronick and Gold write that “discord is not only healthy but essential for growth and change” and that “moving through messiness turns out to be the way we grow and develop in relationships from earliest infancy through adulthood!”
What’s more, failures of connection are quite common—about 70% in healthy parent-child pairs. In other words, it’s totally normal and actually quite healthy to be out of sync or fail to connect with people you love. In the book, Tronick also mentions research he conducted with couples researcher, Sue Johnson, that reflected similar findings with adults in intimate relationships2.
Tronick and his colleagues’ research demonstrates that the process of relationship ruptures and reconnections isn’t just normal, it’s necessary for us to experience so that we can grow all sorts of skills, from communication, to tolerating disappointment, to understanding different needs, to apologizing, and so on. It’s quite analogous to how we talk about fixed mindset versus growth mindset: just as mistakes lead to learning in academic work, mistakes and misses lead to growth in relationships!
This still-face paradigm highlights that healthy relationships rely on our being mismatched and out of sync to enable learning, grown, and relationship deepening! This is such an important mindset shift.
So, what sets healthy relationships apart from unhealthy ones, if not discord?
As Tronick and Gold write, “As long as there is an opportunity for repair, mismatch in 70 percent of interactions is not only typical but conducive to positive and healthy development and relationships. We need the normal messiness in order to learn to trust each other.” When rupture is a part of a safe and consistent relationship where reunification happens in a reliable way, well, that’s pure relationship gold.
Seeing the value in the process of repairing from being misaligned with people we love is an important mindset shift around what conflict should look like and what it means. Many couples, for instance, have a mindset that conflict indicates poor relationship health and that it will take from you without giving back. These couples err on the side of avoiding conflict and thus risk the festering of unresolved issues.
But this research on infant-caregivers (as well as loads of other parenting research and studies on conflict among adults) encourages a different mindset: one that views conflict as one powerful tool for growth and connection. It allows us to see misses as part and parcel of a healthy relationship. And it helps us to approach those misses with intentions to use them as vehicles of learning and growth.
How can you do your part to have healthy conflict?
There are certainly important behavioral strategies for overcoming conflict, like recognizing our own contributions, using soft start-ups, apologizing, and the like. But underlying all of this lies a mindset that can perceive discord as something that is not only tolerable, but which can be constructive. Such a mindset shift helps partners regulate their own emotions and be more productive—through mutual negotiation, expression of feelings, or problem discussion—in the face of conflict. Because by changing the meaning we attribute to conflict and the potential value we see embedded in it, we can transform our experience of it.
In other words, we don’t need to enjoy conflict (and, let’s be honest, we likely won’t!), but we can shift to perceiving and embracing what it has to offer us as individuals, and to our partnerships.
So next time you and your partner or friend or child miss each other or enter into some sense of being at odds with one another, consider zooming out from panic about what it means or trying to shut down the discomfort. Instead, consider what the process of repair can teach you. Perhaps it can help you learn and grow as an individual. Or maybe it can pave the ways towards a reconnection and deepening of your relationship.
Whether it’s your partner’s “still-face” while you’re telling them a story or your teenager’s eye roll when you tell them anything, reflect on how discord in your most important relationships provides opportunities. Because discord, as it turns out, is a delightfully uncomfortable gift.
1 I nabbed The Power of Discord at the library while perusing the relationship section. As in, I wasn’t looking for anything about still face research or even parenting, in general. This is often how I find book gems—totally randomly. How do you readers find your book gems?
2 I tried to locate the research on adults doing still-face in the laboratory but couldn’t locate anything concrete. It either was never published or perhaps reflects clinical observations, is my best guess.
Wow. What a better way to look at conflict with my loved ones. I am definitely someone who has trouble regulating their feelings when I have a conflict with my husband or son. I get panicky, like it’s the end of the world. But if I can look at it as an opportunity to learn and make our relationship stronger, it will help me out of my tailspin. Thanks for this!!