Explaining the Communication Pattern of Couples with Chronic Conflict: A Discourse Analysis Approach
Keywords:
chronic marital conflict, discourse analysis, communication pattern, blame, withdrawal, couple therapyAbstract
This study aimed to explain the communication pattern of couples with chronic conflict by examining the discursive mechanisms through which marital conflict is produced, maintained, and reproduced. This qualitative study was conducted using a discourse analysis approach. The participants consisted of 22 individuals, including 11 women and 11 men, selected from couples experiencing chronic marital conflict in Tehran, Iran, through purposive sampling. Inclusion criteria were at least three years of marital life, recurrent and persistent conflict during the previous six months, willingness to participate in an in-depth interview, and absence of acute psychiatric crisis or active physical violence. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and continued until theoretical saturation was achieved. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using NVivo software. The analysis focused on recurrent linguistic patterns, interpretive repertoires, subject positions, blame narratives, defensive justifications, silence, withdrawal, and the discursive reconstruction of marital conflict. To enhance trustworthiness, member checking, peer debriefing, recoding, and an audit trail of analytic decisions were applied. The findings indicated that the communication pattern of couples with chronic conflict was organized around a repetitive discursive cycle in which conversation gradually moved away from problem solving and became a field for defending identity, proving innocence, and attributing blame. Four main categories emerged from the data: the discourse of blame and fault attribution, the discourse of defensiveness and denial of personal contribution, the discourse of silence and withdrawal, and the discourse of erosion of emotional security. These categories showed that chronic conflict is not merely the result of disagreement over specific issues, but rather the outcome of a stabilized communicative order in which each utterance is interpreted as threat, attack, rejection, or indifference. The results suggest that the core problem in chronically conflicted couples is not only the presence of disagreement, but also the discursive way in which disagreement is interpreted and reproduced. Therefore, couple therapy interventions should focus on reconstructing relational language, reducing victim–blamer polarization, strengthening accountable dialogue, and creating opportunities for emotional recognition and responsive listening.
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