>You can work through it, you just have to care enough. We no longer have arguments longer than maybe 20 minutes now.

We went through the same. A few years of me getting my head on straight and not escalating fights so I could effectively communicate "I don't want to fight about this" and either "this isn't a criticism, this is something that's important to me" or "you're right, I'll start doing that" has made our fighting dry up almost entirely.

There are also folks that are suffering from real severe mental health crisises, and will continue to escalate and dysregulate over and over again - to their own and others detriment.

Having been on the receiving end of this - don’t keep trying to make it work if it gets to this point. Work on being a grey rock to them (non reactive) until you can get yourself and others to safety.

Also don’t tell them you’re leaving until you have a viable plan B that they can’t find. Kids make it much much harder, and unfortunately around 2 yrs old is often when it gets the toughest and this can happen.

You can't always work through emotional dysregulation issues (inability to return to baseline after six hours of argument being one indicator of such issues) by just talking it out. Sometimes you can, sometimes it's associated with something more fundamental like a personality disorder where professional help needs to be involved.

I just want to point out that it's not just personality disorders that can cause this. There are very real physiological problems that can surface this way, too. For example, some people have adrenaline issues where seemingly minor, or even pleasant things (like running into an old friend at the grocery store), cause a much larger than normal spike of adrenaline. If the person it happens to isn't aware of what's going on, they can react the way their body is telling them to (fight, flight, or freeze). Sometimes if they're aware of it, they can have enough sense to take a pause, but it is often very difficult because the biological response your body has is so overwhelming. It's as unpleasant for them as it is for the person who has to deal with their overreaction to the situation.

Wouldn't personality disorders be inseparable from physiological problems ? Is there any particular literature/reference you are basing this on, curious.

I have a theory I use that helps me with this, the "million dollar gun to the head" theory.

Would either of them stop fighting instantly if there as a gun to their heads or offered a million dollars?

If the answer is "yes", then it's entirely within their control to solve the problem.

The only people I think that fail this are psychopaths, and I think those are rare.

If you don't have experience with people prone to emotional dysregulation, it's hard to appreciate how it works, but you don't need to resort to such an artificial scenario like your gun scenario. People with some personality disorders can be triggered by seemingly little things into anger/rage states for 4-6 hours that cannot be resolved by talking them out, but if someone outside the household (i.e., someone who is not their partner or not their kids) shows up unexpectedly, they can often immediately control themselves. But the underlying dynamic doesn't get resolved, and generally won't be without professional tools that go beyond conventional talk therapy, like DBT.

Yup. Having been on the receiving end of it - she literally said afterwards she couldn’t stop herself.

Luckily, she was just stabbing the counter and not me.

My mistake for asking her how she was doing, apparently.

This is something I have been a witness to in my personal life, and you're right-- I don't have the tools to wrap my brain around this. I'm familiar with disabilities. I get that. You're unable to do this thing that other people find easy. But this.... this is a choice. If you can't regulate your emotions, you can't regulate your emotions no matter the context. If you can function just fine at work, but not at home, that's a choice you're making.

Or at least, that's how it looks from the outside.

I get that people who struggle to control their emotions would push back on that analogy, but I'm pretty accustomed to people creating whatever narrative they need to justify their behavior. Somebody acting badly and then making up a justification is something I deal with nearly every day.

It's hard for me to get a better justification than "maybe your 'personality disorder' is just being an asshole" past Occam's razor.

Is there something I could be reading about this to get a better picture? I know I'm coming at it from a general place of mental health, so, you know, that's not the best lens, but I also know I'm not crazy for thinking like this. Just maybe missing a puzzle piece.

I came to a conclusion that people who genuinely can't control themselves due to extremely low impulse control tend to end up in prison.

Those who claim that they "can't control themselves" yet somehow manage to be functional adults are lying - they can control themselves, they just can't be bothered.

This exact thing happened with my partner. Do you know what kinds of personality disorders are prone to this?

To quantify "rare" it seems there are about 1% of the population are psychopaths [0]. A quick search came across a number of refs to that number, but IDK if it is multiple studies, or just one a long time ago that is amplified through time.

[0] https://psichologyanswers.com/library/lecture/read/601609-wh...

I would start billing my own children if arguments lasted hours.

Or maybe you and your wife don't funge with every other pair of individuals in the whole world? Some people truly aren't compatible and make each other miserable.

I think more people give up and quit on compatible people than we care to admit. Getting along is hard for everyone under stressful situations. (combined with our own personal flaws)