How can I use the ‘Still-Face’ method to repair trust and build emotional resilience?

Why is being out of sync with your partner actually a sign of a healthy relationship?

Stop striving for a perfect, conflict-free life. The Power of Discord explains why even the strongest couples are mismatched 70% of the time. Discover how the famous “Still-Face” experiment proves that repairing conflict—rather than avoiding it—is the true secret to building deep intimacy and lasting trust. Learn why the “good enough” approach beats perfection every time.

Embrace the messiness of connection—read the full summary to learn the art of repair and turn your daily conflicts into opportunities for growth today.

Genres

Psychology, Communication Skills, Sex, Relationships, Personal Development

Introduction: Discord might actually be a good thing.

The Power of Discord (2020) offers a significant reframing of the role discord plays in developing functional relationships. It reveals how moments of mismatch – when followed by repair – actually build trust, resilience, and deeper connection. Through groundbreaking research including the famous “Still-Face Experiment,” it offers a refreshing perspective that will transform how you view conflict, showing that working through discord is not just normal but essential for creating lasting, meaningful relationships.

Do you dance around touchy topics and avoid difficult conversations with your partner, your friends, and your family? Do you feel like a failure every time you argue with a colleague, or snap at your children?

If you answered yes to either of these questions, then you might need to reframe the way you view moments of discord. Because expert behavioural psychologists now believe that, far from signalling relationship failure, discord is essential both for building resilience within yourself and for creating deeper connections with others.

This summary lays out the essential role discord plays in building healthy relationships. You’ll learn why even the healthiest bonds are out of sync 70% of the time, and how it’s the repair process – not perfection – that ultimately creates trust and intimacy.

Healthy relationships are defined by discord

When we think of a perfect pairing, we envision partnerships like that of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, dancing effortlessly in perfect harmony. But in reality, most relationships more closely resemble Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. These two endured plenty of stepping on toes, awkward moments, and practice sessions before finding rhythm together. When it comes to relationships, conflict, compromise, and tension are unavoidable.

But they’re also essential. Behavioral scientists increasingly recognize that discord, rather than being an unfortunate byproduct of functional relationships, actually forms their foundation. Moving through challenging moments of discord is precisely how we grow and connect more deeply.

In fact, we learn to navigate discord from infancy. In the 1970s, the author Ed Tronick conducted his famous “still-face” experiment. In this study, parents interact normally with their infants, then suddenly switch to an expressionless face for a period of time. Babies quickly become distressed when parents stop responding to their bids for connection, trying desperately to reengage them. This study is often cited as a demonstration of how crucial responsive interaction is for emotional wellbeing.

But Tronick’s further research revealed something less intuitive: even in healthy, securely attached relationships, approximately 70% of all parent-infant interactions are actually out of sync. This pattern continues throughout our primary love relationships.

We’ve been conditioned to view mismatch as problematic, when in fact, it’s normal and expected. The critical element – the thing that makes this discord beneficial – is repair. While negative feelings arise during moments of mismatch, successfully reconnecting transforms the experience into a positive one. In the still-face experiment, when parents resume normal interaction, the repair process builds trust and resilience. This cycle of disconnect and reconnect teaches us that we can navigate relationship messiness together.

Those with robust experiences of repair develop more hopeful, open approaches to relationships and build confidence in their ability to work through inevitable conflicts. Conversely, people without sufficient repair experiences often approach relationships with guardedness and negativity, and develop fewer strategies for managing conflict. So really, the picture-perfect relationship is built from a foundation of discord.

Imperfection is crucial to our emotional development

Stephen Hawking once observed that “without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.” In ancient times, macromolecules – large, complex molecules like proteins, nucleic acids, and carbohydrates that form the building blocks of life – sometimes replicated with slight variations or “errors” when they interacted. These “mistakes” created the diversity that allowed life to develop and adapt on Earth.

Similar “mistakes” are needed throughout our early lives. Renowned pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott noted that after the first few months of a newborn’s life, when parents are hyper-attuned to their helpless child’s needs, the parent actually needs to begin “failing” the infant in order for healthy development. These small, manageable disappointments allow the child to develop critical self-regulation skills as they learn to manage their emotions and needs independently.

Winnicott called this the concept of the “good enough mother” – a parent who gradually and appropriately fails to meet their child’s needs in proportion to the child’s developing abilities. These measured disappointments aren’t neglect. They’re necessary opportunities for growth.

Now, if imperfection is so vital to our early development, then why have we created a world with such pervasive expectations of perfection? Contemporary culture bombards us with images of perfect relationships, seemingly free of discord. We feel like failures when, in our own relationships, we inevitably face missteps and conflicts.

The problem is, when discord is stigmatized we gain little practice navigating it. And without practice navigating discord, we lack resilience when facing challenges, contributing to rising anxiety and relationship dissatisfaction.

Adding to these challenges is our advice-obsessed culture. A whole economy exists for this, built on sharing tips for everything from raising resilient children to boosting productivity. This creates the expectation that experts have all the answers and there’s always a “right way” to succeed. Ironically, this reinforces the perfection paradigm and short-circuits the essential repair process.

While advice and support are valuable, trusting yourself to navigate challenges is more important than memorizing hacks to strengthen your relationship. The most functional relationships aren’t those without discord. They’re those that embrace imperfection as the pathway to genuine growth and connection.

Regulation creates meaning out of mess

Relationship “mess” is inevitable. It’s what we do with that mess that transforms it from chaos into meaning – like turning spilled paint into a Pollock masterpiece. When we navigate and repair conflict, we create meaningful patterns from what would otherwise remain chaotic distress. This gives us the capacity to extract wisdom from discord, turning potentially destructive moments into opportunities for deeper understanding.

This type of meaning-making hinges on regulatory abilities, particularly self-regulation – our capacity to experience the full spectrum of emotions without being overwhelmed. Self-regulation creates space for meaning-making by allowing us to step back from immediate reactions and consider what each conflict reveals about our needs, values, and patterns.

Unlike the rigid constraints of self-control, self-regulation allows us to fully experience emotions while still maintaining perspective – the essential balance needed to transform relationship mess into relationship meaning. When experiencing grief or anger toward a partner, self-regulation enables us to honor these feelings while simultaneously reflecting on their significance.

The essential mechanism for developing self-regulation is the repair cycle. Early interactions between caregiver and infant, where misunderstanding is followed by reconnection, teach our developing nervous system that disconnection is temporary. Each successful repair builds trust in relationship resilience.

This pattern continues through adulthood. When friends resolve a misunderstanding or partners work through conflict, each successful repair strengthens regulatory abilities. The cycle of discord, repair, and reconnection teaches us that relationships can withstand imperfection, allowing us to remain present during future challenges rather than withdrawing or escalating.

While consistent early caregiving provides the strongest foundation for self-regulation, it isn’t the only way. Those who may have lacked this care can still develop self-regulation through mindfulness, therapy, and supportive relationships. Each repair builds capacity for navigating future discord. Relationship mess becomes meaningful because working through it demonstrates that imperfection isn’t merely inevitable – it’s necessary for growth.

Repairing discord builds resilience

In the last section, we uncovered how moments of mismatch and repair create the foundation for our ability to regulate emotions and navigate relationships. These moments become the basis for handling the big challenges that mark every life: loss, trauma, crisis, and turmoil. Our experience navigating and repairing discord is what allows us to grow through hardships that could easily derail us. Essentially, every moment in which we repair discord is a moment in which we build resilience.

We begin building resilience in our earliest days. Consider the infant whose mother steps away briefly to answer a call. The momentary distress activates the child’s stress response, but upon reunion and comfort, the infant’s stress cycle comes full circle. Its nervous system goes through all three of the cycle’s stages: activation, management, and resolution. This seemingly small interaction teaches a profound lesson – that emotional discomfort is survivable and temporary.

As we grow, such opportunities become more complex. A toddler learns emotional regulation when parents remain steady during tantrums. A preschooler builds adaptive skills when helped to navigate jealousy of a new sibling. Adolescents develop stronger identities when parents maintain connection despite boundary-testing. Each successful repair after discord strengthens our capacity to face future challenges.

Psychologist D.W. Winnicott described this as developing the capacity for going on being, or maintaining an internal coherence even during distress. This ability to hold onto our sense of self through difficulty becomes our anchor through life’s inevitable storms.

But not all discord leads to resilience. Psychologists distinguish between tolerable stress, which is repaired, and toxic stress, which is overwhelming and is not repaired. People who have experienced the trauma of ongoing toxic stress are not given the opportunity to build resilience out of discord.

For adults who missed on early opportunities for resilience-building, the good news is that our capacity for repair continues developing throughout life. Each relationship becomes a new opportunity to experience discord, practice repair, and build the resilience that transforms life’s inevitable conflicts from threats into opportunities for deeper connection and personal growth.

Use play to navigate discord

Human infants don’t receive a guidebook at birth. They must discover the rules of their world through experience, and they do this primarily through play, a powerful learning mechanism that engages the whole self through creativity, movement, emotion, and memory. When we play, we gain both energy and information in a uniquely integrative way.

Our earliest play experiences are carefully structured by caregivers. Consider peek-a-boo, that universal game played across cultures. Caregivers repeat it patiently until the infant understands and participates. This simple interaction teaches profound lessons about object permanence, but more importantly about the rhythm of connection and separation. The brief “disappearance” of the parent creates a manageable stress, followed by the joy of reunion, building the infant’s capacity to handle future separations with resilience.

Through play, children learn how to take turns, negotiate rules, handle winning and losing, and repair relationships after conflicts. A toddler learning to share toys experiences discord that becomes the foundation for future compromise. A school-aged child navigating playground politics develops social intelligence through countless interactions.

But games don’t end with childhood. They evolve and govern adult life too. Two adults falling in love will inevitably need to navigate the different “rulebooks” from their respective upbringings.

Take Maya and James, who approach money conversations from vastly different frameworks. Maya comes from a family where finances were discussed openly and pragmatically, while James grew up in a household where money talk was considered impolite and anxiety-provoking. Their first few attempts at budgeting create immediate tension, but by approaching these conversations with playfulness rather than rigidity, they discover new possibilities. They create a financial “game night,” where they use colored markers and visual aids to make budgeting less threatening, gradually building a shared language around money that belongs to neither of their original families but works uniquely for them.

Another game we all need to play is when we start a new job and have to learn the unwritten rules of a workplace culture. Is humor appreciated in meetings? Are disagreements expressed openly or privately? We learn these “games” through observation and participation, not by analyzing rulebooks.

The key insight is that we don’t master these social games through intellect alone. We need what psychologists call “implicit relational knowing”, an embodied understanding that becomes automatic. Think of a seasoned tennis player who no longer thinks about grip or footwork, and has developed rhythms of play that are second nature.

Changing destructive relational patterns is like correcting a flawed tennis grip. Initially the process is awkward and filled with mistakes. You might know intellectually what needs changing, but transformation happens through practice, through playful experimentation rather than rigid analysis.

The most vibrant adult relationships maintain this element of playfulness – a willingness to explore, take risks, make mistakes, and repair. Discord isn’t relationship failure; it’s the playing field where we develop our most valuable skills for connection.

Repair your relationship to discord

In the aftermath of trauma, our bodies become battlegrounds where past wounds shape present interactions. Trauma fundamentally distorts meaning-making: the world becomes unsafe, others untrustworthy, and the self ineffective. These beliefs create self-fulfilling prophecies in relationships unless something interrupts the pattern.

One such something is Stephen Wolfert’s DE-CRUIT project. Wolfert uses Shakespearan theater to provide an interruption for veterans who were “wired up” for war and struggle to readjust to civilian life. The program’s genius lies in using Shakespeare’s emotionally charged texts to help veterans process their own overwhelming feelings.

The healing comes not just from intellectual understanding, but from the rhythm and breath of reciting Shakespeare’s lines, a process that reconnects veterans with their bodily meaning-making systems. These are the neurobiological processes through which our bodies interpret and respond to experiences before conscious thought. When veterans embody these characters’ journeys through rage, grief, and reconciliation, they create new neural pathways for processing their own emotions.

When the process of mismatch and repair is derailed early in life, our physiological stress systems become permanently altered. This stress response persists in the body even in outwardly functional adults. While we can’t travel back in time to learn repair as infants, programs like DE-CRUIT demonstrate that we can rewire our stress responses today.

Psychotherapy is another avenue for transformation. The therapeutic relationship creates a controlled environment where discord naturally emerges – a client might feel misunderstood, or a therapist might set a boundary. But unlike past relationships, the therapist remains present and engaged. Each repaired rupture in therapy builds new expectations about relationships. When a therapist notices a disconnection, names it, and works through it collaboratively, the client experiences repair that rewires their expectations.

New personal relationships also offer healing potential. When someone with trauma history forms a connection with a responsive partner who stays engaged during conflict, they encounter a pattern-breaking experience. Initially, they may interpret normal disagreements catastrophically, but a patient partner who returns after discord demonstrates that repair is possible.

Healing doesn’t come from perfect harmony but from working through inevitable mismatches. Each successful navigation of discord, whether in therapy or personal relationships, accumulates, gradually transforming our traumatized meaning system. We go from equating conflict with abandonment to understanding that discord is not only survivable, it can actually lead to deeper connection.

Conclusion

In this summary to The Power of Discord by Ed Tronick and Claudia M. Gold, you’ve learned that relationship discord is not a failure but an essential foundation for growth and connection. The critical element is not avoiding conflict but successfully repairing disconnections, which builds trust, resilience, and relationship skills. These repair experiences, whether in childhood or adulthood, create our capacity for self-regulation and ultimately transform inevitable conflicts into opportunities for deeper connection and personal growth.