In your relationship, do you fight in despair or with repair?

In any romantic relationship, fights are inevitable. Whatever you call it: discussions, fights, arguments… the only way to predict success after a fight is to repair the hurt after the fact (or ideally in the middle). Doctors John and Julia Gottman talk about this in five steps in their book The Eight Dates. You have to grow in self awareness for your own understanding as well as to be known by your partner. It’s hard to share your feelings or thoughts when you have no clue what they are.

Before you can even get to the five steps to create repair, you have to first agree to being civil and respectful in having a conversation about the fight. Like most people, you probably get sucked back into the fight instead of being able to break down what happened in the fight. This agreement to a respectful understanding creates the sense that you both are on the same team, figuring out how to love each other better and win as a team. The goal then is to understand what reality looks like from each other’s perceptions- the feelings and thoughts that happened to them. Each of your perspectives are right because they are unique to you. If this can become the goal, then you can move onto the five steps.

Step 1: Each person sharing what they were feeling during the fight.

Step 2: Each person share the perspective on what happened during the argument. You need to validate your partner’s reality. It will be different than yours because you both saw it differently and you both are right. Validating does not mean you are agreeing with it, you are simply seeing how their emotional experience and thought process makes sense in their reality. When sharing your own reality, it is important to only talk about your experience, not telling your partner what they did. “It seemed like…” or “I thought you…” or “I heard you saying” are helpful ways to stick with your experience instead of judging your partner’s character or behavior.

Step 3: Take time to understand each other’s triggers (if there are any). Triggers are often a part of your past that is contributing to your current experience in the fight. This is an opportunity to share a story that connects the feeling to an incident. Some of the prompts for potential triggers are as follows: “A time when I felt judged…” or “A time when I felt abandoned…” or “A time when I felt excluded…” There are a lot of emotions you can put in there to help paint a picture for your partner to better understand your history and connect with your internal experience.

Step 4: Accept the responsibility for your part of the fight. This could be in how you didn’t listen very well, how you came into the fight already stressed or preoccupied, or haven’t made time for your partner. This is not a time for blame or judging. It is a time to own whatever part you played in the fight.

Step 5: Learn from the fight. How can you both do things differently the next time. Spend some time to commit to doing at least one thing to make the next discussion better; minimizing the hurt and possibly avoiding the incident all together.

If nothing else, start bringing a mindset of curiosity and openness to your partner and see how it changes the way you guys connect. To learn more about this process and how to use it in your relationship, get yourself a copy of the Gottman’s book, The Eight Dates and then schedule an appointment to help facilitate how to put this into practice.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you! If you want to process this in your own counseling journey, you can start here.