Speaker 1: In relationships conflict is inevitable. The goal is not to avoid conflict at all costs. It's healthy to be able to talk about the things that are bothering you, frustrating you, and causing tension in your relationship. However, an important mark of the health of a relationship is your ability to quickly repair any damage that could be caused as a result of that friction. Hi guys, welcome back to my channel. And if you're new, welcome to my channel. My name is Stephanie Yates Anya Bwile, Steph Anya for short, and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. Today I'm going to be sharing with you five steps to resolving conflict in your relationship based on John and Julie Gottman's book, Eight Dates. If you're curious, stay tuned. Let's jump right in. As I've talked about in other videos, the most important element of communication, especially when you're having a disagreement with your partner, family member, friend, is not to win the argument and prove that you're right. A lot of us tend to go into conversations with that hope, with that expectation, or that measure of success. What you should be having the goal of doing is having each person walk away with a clearer understanding of the opposing person and that argument's perspective. That way you can better predict and address any other issues that come up that may be similar. So let's jump into the five steps that John and Julie Gottman list in their book, Eight Dates, based on their research about the best way to repair your relationship after conflict. Step one, focus on your feelings. Each person should share how they were feeling during that argument or leading up to the argument. Maybe you were feeling fearful. Maybe you were feeling ashamed or embarrassed. Maybe you were feeling annoyed or jealous. Being honest about your feelings is the best way to start because it allows your partner the opportunity to empathize with you first, right? We've all been in a place where we felt jealous of things before. And so even if your partner can't agree with what led you to feeling jealous, at least they can empathize with the fact that that is the emotion that led into that fight or that you were feeling during the fight. And to clarify, when I use the term fight and argument, I'm using those synonymously. I am not referring to physical altercations in this video. Step two, each person should share their perspective. What did you feel happened during that argument? How did you experience the lead up? How did you experience the actual argument itself? And the most important part of step two is to validate each other's experiences. So maybe they say, and then you yelled at me. Now that is not good communication, but you don't want to worsen the communication by saying, I wasn't yelling at you. You can say, so you felt that I was yelling at you. And maybe this is even an opportunity for you to understand what yelling means to that person, right? So learning how to validate their experience and saying, I can see why you would see it that way, or that makes sense that you would experience it that way. Or I could see how my action would be construed or interpreted that way. Instead of being defensive and trying to convince them that that's not what happened, or that's not how they should feel. Focusing on validation in step two is key. Make sure when you are in step two, that you are focusing on your own feelings, focusing on your own perspective. You don't want to tell your partner or whomever you're having the conversation with how they felt. You don't want to say, for example, and then you got mad out of nowhere. You can't tell them that they got mad, but you can say, I felt tension and it seemed to me that you were mad. That is a completely different thing because it leaves room for the possibility that you misinterpreted the situation. They end this section with a sentence that I love. There is no immaculate perception. Meaning that there is no person who has a perfect, crystal clear memory of exactly what happened. Because each of you is going to be paying attention to different things. Each of you are going to remember different things and forget or completely ignore different things. So no one is coming with 20-20 hindsight about how this argument unfolded and transpired. This is the book we're reading right now in the What's On Your Page book club. This is the book that most of you voted for. And our next book will be the drama of The Gifted Child. I'll be doing a live this upcoming Tuesday, November 1st at 7 p.m. Eastern, if you want to join that conversation, I'm going to have my husband joining. We'll be talking about this book and all of the wonderful things that we've been learning as we've been reading through it. This book has eight topics that couples need to learn how to talk about open-ended questions that the authors provide you with so that you can have more success talking about some of the more difficult conversations within relationships. If you want to get this book, I'll have it in the description box below. And if you want to join the book club, I'll have that link as well. Step three, identify your triggers. What are the things that escalated this argument? We all have reasons why certain things bother us more than other things do. For some of us, it might be a feeling of rejection. For some of us, it might be a feeling of being ignored. For some of us, it might be a feeling of feeling inferior. Recognizing what those triggers are and what actions led to you feeling those things. Typically, our triggers are informed by previous experiences that we've had either in childhood, maybe in previous relationships. And so if you can get very specific in recognizing what is causing you to escalate from a productive conversation to an argument that might be more difficult for you to repair and rebound from, that can help your partner understand the things to try to avoid or work on to help be a better partner to you. And same for you if you can learn about your partner's triggers. Something that they say in the book is that triggers don't go away, they endure. And unfortunately, this is the case a lot of times. The best work that I see with my clients when it comes to triggers is when they are able to face those triggers head on. But that's a lot easier to accomplish when we're talking about maybe you have a hard time dealing with a certain time of year and you tend to stay in. So we might have some exposure exercises where you go out and engage with people during those times of year, for example. Or maybe it's a certain song, a certain artist, a certain TV show. I've talked about triggers quite a bit on this channel. Those sorts of triggers can be a lot easier to manage and develop a plan around. However, some of our triggers are our deepest wounds from childhood that we have a lot of difficulty managing. And our emotional regulation might be significantly decreased when we are encountering reminders of these lower periods in time. The Gottmans give a great extensive list of some of the common triggers that cause us to emotionally escalate in conversations. I'll list a few of the ones that I see the most in my practice and encourage you to think about any that might be playing a role in some of your most significant relationships. A time when I felt excluded. A time when I felt judged. A time when I felt humiliated. A time when I felt out of control. They have a list that includes a lot of these things. But thinking about those things may help you realize the areas that you're particularly sensitive to and could lead to arguments in your relationship. Step four, accountability. Accept your contribution to this argument. Don't look at your partner and try to fix and mold them into being a better partner for you. Look into yourself and identify the things that you are doing that are contributing to poor communication in your relationship. Maybe you shut down when you feel a lot of pressure. Maybe your go-to method is escaping or shutting down. Or maybe on the opposite end, you're the person in the relationship that wants to talk about things right now while your blood pressure is still escalated. You're having a hard time regulating your emotions, calming down. When you're in that place, sometimes it's not always the best time to have a conversation that could trigger you further. But if you're the kind of person that just needs that closure right away, that might be the thing you're doing that's contributing to the argument. Maybe you have a hard time being completely honest with your partner. Maybe there are things about your past or your present that you don't feel comfortable sharing. And that might be leading into these arguments. Be really honest with yourself. And the best insight that you can have into the areas you need to be accountable for is earlier on in step two, when you hear your partner's perspective on the conversation. This is the best insight you can get into what your partner believes is happening. And think about what could you do that might shift the typical dynamic or pattern that leads into arguments for you all. So accountability is extremely important. If we're unable to recognize our responsibility for poor communication in our relationship, there is no hope for salvaging or fixing those things. We cannot beat our partners into submission and make them communicate and do the things that we want them to do. But we can work on ourselves, try to see what we can do to help improve communication. That's the only power that you have in these situations. And you want to use that power to the best of your ability. Being able to accept responsibility is one of the greatest ways that you can help to repair not only this argument, but also make repairs for the relationship going forward. Step five, have a discussion and plan for how you'll handle things differently in the future. You wanna share what your partner could do better, what you could do better. And then you guys come up with the plan. I can say, for example, in my relationship, one of the things that we have worked on is being able to find that balance between giving each other space to process and talking about things quick enough where it doesn't feel like the whole day has passed and we're still upset or frustrated with each other. Whether you guys make a plan to have a physical reassurance, even when you're frustrated, or maybe a verbal reassurance saying, hey, I need a break, but I love you. Those sorts of things can help you guys have more effective communication going forward. So identifying what you're doing wrong, what your partner's doing wrong, and how you both plan to shift those behaviors in the future can help you guys avoid arguments down the line, or at least make that repair time that much quicker when you do experience conflict. Those are five steps for repairing your relationship after you have an argument or experience conflict. If you have any other tips or questions about those, please put those in the comments below. Thank you for watching the video. I ask that you like and subscribe to my channel and share it with a friend if you think that a friend or partner might find this information valuable as well. You didn't have to watch this video until the end, but it means so much to me that you did. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.