After a Fight With Someone You Love
For the hour or two after it, when the house is quiet and you are still rehearsing your side. It settles you first, then sorts out what is worth coming back to and how to open the door again.
Relationships · Relationships · Communication · 8 items · whenever you need it
The checklist
- Give it twenty minutes before anything else — Nothing useful gets said while both of you are still flooded.
- Drink water and go to a different room — Your body comes down faster when the scene changes.
- Write your side out, for you only — On paper it loses the heat it has in your head.
- Find the one sentence underneath it — Usually it is “I felt dismissed” or “I felt alone”, not the dishes.
- Name one thing they got right — Not a concession; just the part of their case that holds.
- Decide what you are apologizing for — Your own share, specifically, with no “but” attached to it.
- Open with repair, not with the argument — “I hate it when we are like this” goes further than a better point.
- Agree when you will come back to it — Some things need a calmer hour, not the same night.
Use this checklist Free account: tick items off and keep each day's record.
How to use it
Run through it whenever you need it, honestly and without scoring yourself. A checklist is a way of noticing, not a test: an item you cannot tick is information about the day, not a verdict on you. Over a few weeks the pattern of what gets ticked and what does not says more than any single pass.
With a free Theraglee account the checklist remembers each pass, so you can look back. Without one, you can still read it here and keep your own copy.