When people are having relationship issues, Bruce, what is the first thing that someone can do to start to repair the relationship without having it be another fight?

the common advice you'd get if you asked a relationship coach was work in your communication.

Like it's kind of, you know, we all have read that, heard that, and it's like, watch your tone of voice, learn some communication tools, work on who, you know, your facial expressions, be kind, be gentle, yada, yada, yada, yada.

And none of that is wrong.

That's all accurate advice, except sometimes, None of it works until you're connected first.

So when you're upset, like you've just had a fight with your partner and you want to go and talk to them about the fight, we usually go in there kind of like feeling a bit, you know, and we're going guns blazing or we're kind of shut down a bit defensive.

And when you use all of those tools, when you're not connected, when you're feeling afraid of your partner or you're feeling anxious that things might go wrong, you're in a place of fear at some level and your nervous system goes into fight or flight.

Can you just walk us through each one?

listening to each other.

Yeah.

And we can't hear anything other than what our filter that we hear through allows in.

You know, we all have a kind of a filter of whether the filter is, you know, all men want is sex or all women are drama queens or my partner is X. that's the filter and they can say whatever they want, but hey, I'll filter just here's what we want to hear.

And so part of what we have to do is kind of start to recognize our own filters, our own projections that we put onto the opposite sex, our family, our friends, our partners, and then just see them through a blank slate again and go, oh, oh, wow.

And so everything that isn't love is just a misunderstanding.

What that means is that in my almost two decades of doing this now, I can't even remember where I haven't been able to find the misunderstanding.

Not me.