Ep: 107: How to Stop an Argument With Your Wife Before It Blows Up

I want to add something to part three of the Marriage Reset because after I released that teaching, I was coaching one of the husbands I work with and we were talking about conflict.

And we were talking about the sorry method.

And we were talking about how some of the patterns that kept showing up between him and his wife, they just kind of keep happening.

They can't seem to kind of mitigate.

It just always ends up there.

And so he essentially asked me, okay, this framework is great, but what do I actually do when we're in it, right, in the middle of it? Not afterward, not tomorrow morning, not after we both calm down.

But what do I do when I can literally feel the conversation starting to turn? And then I realized I spent a lot of time teaching men why conflict happens.

And I've taught you about flooding.

I've taught you about defensiveness, about criticism, contempt, stonewalling.

I've taught you about seeking to understand instead of seeking to be understood.

And in part three, I gave you the SORIA method for repairing the relationship after something had happened.

But there's a gap.

There's a gap between those two things.

What do you do when the train is still on the tracks, but you can see the cliff coming? How do you actually stop it? As this client and I started working through it together, I began building a simple process with him in real time.

I'm going to unpack it for you.

Four steps.

Remove, regulate, reflect, re-enter.

I'm calling it the 4R reset.

The 4R reset.

And this is not a framework for winning arguments.

It's not even really a communication framework.

It's a pattern interrupt.

It's a pattern interrupt.

That's what it is.

Very strategically, specifically designed to interrupt you in your tracks in the moment.