508 - Four Steps to Stop a Conflict Spiral

Stopping conflict spirals

When we get stuck in conflict spirals with a partner it can be hard to take a step back and think with a clear head. Today we’re talking about four different steps you can take to disengage from a partner when you’re trapped in a spiral. When you find this happening, try stopping, soothing, approaching, and then refocusing to get yourself back to a place where you can calmly revisit a conflict. As always, we worked up an acronym:

Stop

Find a cue that lets you know it’s time to stop, which can be difficult if you’re in a physiologically aroused state or your sympathetic nervous system is activated. This could look like:
- Increased breath or heart rate.
- Sweating.
- Muscle tension.
- Panicky or shaky feelings.
- Increased temperature or “blood boiling” feeling.
- Change of tone in voice like volume, timbre, or pitch in either partner.
- Shift in body language in either partner, including aggressive, avoidant, or collapse.
- You can learn more about this here: 316 - Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn.
Some possible ways of finding your cue are:
- For some people, if you have good body awareness, the physiological arousal itself could be your cue.
- Use a smartwatch, checking for when your heart rate is above 100 bpm.
- Scan for HHALTDS (horny, hungry, angry, lonely, tired, drinking/drugs, sick).
- Scan for the 4 horsemen (contempt, criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling).
When you find your cue:
- Communicate that you want to stop. Some possibilities could be:

Take a breath

Soothe yourself for at least 20 minutes and no more than 24 hours. Ideally find something unrelated to the fight to focus on:
- A non-activating video game.
- Physical activity.
- Doing something with your hands.
Don’t:
- Use this time to act out and keep the fight going even from separate spaces. Don’t stomp or slam around the house, send long text messages unless previously agreed on, or sit and ruminate on your argument for when you reconvene.
There’s mixed recommendations on seeking out others to talk to during this time. Venting to others while you’re at the height of your activation is likely to keep you stuck in it. Seeking out support or advice from a therapist or someone you trust can be helpful for an outside perspective, but better to seek when you’re closer to a more normal physiological baseline. More about all of this, including some great reflection questions to ask yourself during this time in MA 218 - I've HALTed. Now What?

Approach

You might seek to partner soothe or co-regulate with the other person at this time:
- Be careful not to get sucked back into the argument. The wrong approach can trigger the spiral again and suck you both back in. That could look like:
  - One person being ready to approach and the other one pushing them away or avoiding them, then the approacher feels hurt and rejected.
  - Bringing back content from the fight, attempts at justifying oneself, criticism (even if it’s soft).
  - The re-approach is seen as an opening in the defenses, and the other person doubles down
It’s ok if it’s simple:
- “I’m sorry that we’re having a hard time right now. Can we sit together for a second?”
- “I want you to know that I love you, and I want to figure this out with you.”
- Closeness and touch.
If you’re not ready to be approached yet:
- It’s important to still connect before stepping away.
- “I appreciate you coming to be close to me. I still need a little bit of time to calm down. Can you give me another hour or so?”
- “I’m not ready to be hugged yet, but can you just hold my hand for a moment?”

Refocus

It’s possible that just by reapproaching, you’ll have repaired the majority of what went awry, and you may not need to jump back into processing together. Often happens with nothing fights or spirals that are the product of external stress or HALT factors.

It may be helpful to table any further discussion for the time being and just focus on soothing and connecting together. Be specific about when you’ll revisit, if that feels necessary.

“It’s important to me that we keep talking about this. Is it okay if we come back to this tomorrow after dinner?”
“Let’s write this down as something to look at again when we do our next RADAR/check in.”

A good place to start with refocusing could be on finding just one thing that you can validate about what came up for your partner during the conflict. It doesn't have to be validating or agreeing with absolutely everything.

“It makes sense why you would have been caught off guard by me reacting as strongly as I did.”
“I think you’re right to be frustrated by X,Y,Z.”
“I know that you’ve been sad about this for a while.”

Remember the repair SHOP: 234 - SHOP: How to Repair After a Fight

Transcript

This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about how to stop a conflict spiral. You might be at the end of your rope with a partner. You've raised voices. You've said things you wish you hadn't said. You've reached a point in the argument where you know it's no longer productive. You're exhausted, and you just want things to be over with, but you have no idea how to stop.

You don't even know how to start crawling back to your partner. How do you ever get close again without getting pulled back into a fight? How do you come back together if you're feeling hurt or feeling ashamed? Today, we are going to talk about how to get the spiral to stop, how to soothe yourself, how to come back together to co-regulate, and how to get on track towards repair and reconnection. We're going to give you four steps to take, which will have a beautiful, cool acronym, STAR.

Dedeker: Yes, a big multiamory reveal of a new, very multiamory acronym.

Jase: Yes. You can be the star of your own conflict spiral.

Dedeker: Your own conflict constellation.

Jase: I love that. Yes. In this episode, we are going to be referencing several of our other tools that we've created in the past. If you would like to learn more about those, you can check out those tools as well as many others in our book, Multiamory Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. You can find links to buy it at multiamory.com/book or wherever fine books are sold. Also, you can check back through our back catalog or check out our first nine episodes where we cover some of our most commonly referenced episodes.

Dedeker: I want to hear from the two of you about your experiences with bad conflict spirals. Particularly, I'm curious to know when you went through any kind of bad conflict spirals with a partner, did it tend to be like one-offs? There wasn't a ton of conflict in the relationship, but then, when you would get into conflict, it would be like really intense and cyclical and last a long time, or was this more likely to happen in relationships where there's just like a lot of conflict in general?

Emily: I feel like I tried to really keep my relationship as conflict-free as possible in my last big relationship. Yet when conflict happened, it was pretty bad, and it was pretty intense, and it would often last for a long period of time and sometimes even be brought up like six months later as, oh, that was a thing that you did when I thought that we had kind of gotten past it. Yes, the conflict spiral thing is really interesting, I think, just because it's so difficult to get out of, especially when you just have a habit as a couple of doing the cyclical, spirally thing.

That is the pattern that you get into in your conflict, regardless of what it's really about, is that it becomes this weird, unfortunate spiral. I feel like, yes, in my last relationship, that was very, very present, which was too bad.

Jase: Yes, I think that I've experienced it a couple of different ways, maybe three different ways that are coming to mind.

Dedeker: Three different ways. Wow. Triplet flavors.

Jase: I'm trying to categorize it, but I think one is usually a relationship where things start fine, usually while you're still in NRE, and then at some point, there starts to be this communication mishap that happens. Then it's like everything falls back into that cycle, that conflict cycle of just getting upset and escalating, escalating, escalating, and nothing really gets resolved until everyone just kind of burns out. Then you go back to normal for a while until you fall back into it again.

I feel like that's one category I've seen or I've experienced, I've been in, where I guess that would be the one you described as pretty consistent. It's like the conflict level, in general, becomes high once that cycle starts.

Emily: Yes.

Jase: Whereas I think there's other ones where things are fine most of the time, but then there are like certain topics or certain issues that'll come up now and again that have this tendency where you just really don't see eye to eye. It just feels like we both get really upset, and nothing really would get resolved, at least not until we eventually found ways to move away from that or approach it from a different angle instead of just hoping the same thing is going to be different this time.

Then I guess the third way, which I would say happens in my relationship with you, Dedeker, is where generally I think we're quite good at communicating, but it's like sometimes usually one of us, sometimes both of us, but usually one of us is just in a more, I don't know, fragile place, like it's just maybe not feeling well.

Maybe I'm thinking about that because I've been sick this week, but not feeling well or has something else going on in their life that's causing a lot of stress or a lot of anxiety or something like that, that then it's like a conversation that normally wouldn't go there can start to end up in a little bit of that. We're not really getting anywhere. We're maybe switch tracking a little bit, talking about slightly different topics, but I think we are very good at doing the stuff we're going to talk about today, which is stopping sooner than later.

Still it can end up spiraling a little bit, but stopping soon enough and then giving that space before coming back together. I think having practiced that more has made that better because I think earlier on in our relationship, that spiral would last longer before we would eventually be able to come back from it, whereas I think that's much faster now.

Dedeker: Yes, I think that there's a lot of interesting things that are sometimes going on in any kind of conflict spiral as far as the contributing factors because in this episode, we're going to get into what the research says about what are the disparate pieces and behaviors that tend to go into these conflict spirals. Then we're going to get into the kind of the tool for getting out of it. I didn't do a ton of research on contributing factors because it's like everyone's relationship is different, and many, many things can contribute to that.

Things like you mentioned, like physiological state, how well someone is or isn't managing external stress. I think the stuff you brought up, Emily, this idea of are we pretty avoidant the rest of the time in the relationship because we're afraid of how bad the conflict gets because it is bad. Then we avoid it, and then things get talked about, and then it's bad again, or I think a lot of things that go into it is like physiological arousal as well. If one or both of us, if this is a hot button issue or a very triggery issue that it can be really hard to move past it.

I've had some clients who shared with me about how what they noticed about their conflict pattern was that they often would end up on the same page or they often would realize, oh, actually, we want very similar things here. It's like they still had trouble calming themselves down enough. They would keep just rehashing the same ground over and over and over again because even though they cognitively realized we're on the same page and we want the same thing, there was something in their bodies and their feelings that just wasn't settling. I think that can be a piece here as well.

Emily: I feel like when there's long-term external conflict that's causing internal conflict within the relationship, that your capacity to be able to deal with conflict more effectively is lessened, at least because you're having a lot of emotional burnout. Or if you're having to do the same cycle for a fairly long period of time, even say a week or a month or something like that, then I feel like that capacity diminishes over time. Maybe at the beginning of the month, you were really like, "Okay, let's tackle this. Let's figure this out. I'm going to be here for you." Then if it continues to happen towards the end of the month, you just feel really depleted.

Dedeker: I want to start out by looking at the research. My entry point to this was looking at how does the research define, "High conflict or high conflict couples." I suppose I'm looking at trying to differentiate this from maybe shorter day-to-day disagreements you might have with a partner or maybe tiny little spats where you get on each other's nerves, but you're able to repair it quickly. These are the more sticky things.

Most of this information I'm pulling from a study titled Defining High Conflict that was published in The American Journal of Family Therapy in 2010. The study was conducted by Anderson et al. I'm going to go through this list of clues that you may look out for that may indicate that you are in a conflict spiral or in some sort of cyclical recurring unhealthy conflict. The first clue is pervasiveness.

This idea that the conflict just keeps continuing, there's no settling point, there's no resolution point, and this idea that it's maybe not necessarily limited to just one topic, although it could be, but often your conflict spirals are characterized by the fact that conflict rears its head in many, many different points of disagreement in the relationship, not just one particular hot button issue.

Jase: I feel like a way I've seen that play out though is where whatever the conflict is about, it gets pulled into the spiral of some other underlying conflict that's maybe deeper underneath it of like a value disagreement between the two people that they just can't reconcile, and so everything else gets sucked into the whirlpool of that one.

Dedeker: For sure.

Jase: It'll come up in different places, but it's all coming back to similar things. I guess it can get disguised a little bit in that way though.

Dedeker: Yes, for sure. Another clue to look out for are, are your exchanges primarily characterized by defensiveness? It's like you're moving to protect yourself or maybe your defense strategy is just avoidance, shutting a partner down when they want to talk about a topic or literally leaving the room or literally leaving them on red, all the other behaviors that we incorporate in order to avoid things or stuff like withdrawal, stonewalling, giving them the silent treatment or just not giving them any kind of response to what they're saying to you.

Now, this one was interesting. This is specifically drawn from the text of the study. Efforts to control the other before being controlled. It's interesting that this is roped under the category of defensiveness or defensive behaviors because it's almost trying your best defense is good offense sort of approach here of this idea of, "I need to get the upper hand. I need to get the power here because I know if I don't, the other person is going to get the upper hand. They're going to be right and try to tell me that I'm wrong or they're going to try to extract an apology from me first or they're going to try to hold me accountable first, so I need to get in there before they do that."

Jase: Yes. This is something that I feel like, Dedeker, you, and I have identified as, I think we call it being preemptively mad.

Dedeker: You think that's what being preemptively mad is about? Is about trying to control?

Jase: Well, okay. For some context.

Emily: It's part of it.

Jase: It's this thing of where imagine a situation where you come to your partner to let them know about something that maybe you did a little bit wrong or that you're worried they're going to be upset about, but you present it like I'm angry at you.

Dedeker: Wait, are you saying this about me specifically or the general you?

Jase: The general you.

Dedeker: Okay.

Emily: I figured that he was talking about both of you from the way in which he's presenting.

Jase: Yes. This is anyone, but us also, anyone including us. The reason why we have this term preemptively mad is actually part of seeing that and finding a kind of micro script, which you can find out about in our book if you don't already know about that, but having a micro script to actually help stop those situations from becoming bad where it's like one person might come in and be like just a little more intense than you would think about something, and the other person goes, "Whoa, what's your deal? Why are you being like this?" They're like, "Oh, sorry. I was being preemptively mad because I expected that you were going to be upset that I hadn't broken down this cardboard box yet or something like that."

Dedeker: What an example?

Emily: You're jumping the gun on being mad also?

Jase: It's that defensiveness. It's that like, "Oh, I've got to be self-protective."

Dedeker: Yes, it's preemptive defensiveness.

Jase: Yes.

Dedeker: Yes, because I feel like it usually goes down but maybe I enter a room and maybe I have something else entirely on my mind, but I'm like a little bit stressed or a little frazzled, like trying to, I don't know, get things done before we have to record or something like that. Then Jase might be a little weirdly snappy or whatever because I think you're anticipating that I'm going to come after you-

Jase: You're right.

Dedeker: -for something or like be disappointed in you, and so, and I'm like, "Whoa, why are you snapping?" You're like, "Sorry, I was getting preemptively mad because I assumed."

Jase: I assumed you were going to be mad at me.

Dedeker: Right.

Emily: Exactly.

Dedeker: I guess that works out as a pretty good micro script for us.

Jase: I think just giving it a label was essentially what served as our micro script to then make it okay to say, "I'm sorry, that's not actually what I mean to be doing."

Dedeker: Sure. Sure. Another thing to look out for that may indicate that you're in a conflict spiral is overall aggression. The researchers define aggression as there are attacks that are person-focused rather than issue-focused. This reflects a lot of what the Gama has talked about when it comes to things like criticism and critique. To bring up an issue-focused complaint might be, "Hey, sometimes you tell me that you want to spend more time together, but then there's no follow-up or initiation to making actual plans, and so I want us to talk and figure out how we can make planning dates feel equitable and easy for both of us."

It's like we're focusing on the issue which is that like, "You say you want to hang out with me, but then there's no follow-up," versus person-focused, which might be something like "You're so wrapped up in your own world that you completely forget about making plans with me and you expect me to do all the planning because you're disorganized and unfocused." Then it's like I've shifted into-- The complaint is still the same essentially at its heart, but I've shifted into, this is because of your failings because of who you are as a human being, which is very hard for someone to just take on the chin if their partner's coming at them like that without being defensive.

Emily: I will say it's difficult when you do say it correctly or more issue-focused and a person still gets very defensive and turns it into, "But you're saying this about me as a human being."

Dedeker: Yes. That's another issue.

Emily: Yes. You're moving it into the behavior. That is another issue.

Dedeker: Yes. That's another issue. I think that we've covered this a little bit in bits and pieces on other episodes, but that I think starts to get into an issue of just the discomfort of dealing with a partner who's has a complaint or a partner who's asking for something from you or is expressing that they were disappointed or they were hurt by something that you did, which is really hard to deal with.

I think if you care about the other person, then it's hard to hear that you disappointed them in some way. I think that opens up this whole other pathway where even if the other person can say it in all the right ways, it can still freaking hurt, and then some people deal with that hurt in healthy ways and unhealthy ways.

Jase: I've also seen that one especially come up around certain topics that for that person are just, it's too close to something that they're too sensitive about so that a criticism, even about a specific action like this to them lands as more of a personal attack. The ways I see this happen is usually if a certain behavior for that person is linked with being a bad person, and then if your criticism is, "Hey, I feel like you're doing this thing," that to them is linked to being a bad person, that then more of that defensiveness comes up there. That likely has to do with just how they were brought up or what their friend group is like, about who they make fun of, what kinds of behaviors they think are bad, what their parents would talk shit about, whatever it is that got that association in their brain.

It could be something that could be perceived as being sexist, that maybe for them they really internalized that means you're a bad, evil person, and so they're going to be extra defensive about that, or it could be something about, I don't know, laziness like in this example, if it were, "Oh, you're not playing with me because you're lazy," that maybe they were really brought up with this idea that like lazy people are bad people.

They're going to have a harder time differentiating themselves from just the behavior that's being criticized or that there's a complaint about. That's just something to keep an eye out for. I think again, is one of those whirlpools that can pull you in is if it has this magnetic force that pulls other discussions into its whirlpool. I'm mixing up magnets and water dynamics here, but you get what I'm saying.

Dedeker: We get it. Yes. That leads us to the next behavior, which is escalation. As in any behavior, that's the way that I think of it is as increasing the octane, increasing the temperature of the conversation. All your classic behaviors like blame, criticism, having a complete lack of empathy, emotional reactivity, falling into this attack and counterattack cycle. Your partner complains about something about you, and so you have to throw something back in their face as well.

Then underlying all of this, chances are high that there's also some physiological arousal or physiological escalation taking place, then that can look like raised voices, aggressive behavior, and posture. If you're starting to stomp around the house or slam doors or just take a little bit more of an aggressive stance, that's probably what's going on.

If you go check out our episode 275 all about demon dance battles, we talk a lot more about what tends to motivate these escalation and these particular escalation patterns because also escalation for some people can look like more withdrawing. That as the temperature of the conversation increases, the avoidance, the withdrawal, the desire to stonewall can also increase for some people. It's not always necessarily aggressive.

Then the last one that they mentioned this research is negative attributions and dualistic thinking. This boils down to vilifying the other person and portraying oneself as the victim or as the one who is under attack. This could be behavior that either gets expressed verbally, right, in the way that you're conducting the fight where it's all about, you're terrible and you did this bad thing and I'm the one who has suffered because of the thing that you've done and I'm completely innocent and I'm just the victim here.

I think a little bit more insidiously be just a mental stance that we can take during a fight that the other person is the one who messed up and we're the one who's having to deal with the fallout of them messing up and that's the only way that it ever plays out. There's this quote in the study that says, over time these attributions become rigid, redundant, easily activated and difficult to extinguish.

Jase: It's when those things become a pattern that then you get those habits built in and it just instantly falls into those patterns again, that easily activated part makes a lot of sense.

Emily: Yes, this is all pretty triggering.

Dedeker: Oh no, Emily.

Emily: No, it's okay. It's interesting that they found all of these things to be the case in high conflict because it's absolutely true. I'm sure a lot of people listening to this are like, yes, I get into that spiral with a particular partner. I think it's interesting because when you have multiple partners or when you go through multiple relationships in your lifetime, you can see how some trigger this response and others definitely don't.

Dedeker: Sure.

Jase: Yes.

Emily: That's really fascinating to deconstruct and unpack as well. What is it about a pair of people that causes them to go in this spiral versus another partnership that doesn't do the same thing.

Jase: Yes. I think I shared about this way back in the early days of the podcast because this happened like 20 years ago or something like that. I had a partner in college, my freshman year that we had a very college like relationship which is very explosive I guess in both in a good way at the beginning of like, wow, this is amazing, oh my gosh, this is so cool to then a lot of conflict later on and then broke up. We're all part of the same friend group. It was a small college too so we're all in each other's lives.

Then maybe a year or two afterward, reconnected online through instant messenger just being like, "Hey, kind of reconnecting," and within maybe 30 minutes, got into an escalated disagreement over there based on total misunderstanding. It was like those pathways were still so easily triggered that it was like, okay, we need to take a break from this. Now, we're civil with each other online many years later, but I feel like even now I'm like, yes, there's something about the patterns we would fall into probably almost 20 years later that wouldn't still be the case but even a couple of years after that relationship, it still was.

Dedeker: Wow. Gosh.

Emily: Yes. That kind of neuroplasticity versus ingrained very specific patterns that you tend to fall into regardless of the amount of time that's passed, that's very interesting to me. I think that these tools require a certain amount of willingness to be able to break that pattern. That's something that not everybody is willing to do. I hope and encourage all of you out there listening to take a breath when you're in these situations and we'll get more into some of that but it can be really difficult to move past a pattern because that's all that you know.

Dedeker: Yes, seriously.

Jase: Especially if you don't know how to identify it because I had no clue that that was a thing to look out for. Maybe if I had, I would've seen it and been like, ah, that's just that.

Dedeker: The more experience that I get working with couples, the more, I don't know if I'll stand by this in 10 more years so take it all with a grain of salt but at least where I'm at today, breaking a pattern, it requires breaking in the sense of it requires effort and it requires will and it doesn't feel good or natural or right. Like Emily said, this is what you're used to especially if you're in this pattern where you feel justified, where you feel like they're the one who's messing up all the time and I'm the innocent victim and again, giving the asterisk, we always have to give that it's like this doesn't apply to actual abusive situations.

Yes, breaking these patterns requires muscle building. It doesn't just happen overnight and it doesn't just happen if you're waiting around for your partner to get their act together. Now I wanted to go off on a very slight tangent that I think is still related. I found this study published by Jaeger in a sociology compass. It's titled High Conflict Couple Interaction and the Role of Relative Power. It was published in 2009, and I found this quote super fascinating.

They say, "People who expect that the other party will accurately understand their position and explanations are more likely to take pains to communicate in positive ways whereas people who do not think the other person is likely to accurately perceive their side of things are less likely to be careful in this manner. Sanford suggests that in cases where someone expects to be misunderstood, it makes sense for them to not be as cooperative since it may weaken their position but is unlikely to confer benefit. People seem to come to any given scenario with expectations of the other party's disposition and flexibility and they then act accordingly. Expectancies can then "become a self-fulfilling prophecy" as they can cause a mode of relating that may then in turn prompt the partner to behave in the manner expected in the first place."

Jase: Outer end quote.

Dedeker: Yes, the actual end quote.

Jase: Yes. That to me is fascinating. That idea of that if you expect to be understood, you're also going to communicate in a way that makes you easier to be understood and makes it easier to receive and if you don't expect to. I see Emily's face reacting very strongly to all of this.

Dedeker: With that we are going to be talking about a four-step process that you can walk through if you've identified that you're in a conflict spiral, you're at the point where you know it's not productive anymore and you're just like not entirely sure what to do. Of course I made a cute little acronym for it. The acronym is star, S-T-A-R. It stands for stop, take a breath, approach, and refocus. We're going to dive into each of those steps specifically.

Emily: All right. Let's talk about the S of the star, stop. We are a big fan of the acronym HALT. It is in our book. We've done multiple episodes on HALT. We'll get into it more in a moment but first you just need to find the Q that lets you know that it's time to stop the pattern or to stop the escalation or any of the above essentially just to stop you from moving this train further on the track. This is difficult because chances are high that you are in sympathetic nervous system activation or physiological arousal. You might be sweating a little bit or having some muscle tension or increased breath rate, increased heart rate. Maybe you're feeling panicky or shaky feelings. You may have a blood-boiling feeling or even literally have increased temperature.

I think that this can manifest in ways like a raised tone of voice or even your timber changes, your pitch of your voice changes and that shift in body language, I think in some extreme examples may happen. You might be getting more aggressive or you may be getting more avoidance. You may shut yourself in your room for example and not want to be around anyone for a while. You might even collapse. You can learn more about these sympathetic nervous system responses in our episode Flight Fight, Freeze or Fawn which was episode 316.

Dedeker: When you're in this state, your nervous system is focusing on survival at any cost. Unfortunately, you may not have the wherewithal to calmly or rationally call a pause on the spiral. I think this is the 101 level of what keeps people in spirals is that when you're all hopped up on adrenaline and there's a part of your body that's convinced like you're going to die if you don't win this one, it's really, really, really hard to get yourself to stop or to pause even if you cognitively know that it is the correct thing to do. That can be very, very frustrating, right?

Jase: Yes.

Dedeker: It's extremely important to find some kind of cue that is going to be the reminder to help you know that it's time to stop. For some people, if you have good body awareness, it could just be all those physiological arousal symptoms, right?

Jase: Might take a little practice, but you could start to notice them sooner.

Dedeker: Yes, you could notice, okay, I've got that blood-boiling feeling. I can feel the temperature rising, or I can feel that my palms are getting sweaty or something. We've recommended on the show before that you can literally check your smartwatch for your Fitbit if you've got one that if your heart rate is approaching 99 beats per minute or it's above 99 beats per minute, that yes, you're in physiological arousal in a flooded state.

For other people, it could be remembering to scan for HALT and again, we did a whole episode on this and we did an extended version of the HALT acronym into HALT, so scanning of, am I hungry right now? Am I horny right now? Am I angry? Am I lonely? Am I tired? Have I been drinking or using drugs? Am I sick currently? That that's your cue to know. Okay, I'm in a compromised state and I need to pause this for now. You could be scanning for the four horsemen behaviors that we've also talked about that comes out of the Gottman Institute, so contempt behaviors, criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling.

I have some clients who when their conflict is starting to reach a particular temperature and at least one of them is aware of it, they'll play a particular pop artist that they've associated with it being an interrupt and so that's their cue to know, okay, time to stop and to take a little break. We've also in the show talked about micro scripts that are movement-based or it is just something that needs to tell you like, okay, now is the time that I'm pulling myself away. Again, like I was saying earlier about how if you're going to break a cycle, it's going to feel like a break. That this is going to be hard the first few times and maybe the first 25, 50 times that you do this.

Jase: For anyone who watched How I Met Your Mother, I think I've mentioned this before, but how Marshall and Lily's characters, they were the couple who had been together since before the show starts and stayed together through the whole thing, but they're the example of the solid couple I guess, on the show but they have a thing where they'll be in the middle of a fight or an argument and say pause, and then they'll both instantly stop, be pleasant, go about their thing, and then later that evening unpause and then they're immediately back into the fight where they left off.

While I think it's a silly little joke, I do think there's something to be said for being able to pause and learning that it's possible, but that you will still come back to it because I think sometimes that's the fear is like, if I stop, we're not going to finish this conversation and I'm not going to get what I want or I'm not going to get to express this or it means I've lost or something like that, but to develop that practice of we are going to come back to this, but hopefully because you've regulated in the meantime whether you meant to or not, you'll come back not instantly back to it where you started or where you left off last time.

That's the part that's a little bit silly because you'll actually probably come at it very differently when you come back. When doing this, how do we communicate it? One could be maybe you both watched that show and you liked those characters, you could try pause and just know that pause means we're going to regulate, we're going to come back to do this later. It also could just be communicating very clearly of I need to take a break. Maybe it is my watch just buzzed because I have an alert set when my heart rate goes above 100 beats per minute that it'll buzz me.

I had a watch that would notify me of, are you working out now if my heart rate went above a certain amount and if I was ever playing League of Legends, I'd be 10 minutes into a match and it'd be like, "Are you working out right now?" I'm like, "Goddamn it." It would let me know, yes, I'm reacting very physically to the stress of this situation, which is maybe not always the best, but it did help me be mindful of it. Maybe it's, "Oh, my watch just went off, I need some time," can help make it a little external from yourself as well.

It could be I need 20 minutes to myself. Could be this is getting overwhelming, let's pause for a second. I'm going to take a breather or again, if you both are aware of micro scripts and you can just have a quick thing you can say, or that song you put on or a little dance or maybe a hand signal that means time out, something like that just to indicate, hey, we both know what this means. It just means I need some time and then we'll come back. The things to avoid here is trying to put it on the other person, and this is actually very similar to some of what we were talking about before of, don't make up a story about the other person or try to tell them how they're feeling or what they need, keep it focused on yourself.

Don't say things like, you need to calm down. We should take 10 minutes. That's generally not going to get the calming down that you want actually. You need to stop right now. You are getting out of control or just walking away in silence and slamming the door behind you. Ideally, try to keep this focused on yourself and what you need and ideally talk about this before you're in the situation so your partner or friend or whoever this is, has a sense of, okay, I know what's happening right now. This isn't just them saying, I'm not going to speak to you about this.

Dedeker: It's important to catch the ball here. What I mean by that is that when someone makes a repair attempt like this, like saying, "Hey, I really need to take a break, or I need to slow down, or I'm getting overwhelmed, can we please pause that?" There's also a responsibility on the other side to catch the ball, to catch the repair attempt that they have tossed at you because if your partner says that and you say, "Fuck you, no, you're not going anywhere. We're going to settle this right now," there's no point in making the repair attempt.

That's another thing that's going to feel hard to do. It also takes muscles not only to learn how to make a good repair attempt here, but also to catch it. We highly recommend that if you want to know more about repair attempts because it goes beyond just the taking a pause thing. You can go check out our episode 288.

Emily: It's now time to move on to the T of the star, which is Take a Breath. You've stopped, you've halted, whatever it is, you're maybe taking a breath now and time away from the intense situation that you were going through in that moment. Now it's time to soothe yourself. We recommend at least 20 minutes of soothing and no more than 24 hours before you come back and continue the conversation, hopefully in a less emotionally activated place. Ideally find something unrelated to the fight to focus on, so like a non activating video game.

Jase: Don't play League of Legends. Something calmer than that.

Emily: I was going to say like Star New Valley or something or-

Jase: Okay, sure.

Emily: -Animal Crossing.

Dedeker: Yes. That's nice.

Jase: Okay.

Emily: Taken out on Tom Nook or something. You could do a physical activity like some yoga would be great. I love doing yin yoga at the end of the night to just wind down and that's a lot of breathing and maybe a little bit of-

Jase: To me just walking is my favorite.

Emily: Yes. Walking.

Jase: Is just to get some movement, get out of the same environment for a little bit.

Emily: Yes, that's a great idea. Maybe do something with your hands, like some yard work or some housework.

Dedeker: Yes. Jase, do you remember the time? This was a couple years ago. This is when I was in recovery from my big, big breakup where I wasn't even in an active fight with the person that I broke up with. It was just me ruminating and getting all activated and emotional and stuff like that and for some reason I decided, there was literally two minutes before the three of us were supposed to have a planning meeting or something that I was like, I need to go break down all these cardboard boxes that are in our house and you got mad at me because you're like, why are you doing this right before our meeting? I was just like, no, I have to regulate. I have to do this and it did help.

Jase: Okay. That's good.

Emily: Well that's good. I love it. You could go down like a favorite silly YouTube rabbit hole. Jase would probably say, he's going to learn a million things in this amount of time to emotionally regulate.

Jase: Right. Something like that. Don't watch political commentaries or things that will reactivate you, but something that's just fun, interesting.

Emily: Then also attend to your HALT need. If you're hungry, make that happen. Make yourself a nice meal perhaps, or go out to eat. If you're angry, do all of the above to try to help with that.

Jase: You're right.

Emily: If you're lonely, ask for some cuddles maybe, or try to go out with a friend perhaps, call your mom. Try to talk to someone just to get it out, attend to that loneliness and then if you're tired, take a nap or wind down-

Jase: Yes, it's important.

Emily: -and take a bath. Yes, exactly.

Jase: The bath is a nice one. That is a good way to physically regulate.

Emily: I miss having a bath. I'm excited for Hong Kong when I get a bath again.

Dedeker: Well, we don't recommend during this time where you're soothing and taking a breath is using the time to act out and keep the fight going, even from separate spaces. Maybe this sounds silly, but I've seen it happen. I have done it also, so this is when you take a break in name only rather than in spirit. It's like you take a break, but you're still stomping or slamming around the house. You go to your room, but you immediately sit down to send the other person a long-ass text message.

Unless the two of you have agreed to this, I do think this can be a strategy where if you're verbally not able to make it work, but maybe it helps to have a little bit of an asynchronous messaging to help the both of you to calm down and choose your words a little bit more carefully. That can be helpful but unless the two of you agreed to this, I don't think now is the time to be drafting that or sitting and ruminating trying to shore up your argument for when it's time to come back to the argument. Basically anything that's going to keep you in this state is probably not going to be a very productive use of your time. The whole point of this time is to physiologically soothe yourself.

Jase: Related to that, when it comes to seeking out others to talk to, be sure to keep that in mind as well. Reaching out to someone specifically to vent or complain about the situation you're in can keep you at that height of activation and is just going to dig you into that farther, isn't going to relieve that. That said, seeking out support or advice from a therapist or someone that you trust can be helpful to get that outside perspective, but it might be better to also do that once you've regulated a little bit more, once you've come back to a little more balance, physically speaking.

Just something to consider there that if you are, for example, like Emily said, if you're feeling lonely, reaching out to someone can be really good. I would recommend reaching out to see what's up with them, like make it about connecting to that other person and not just, "I want to continue all this stuff I'm thinking about," but dumping it on someone else because it's not going to help you. Also isn't the most pleasant way to get a random call or text from you as well. Then, so with all of this, if you want some more ideas on what you can do during this time, we actually have an episode on that as well, which is episode 218. I've halted, now what, and we go over some of these techniques in a little more detail

Dedeker: This next step is approach. This might be considered the step where you seek to not just self-soothe, but now you're partner soothing or maybe you're coming together with the other person to co-regulate your emotions, but finding the right approach vector for reentry can be difficult as any sci-fi nerd should know I'm looking at you, Jase.

Jase: So true. So true. If it's too shallow, you bounce off the atmosphere. If it's too steep, you burn up. It's a little problem.

Dedeker: It's the same thing can happen here. The same exact thing.

Jase: Of course you're right. Stakes equally high for sure.

Dedeker: Stakes are high. I'm only half joking because approaching your partner again, in an unskillful way can trigger the spiral to just suck both of you back in again. I think this is why people can get caught in these cycles where they go through intensive conflict and we just wait for it to peter out and wait for life to come back to feeling normal again, but we never really readdress it and we never really intentionally reconnect.

Then we try to avoid the conflict. These just not great feeling spirals. How I most often see this going down with clients is one person being ready to approach and the other person either pushing them away, avoiding them, and then the person who made the approach feels hurt and feels rejected and then we're off the races again. Or I see people reapproach their partner, but they immediately bring back content from the fight.

Maybe they immediately bring in an attempt to justify themselves or maybe they bring up the same exact criticism just in a slightly softer way before that person is actually ready to understand it and hear it. Or I've also seen it play out where the partner reapproaching is seen as, "Ah, there's an opening in the defenses." Then the other person doubles down as in like, my partner comes to me and maybe they apologize for something they said or they did. Then I'm like, "Ah, this is a good opportunity for me to really lay into-

Jase: Go on the offense.

Dedeker: -all the other stuff that you need to apologize for. Or how much I'm justified and how much you messed up. There are many ways to mess up an approach vector, but those are the ones that I tend to see. I don't know if there's others that you've experienced, the two of you that come to mind.

Emily: Definitely been in all of those.

Jase: Yes. I feel like they all fall into those categories for the most part of some variation on that. I think that the whole reapproach, if you come in opening with an apology, which we generally say is a good way to come back in of like, "Okay, I'm sorry that I raised my voice or that I got extra heated here." That if the other person sees that as like if they were raised in a family where any apology means you lose and winning and losing is what matters, not actually resolving anything. If that's what you were taught, then yes, you might jump on that opportunity to say, "Aha, now they're showing weakness, it's my time to win. They're losing."

Then you can also get into that situation where if you've now associated your partner with doing that, you're going to come in with more of the aggression too, because you're preemptively expecting them to come after you, and so there does need to be some work on both sides of this. If that's a pattern that you have, it's like you've even got to take an extra step back and work on just that first part first of being able to apologize and reconnect for something. That doesn't mean the argument's over, the purpose of it isn't just to get the other to apologize and you lose.

Emily: With this approach, it's okay if it's a simple approach. It's really okay if you just say to your partner, "I'm sorry that we're having a hard time right now. Can we sit together for a second?" Maybe not even dive back in right away, just sit together and be near each other. "Or I want you to know that I love you and I want to figure this out with you." You could even just sit there and it doesn't have to involve any words. It can just involve maybe closeness and touch, an arm around your shoulder or a hand on a knee, something like that.

Jase: I've definitely found this one to be very effective at times where Dedeker and I have been a bit heated about something and if we'll take some time or maybe it was just like, "Okay, we will deal with that later." Maybe we're busy. Then the next time I have an interaction with her, like she'll walk into the room and maybe I'll feel myself get a little tense of like, "Oh, are we still going to disagree?" If she'll put her hand on my back or touch me in just a nice way, it's like I'll feel that tension just instantly melt away. Then often I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I was afraid you were still going to be mad." She's like, "No, no, no, let's--

Dedeker: Yes, sometimes you'll collapse into tears.

Jase: Yes. That happens too sometimes.

Dedeker: Like as soon as I touch you're--

Jase: Yes, they usually semi-pretend tears, but it's like this, "Oh my gosh, I was carrying all this tension and worry about us fighting."

Dedeker: Yes. My friend Catherine, who's a non-monogamy coach at Expansive Connection, from her I learned this great phrase, "connect before you correct." Now I tried to look into this, she said, the phrase is not original to her. Apparently, it's come up in parenting contexts as well. I think this makes a lot of sense that the thing is, unfortunately sometimes in our relationships we are in a position where we do have to correct a partner.

That's totally okay as in correct them and teach them how we want to be treated. Or like, "Hey, when you said this thing, it hurt my feelings. Or hey actually like I asked you to do this and then you didn't or anything." We have opportunities for correction and I hate that word "correction" because it just makes me think like you're training a dog. That's not what I'm trying to imply.

Yes, this idea that before you can bring a complaint, you do need to make sure that you're connected. That's why this kind of reapproach is so important that you're reapproaching not to jump straight back into the content of the fight, but you're reapproaching to reestablish a baseline of connection so that both of you can feel safe enough to wander into that territory again.

Emily: If you're not ready to be approached yet, or you find that your partner isn't, it's still really important to connect before continuing to step away. It's great to have that moment of physical connection maybe, or even just, I love you, I care about you, I'm sorry, let's come back together when you feel ready to, and/or when I feel ready to, I appreciate you coming to be close to me. I still need a little bit of time to calm down. Can you give me another hour or so?

Or even if you're not ready to touch a person to be touched, perhaps you can say something like, "I'm not ready to be hugged yet, but can you just hold my hand for a moment?" Still take that bid to a degree, but you can do it incrementally, perhaps not all at once if you are not ready for it at that particular moment in time.

Jase: Now step four, final step, which is the R of star. We've stopped, we've taken a breath, now we've approached, and then finally to refocus. It's possible that just during that approach you will have repaired the majority of what went awry, that maybe all it takes is just some regulating from both of you and you might be able to continue on and not have to do a lot of processing together. This is particularly likely if you realized during your taking a breath step that it was because you were hungry or you were tired or lonely, or you were drunk or something like that. That if that state has been fixed, that may be all it took. Maybe that's all you needed was that.

Even that part can already be really powerful, and it may be helpful to table any further discussion for the time being and to just focus on the soothing and the connecting together. If that's the case, then it is good to be specific about when you will revisit the topic so it's not just bubbling in the back of your head as this stressor of like, "Oh, I don't know when that's going to come up again." It feels unresolved. Set an actual time for it.

Then, it could be, right now, this isn't urgent, actually. "We were treating it like it's urgent, maybe it's not. Let's just take some time to connect with each other." As far as when to deal with that, it could be scheduling a specific time, like saying, "Hey, why don't we come back to this tomorrow after dinner?" Or, "We're going to see each other this weekend, let's wait and talk about it then so that we can both gather our thoughts."

Or, if you're doing something like a regular RADAR that you have every month, and maybe it's, "Oh, our RADAR is coming up in just a couple of weeks, let's just put this on our list. Let's write it down now so we don't forget, but let's talk about it then, because we'll be talking about a lot of other stuff, and so it'll be a good time to figure this out and come up with solutions to try." That's one of the things I like most about RADAR. It gives you an easy way to, instead of having to pull out the calendars and find a time, it's like, "We've already got this scheduled. Let's talk about this then."

Dedeker: If that's not the case for you, a good place to start with this refocusing step could be on finding just one thing that you can validate about your partner's experience or something that came up for your partner during the conflict. It does not have to be validating absolutely every single part of their feelings. It doesn't have to be agreeing with every single part of their take on the situation, all you have to do is pick out one thing and that can be your opener. For example, something like, "It makes sense why you would have felt caught off guard by me reacting as strongly as I did." That could be it. Or, "I think that you're right to be frustrated by this situation," or, "I know that you've been sad about this particular topic for a while."

I really cannot overstate how this can be very simple because, again, if you're trying to break patterns, it has to be simple because you're not going to change overnight, and you're not going to pull a complete 180 and you're also not going to be perfect. None of us are perfect at this stuff. The more that you can make it simple for yourself, the better. If it's just picking one tiny thing to validate as your opener, I highly recommend that. Also, you can go check out our repair SHOP tool. Either, you can learn more about that. There's a whole chapter in our book dedicated to that, or you can listen to our episode, which is Episode 234, titled SHOP: How to Repair After a Fight.

The super quick and dirty overview of repair SHOP is basically, you and your partner sit down together, and you, again, go through a four-step process, where you get to compare, "Okay, what were the stories and assumptions that I brought to this conversation? What's the history here? What got triggered for me?" You both have opportunities to take ownership of how you contributed to the conflict, and then you get to the end, which is the prevention step, which is about actually putting your heads together about how do we prevent this? How do we resolve this for next time?

Again, none of these tools are perfect because every single person is an individual and every single relationship is unique, but we really do believe in trying to make these things be at least simple and accessible so that when you are in those moments where you just have no idea what to do, you're just in over your head, or you're feeling really overwhelmed, you have something to latch on to, to at least be a starting point for unknitting the spiral.

Emily: For a quick review, remember, use the star.

Jase: Be a star.

Emily: Be a star.

Dedeker: I was really thinking, I was like, "Turn your conflict spiral into a conflict constellation," and then I was like, "That's not it." Then, I was thinking about the superstar thing, and, like, Mario Party-

Emily: Yes, I want it to be a Mario thing.

Dedeker: -then I was like, "That's not it because I've gotten into the most heated conflicts of my life around Mario Party."

Jase: Sure.

Dedeker: I think Emily has sworn at me the most you've ever sworn in my entire life and as aggressively over Mario Party games. That's not probably a good one.

Emily: Sorry, I'm not surprised.

Dedeker: No one is surprised.

Emily: Well, be a star.

Dedeker: Okay, hold it. Is it your guiding star, your North Star?

Emily: Oh, I like that. That's good.

Dedeker: That is your guiding star. That's going to guide you out of the conflict whirlpool.

Emily: Yes, there we go. Get out of the conflict whirlpool and jump on your shining star, my star thing.

Jase: I don't think we're riding a star-like.

Emily: Okay, yes. I'm grabbing onto it and riding it into the sky.

Dedeker: What could be.

Emily: There you go. Yes, exactly. Stop, take a breath, approach, and refocus.

PodcastMultiamoryDecember 3, 2024conflict, co-regulation, conflict management, relationships