The time has come for you to sit down with your partner and have a serious discussion about the state of your relationship. The connection between you has become a ticking time bomb. Entering these discussions is never easy, especially when resentment and ill-will have built up.
You feel like exploding with screams at your partner, but instead, you must maintain composure to avoid a heated conversation, which will only cause you both to explode.
Here are 6 ways to rationally discuss conflict when you feel like exploding on your partner:
1. Listen to your inner dialogue
Listening to your self-talk is crucial if you have any type of uneasy feeling about your partner’s reaction, or if you know you feel strongly about the topic. Remember to breathe and think carefully about your words, as supported by a study on conflict resolution styles and closeness in the Mindfulness Journal. If you’re in a place where it’s practical, sit down next to your partner.
2. Think through the situation
Social psychologist Sandra L. Murray’s study on the self-fulfilling nature of positive illusions in romantic relationships suggests thinking positively helps create a positive outcome. Identify your feelings, what you’d like the outcome to be, and how you see yourself and your partner coming to a compromise or a decision to respectfully disagree. Then, you can sit down and discuss it.
3. Decide how you’ll compromise
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If you are unable to resolve the issue or come to an agreement, then choose how you will compromise or decide on another time to come back and discuss the same topic.
4. Hug or hold hands while you talk
Why? This issue is exactly that — just an issue — and in no way affects the rest of your complex relationship. You’ve chosen to love each other through thick and thin. Don’t forget to show that. Research published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience demonstrates how “touch increases the autonomic coupling between romantic partners.”
5. Pick a ‘safe’ word to calm emotions
Your safeword could be as simple as “humility” or “love.” You want to recite something in your head, or better yet, say it out loud repeatedly until you’re in control of your emotions. Note: It is okay to use the same word, phrase, or poem repeatedly.
6. Do a math puzzle together
Wait, what? Yup, do some kind of math problem. That’s right. In the heat of the moment, if you are ready to pop, you are not in the decision-making area of your brain, you’re in your emotionally reactive brain.
To get to the higher executive functions, you have to engage your frontal lobe, as seen in the research of Julie A Alvarez, Ph.D. How? By doing some kind of math or logic problem. This takes you from the emotional area of your brain straight to your rational area. And that is the only area where conflict can truly be managed rather than escalated.
You can stay rational and calm while discussing serious problems with your partner if you plan and are aware the topic of discussion could be reactive for both of you. Taking some time to plan, prepare, and be ready to support and nurture will make a world of difference when you sit down to resolve the issue at hand.
Lyndsay Katauskas is a personal coach who specializes in relationships, divorce, grief, and trauma.
