Are you always fighting about the same issues?

If you are in constant conflict in your marriage - the pattern has become familiar. And it has very little to do with whatever the "it" you are fighting about is.

It’s just familiar. He says or does something that triggers your brain’s auto-response. You’re fighting your brain – in essence, the reason it often seems so hard to stop fighting is that you are fighting against yourself.

If you want to. change it, disrupt the familiar.

When you feel pulled into conflict - pause - use the five-second rule made widely popular by Mel Robbins- count backward in your head 5-4-3-2-1… to break the thought cycle.

Does it require a bit more of you to sidestep the conflict, yes, it does - no way around it. It is breaking a familiar pattern (and remember your brain likes the familiar.)

But if you aren’t loving it, pause long enough to jolt out of it. Five seconds gives you enough of a break to bypass unconscious patterning and ask yourself what you want.

Do I want to continue this argument? Do I really believe I need to defend myself? What will I get from it? Even if I know I am right and he is wrong, how will that benefit me? Will it get me what I most want?

Pausing long enough to use the LOVE tool - Listen to the thoughts you are having, Observe how they are making you feel, validate or verify that the thoughts are true, and Embrace where you are - which is holding the space for you - for you to think, for you to really feel. Do you feel hurt by his words - can you sit with that for 90 seconds? Without adding more thoughts to justify why you are hurt? Embrace your heart right where it is. There may be a lot of pain there, but you don’t have to let your unconscious brain dig through the years of mud to bring it up and feel more pain, do you? Because that is what the brain will do by default - look for all the times in the past that you were hurt. By making the familiar response unfamiliar, you are changing.

You may not take it one step further, but just by pausing you have made great strides. You have now made the unfamiliar more familiar.

Practice pausing, practice holding the space for you until you know what you really want to say, instead of letting your beautiful unconscious brain do the thinking for you.

That's it for now!