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Defensiveness is self-protection in the form of righteous indignation or innocent victimhood in an attempt to ward off a perceived attack. Many people become defensive when they are being criticized, but the problem is that its perceived effect is blame. It is usually a counterattack to a complaint.

What feelings and needs is your partner communicating to you?

What role in the situation can you take responsibility for?

What clarification do you need about the issue?

"You're right, I could have been more aware of how you felt ______. Can you tell me more about that?"

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listen carefully and make no assumptions

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listen carefully and make no assumptions

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Many people in maturing relationships forget how to listen carefully without jumping to conclusions, especially with regard to what their partners are actually feeling or thinking. They believe that familiarity has entitled them to thinking they know everything they need to about the other, even if one or the other has changed.

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refrain from bringing up issues older than 3 months as ammunition

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refrain from bringing up issues older than 3 months as ammunition

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there is no right or wrong. this is a two player cooperative team game, so you can either win together or lose together.

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there is no right or wrong. this is a two player cooperative team game, so you can either win together or lose together.

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Player 1 and 2:

3 deep breaths

Face each other, sit at the same level, maintain open body language and eye contact.

Approach the game as a challenge and opportunity to communicate and understand your partner better. Maintain a positive, generous, warm, compassionate tone. Listen carefully, trust fully,  be honest, empathetic, and give the benefit of the doubt.

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Player 1:
Identify the complaint, not the criticism.

Formulate the "I" statement. Elaborate as necessary, using feeling words and avoiding the word "you", "always", and "never". Consider and include assertions of individual responsibility, self-disclosure, and empathy.

"I feel ____ when you ____."

Define your emotional needs.
"I need ___ when ____."

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Player 2 listens carefully.

Acknowledge/repeat the "I" statement.

"I understand that you feel _____ when I ____. I'm sorry for making you feel that way."

Consider and assert your responsibility, and explain your intentions/perspective. Include self-disclosure, use feeling words, and avoid using the word "you", "always", and "never".

"I know I do ______, but I don't mean to make you feel ______ ...."

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Player 1 listens carefully.

Acknowledge/repeat their intentions, consider your role in your emotions, recognize any misunderstandings, and reevaluate your feelings based on the new information given. Include self-disclosure, use feeling words, and avoid using the word "you", "always", or "never".

"I understand that you _______. I thought ________ but now I feel ______ now that I know that you ______."

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Player 2:

Address the complaint and propose a solution.

"I understand that you feel _________ and need _________. What if I/we ______."

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Player 1:

Evaluate the solution, consider your needs honestly, and renegotiate based on your needs.

"That is a good idea, and addresses my needs because it _______. I would also appreciate if we/you could _______ because it would make me feel ______."

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1. Criticism: Do not make negative judgments or proclamations about your partner in absolute terms. "You always do ____" or "You never do _____"

2. Contempt: Do not treat your partner with disrespect, disgust, condescension, or ridicule (ie, sarcasm, mockery, eye-rolling, sneering, or name-calling).

3. Defensiveness: Do not avoid taking responsibility or deflect blame onto your partner. Both parties are responsible in the conflict.

4. Stonewalling: Do not withdraw, shut down, or physically/emotionally distance yourself from your partner.

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Repeat steps 5-6 until a solution is reached and both parties are satisfied.

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Bonus point: "I recognize that you did not mean to _____ because _______"

Bonus Point: Mention instances in which your partner has done the positive/reverse version of the complaint as an example of a solution.

"I really appreciate when you ________ and ________ in the past, because it made me feel _______."

Bonus point: 3 deep breaths at sign of a rising temper

Bonus point: show of affection

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Bonus point: make positive declarations that abate your partner's hurt feelings:

"I'm sorry my actions made you feel neglected. I love your company and want to spend time with you."

"I'm sorry my actions made you feel judged. I think it is great that you feel passionate about _____"

Bonus point: Bonus point: 3 deep breaths at sign of a rising temper

Bonus point: show of affection

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De-escalate as necessary. This is perhaps the most important lesson in conflict resolution. Be the bigger person. When the argument starts getting heated, take three deep breaths, and de-escalate with the following phrases:

“What if we…”

“I know this is hard…”

“I hear what you’re saying…”

“What do you think?”

Take breaks, breathe deeply, and show affection. There is only ever one thing we really want from our partners behind, or beneath, an argument: we need to know we are loved.

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-across-the-gap/201409/reflect-validate-repeat-necessary

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perceive through a lens of love, not moralism

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perceive through a lens of love, not moralism

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1. Imagination: Moralistic-thinking identifies people closely with their worst moments. Love-thinking pushes us in another direction, it bids us to use our imaginations to picture why someone might have done a regrettable deed and yet could remain a fitting target for a degree of understanding and sympathy. Perhaps they got very frightened, maybe they were under pressure of extreme anxiety and despair. They might have been trying to say or do something else, and this was all they could manage.
To consider others with love means forever remembering the child within them. Our wrongdoer may be fully grown, but their behaviour will always be connected up with their early years. We’re so keen never to seem patronising by treating someone as younger than they are that we overlook the need occasionally to ignore the outward adult sides of others in order to perceive and sympathise with the angry confused infant lurking inside.

2. Hurt, not bad: Bad behaviour is invariably the consequence of hurt: the one who shouts did not feel heard, the one who mocks was once humiliated, the constant cynic had hope snatched from them. This is not an alternative to responsibility, it is just a knowledge that acting badly must be a response to a wound, and never an initial ambition.

The fundamental step of love is to hold on, in the most challenging situations, to a distinction between a person’s overt unpleasant actions and the pity-worthy motives that invariably underlie them.  Love-thinking believes in the existence of tragedy, that is, in the possibility that one can be good and still fail.

3. redeeming features: Love-thinkers interpret everyone as having strengths alongside their obvious weaknesses. When they encounter these weaknesses, they do not conclude that this is all there is, they know that almost everything on the negative side of a ledger could be connected up with something on the positive. There is no such thing as a person with only strengths, but nor is there someone with only weaknesses.

3. patience: Moralistic thinkers reach their certainties swiftly; love thinkers take their time. They know themselves well enough to understand that abandonments of perspective are both hugely normal and usually indicative of nothing much beyond passing despair or exhaustion.

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Complaints center on specific issues, but criticism is an ad hominem attack on your partner’s character. In effect, you are criticizing not a specific action or behavior, but your partner as a whole person. And words like always and never imply that the other person has a consistent and negative personality flaw.

Criticism can have devastating effects because it makes the victim feel assaulted, rejected, and hurt. It often causes the couple to fall into an escalating pattern where criticism reappears with greater frequency and intensity.

What is the issue at hand?
What feelings and needs do you want met?
How can you complain without blame?

"I feel ____ when you ____."
"I need ___ when ____."

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When we communicate in this state, we are truly mean—we treat others with disrespect, mock them with sarcasm, ridicule, call them names, and mimic or use body language such as eye-rolling or scoffing. The target of contempt is made to feel despised and worthless.

What feelings and needs are behind this anger?

What are short-term measures that address your feelings and needs?

"I'm feeling ______, and I need ____."

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Stonewalling occurs when the listener withdraws from the interaction, shuts down, and simply stops responding to their partner. Rather than confronting the issues with their partner, people who stonewall can make evasive maneuvers such as tuning out, turning away, acting busy, or engaging in obsessive or distracting behaviors.

It takes time for the negativity created by the first three horsemen to become overwhelming enough that stonewalling becomes an understandable “out,” but when it does, it frequently becomes a bad habit. And unfortunately, stonewalling isn’t easy to stop. It is a result of feeling physiologically flooded, and when we stonewall, we may not even be in a physiological state where we can discuss things rationally.

If you feel like you’re stonewalling during a conflict, stop the discussion and ask your partner to take a break

Then take 20 minutes to do something alone that soothes you—read a book or magazine, take a walk, go for a run, really, just do anything that helps to stop feeling flooded—and then return to the conversation once you feel ready.

Why do you feel overwhelmed?
What is the issue at hand?
What needs are not being met?

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What stories are you telling yourself in lieu of the truth?
How are they unfair to you and your partner?

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1. It is of immense benefit if relationships can be conducted under the assumed truth that both participants are idiotic, mentally wobbly, quite flawed in manifold ways – and constantly in need of forgiveness. It’s an implicit faith in our own perfection that turns us into monsters.

2. People concede points not when they’re aggressively told they’re wrong; but when they feel loved. We get stubborn and withhold the truth when we’re scared and suspect that the person challenging us hates us, means us harm, can never forgive us – and is perhaps about to leave us. It is indispensable to preface every criticism with an assurance of our ongoing love.

3. People change very slowly, and seldom when they are harassed into doing so. We must strive not to be desperate for change. We must make our peace with the idea that they won’t evolve as we would wish on the timescale that would suit us; we should be rather pessimistic about human nature in order to encounter one or two grounds for hope.

4. We shouldn’t aggravate our frustration by a sense that we have been uniquely cursed in ending up in this relationship. Of course they are annoying. Everyone in the world would be equally tricky at times and often probably a lot worse. The specifics of why we’re in an irritating dispute may be local but that we are in one is a universal destiny. We should laugh darkly at the human tragedy.

5. Our partner is only ever frightened, worried and not thinking straight – rather than bad. Just like us, they carry a lot of emotional baggage: they have been shaped by their complex and at moments very troubled history. Much of what they do isn’t directly about us but is a way of coping with difficulties that came into their life long before we met them.

6. Don’t let the relationship die from misplaced ‘politeness’ or embarrassment. Dare to name the problem, however shocking it sounds. As long as it’s been carefully wrapped in layers of love, the truth is normally bearable to those who care for us.

7. It doesn’t matter if we’re right. We must be prepared to forego all the pleasures of proving a point. We’re not not trying to ‘win’ but to live as happily as possible with another person who is, in the end, our best friend and on our side.

8.The capacity to be horrible to a partner is even a strange – though genuine – feature of love. A relationship has to include the madder, more unreasonable parts of our nature; if we are only ever polite, it’s because we have not been made to feel safe. A row may have to be the turbulent passage towards the kind of deeper reconciliation we long for. It can be important to say some wild and hurtful things to halt a drift apart. By foregrounding for a while the most extreme points of conflict, we set up the conditions for reconnecting with larger areas of closeness.

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Identify the emotional substratum of the issue:

1.  I feel you don’t value me.

2.  I feel abandoned.

3.   I feel not good enough.

4.  I feel you are trying to control me.

5.  I feel you’re not accepting who I really am.

6.  I feel unseen and unheard.

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I can try to understand what you think and feel, without it taking away from my own experience. Your reality doesn’t cancel out mine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/opinion/sunday/engagement-marriage-conflict.html