Transcript
Ibinye : Hello, and welcome back to the Better Marriage Podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about how to repair after a fight. If you've been married, you know disagreements happen. Sometimes you have an exchange of words. Sometimes feelings are heated, but it's okay.
Ibinye : Today, we're going to give you some very simple things to do if this has happened to you, because it will happen eventually.
Raffi & Ibi: Yeah, going to happen. By the way, if you think that you're the only one having fights, that's not true. If you think that it's a problem to be having fights in your marriage, that's not true. People do have fights. People sometimes have really nasty fights.
Raffi & Ibi: We are aiming, certainly if it's getting physical, that's over the line. If there's sort of abuse and real name calling, that's bad. But fighting is normal. And we want to be able to recover and repair after those fights.
Ibinye : Yes. Okay. So remember that you love each other, right? That's why you got married in the first place. and At least we hope that that's the baseline here. So first thing that I typically recommend is let's let's talk about it. Let's talk about what happened. Okay.
Ibinye : Keep in mind that each person has their own perspective. The goal is not to prove your spouse wrong and to say that didn't happen because that's when things just go all over the place. The goal is just to speak your piece Have your spouse listen to you, and then we're going to reverse. I love a really good speaker-listener format. So one person is talking at a time so that the other person can listen.
Ibinye : You're not listening to a attack. You're not listening to find holes in the story. You're simply listening to understand your spouse's point of view. You don't have to agree with the point of view.
Ibinye : You just need to understand the point of view, okay? So step down here.
Raffi & Ibi: Yeah, I think the previous episode, we talked a lot about listening there in this way. So it's definitely good to review because that's going come really handy for this thing about fixing up fights.
Ibinye : Yes, absolutely. um Now, after we've talked about it, next step is your partner talks about their point of view. We listen and you talk about where you take responsibility. This is where I went wrong. Shouldn't have raised my voice. Shouldn't have made assumptions. You're taking responsibility for your part in the upset.
Ibinye : Ah. This is where we have to throw pride out of the window because typically I see sometimes with couples, they're like, she's all wrong or he's all wrong. I did nothing wrong. just Just take a moment and reflect.
Ibinye : If you feel like you did something wrong, you made a little misstep somewhere, talk about it here.
Raffi & Ibi: Yeah, the good news is once you do that, your partner is going to be a lot more likely to do the same thing. so if you want to be the bigger person and like, okay, this is where I went wrong, um you'll find it much easier to get through that. And the other person will be much more willing to do the same.
Ibinye : Yes. Validate your um partner's emotions. Validation is just simply, i understand how you would feel this way.
Ibinye : You can phrase it however you want, right? It doesn't mean i I agree with your point of view, but I could certainly see why you got upset. I could certainly see why you forgot X, Y, Z.
Ibinye : I could definitely see why you view the problem in this life. That's all it is.
Raffi & Ibi: Yeah, I can understand. You know, if you remember the whole scene happening this way, of course you'd be upset about that. I get that.
Ibinye : Yeah. Last step is, okay, if this happens again in the future, what do we do about it? What do I do about it? What am i going to be responsible for? What are you going to be responsible for? Or how can we prevent this from happening in the future? Again, what am I going to do to prevent this? What are you going to do to to prevent this? I am a big fan of each person taking responsibility for their own actions. And then let's hold each other accountable as a couple.
Raffi & Ibi: Yeah, the more that you look at your spouse and what they're doing, the less effective you're going to be because you can only control one of you and that one of you is yourself, right?
Ibinye : Yes.
Raffi & Ibi: A lot of people try to say, well, you need to be accountable and you need. No, no, the truth is that you, the person listening, you need to be accountable to yourself. You need to make sure that you're doing what it takes for you to not fall into the same trap again and not worry about whether your spouse is going to do the same thing. To the extent that you both are pointing fingers at each other, nobody's getting nowhere.
Ibinye : Yeah, I like that. Focus on yourself. Focus on what you can control, which is your behavior. Focus on what you're going to be doing in the future. Hold yourself accountable. Your spouse will work on himself. You work on your own self.
Raffi & Ibi: Okay, so Ivy, recap us through those steps of repairing after the fight.
Ibinye : Okay, so we're going to do speaker-listener format, which is one person speaking at a time. We're going to talk about what happened according to each person's point of view. We're going to validate the emotions of the person, right?
Ibinye : You don't have to completely agree, but hey, just validate. take responsibility. What was my role in the upset? And then four, what are we going to do to prevent this in the future? Or what are we each going to do if this comes up again in the future?
Raffi & Ibi: Super. Okay. So hopefully folks are not going to have fights. They're going have fewer fights because of all these podcast episodes they're listening to. But if and when you do have fights, now you have a process for recovering from that.
Raffi & Ibi: So thank you for listening. I hope this helps and we will see you next week on the Better Marriage Podcast.
