We know there are things we can do that give difficult conversations a better chance of going the way we want them to. We can think about how we start them, try to talk about our own feelings and experience rather than immediately telling the other person what’s wrong with them, take responsibility for our part rather than becoming defensive, and recognise when we’re getting overwhelmed and probably need to stop for a bit rather than continuing to push through.

The Gottmans talk about a lot of this through their work on the Four Horsemen and the alternatives to them, and you can read more about those communication patterns here. They’re really useful things to know and, in an ideal world, we would remember all of them at exactly the moment we’re hurt, pissed off, frightened, feeling rejected or trying desperately to get our partner to understand something that feels incredibly important to us.

Obviously, that’s not always what happens.

Because understanding what healthy communication looks like and actually being able to access all of that information when you’re in the middle of a difficult interaction are two quite different things. You can know perfectly well that starting a conversation with “You always…” probably isn’t going to go brilliantly and still hear those words coming out of your mouth. You can understand defensiveness and still become defensive. You can know that you’re supposed to take a break when you’re overwhelmed and instead keep going for another twenty minutes because, in that moment, stopping feels impossible.

And I think this is the bit we don’t talk about enough. We spend a lot of time teaching people how to communicate well, which is absolutely worthwhile, but sometimes I wonder whether we inadvertently create this idea that the measure of a healthy relationship is how successfully two people avoid getting it wrong.

I don’t think it is.

I don’t think being good at relationships means that you never have conversations that go completely sideways, never react from an old wound, never get defensive, never say something you wish you could shove straight back into your mouth, or never hurt the person you love. Two people trying to have a real, intimate relationship are going to get it wrong sometimes. They’re going to be tired and stressed and scared and occasionally unreasonable. They’re going to misunderstand each other, bring old stuff into new situations and sometimes realise afterwards that what they thought they were arguing about wasn’t actually what was going on for them at all.

So yes, I want couples to know how to have healthier conversations. I want them to understand the things that make communication more likely to work and to practise those things until they become easier to reach for.

But I also really want couples to know what to do when they don’t manage any of that particularly well.

Because I think the ability to repair is every bit as important as the ability to communicate well in the first place.

Repair doesn’t always have to happen afterwards

Sometimes you can feel a conversation starting to go off track while you’re still having it. Maybe you hear your own tone and think, shit, that’s not how I wanted to say that. Maybe you’ve started out trying to talk about one thing and somehow you’re now listing everything your partner has done wrong since 2019. Or you realise you’re so focused on getting them to agree with you that you’ve completely lost sight of what it was you actually wanted them to understand.

That doesn’t mean the conversation is ruined and you now have to see it through to its bitter end.

You can stop.

You can say, “Hang on. I’m not doing this very well. Can I have a second and start again?”

And I think the second part of that is important. Actually take the second. Don’t just immediately reword the same accusation slightly more politely. Think about what you’re trying to communicate. If you stripped away all the extra stuff, what do you actually want this person to know? What are you feeling? What have you made this situation mean? Is there something you’re frightened of? Is there something you need from them that you haven’t actually asked for?

Then you can come back with something more like, “Okay. I’ve thought about what I’m actually trying to say, and I think it’s this…”

I really like this kind of repair because it doesn’t require either person to pretend the first bit didn’t happen. You’re just acknowledging, in real time, that you’re not communicating in the way you want to and making an effort to change direction.

Sometimes that’s enough.

Other times, you’re too far into it. One or both of you are completely overwhelmed, you’ve lost the capacity to listen properly and you’re now essentially just lobbing increasingly unhelpful things at each other. At that point, the repair might actually be recognising that nothing good is going to happen if you keep talking.

The Gottmans use the term flooding to describe the physiological overwhelm that can happen during conflict, and this fits with other clinical thinking around regulation, including Dan Siegel’s Window of Tolerance and Pat Ogden’s work in sensorimotor psychotherapy. When we’re pushed outside the range in which we can stay emotionally present and still think reasonably clearly, some of us become increasingly activated and reactive, while others shut down, disconnect or go quiet.

And when you’re there, you can know every communication skill in the world and still not have access to any of them.

So sometimes repair looks like being able to recognise, “I’m too overwhelmed to do this properly now. I need to stop, get myself grounded and come back.” That isn’t the same thing as storming off, disappearing for two days or refusing to speak about the issue again. The coming back matters, because the purpose of the break is to get yourself into a state where you can actually return to the relationship and the conversation.

When something has happened that needs more repair

Then there are the times when you’ve already had the conversation, or the fight, or whatever it was, and something has happened that has properly hurt.

Maybe something was said that landed really badly. Maybe one of you felt abandoned or humiliated or dismissed. Maybe you’ve both calmed down and you’re technically “fine” again, but there’s still this thing sitting between you that neither of you quite knows what to do with.

Those are the ruptures that I think benefit from actually making some space for repair rather than hoping enough time will pass that everyone stops feeling uncomfortable.

One of the resources I use with couples is the Gottmans’ Aftermath of a Fight or Regrettable Incident, and what I particularly like about it is that the aim isn’t to go back through the argument and work out who was right. Each person gets the opportunity to talk about their experience of what happened, what they felt, what was happening underneath their reaction, what they can take responsibility for and what they think needs to happen differently.

Because if the repair conversation becomes another attempt to establish whose version of the original argument was correct, you’re probably just having the same argument again with slightly calmer voices.

What we’re actually trying to understand is what happened between you, and that means making room for the fact that two people can walk away from exactly the same interaction having experienced it very differently.

Where did it start to get pointy?

One of the things I often encourage people to think about is where it started to feel pointy or edgy for them, because there’s often a moment where something changes internally before everything else starts to unravel.

Maybe it was a particular sentence, a look, a tone or something that, on paper, doesn’t even seem particularly significant. But something about it made you feel unimportant, criticised, controlled, rejected, abandoned, not good enough or like you weren’t being heard, and from that point onwards you weren’t really responding only to the words being said anymore.

Once things have settled, I think it’s worth getting curious about that.

Was your reaction entirely about what happened in that moment, or was there something else in the room with you?

Maybe you were responding to A, but B was coming up as well. Perhaps what happened tapped into something that has happened before in this relationship, or into something much older that has absolutely nothing to do with your current partner but still shapes what certain situations mean to you.

This is one of the things I find really useful about attachment-based approaches, including Sue Johnson’s work in Emotionally Focused Therapy. Our histories don’t stay neatly in the past. They can shape the meaning we make of what’s happening now, particularly in moments where connection feels threatened.

So you might come back after thinking about it and say, “I’ve realised I wasn’t only reacting to what happened yesterday. That did upset me, but I think it also hit this thing I have about not mattering, and once that got activated I was responding to all of it rather than just what you actually said.”

That doesn’t mean whatever you did next suddenly becomes okay. Understanding why you behaved a certain way isn’t the same as excusing it. But it gives you and your partner much more useful information about what actually happened.

Being able to own your bit

For me, one of the biggest parts of repair is being able to look at something after the heat has gone out of it and ask yourself, what was mine here?

Not how do I take responsibility for the whole thing? And definitely not I’ll own mine once you’ve owned yours. Just genuinely looking at yourself and working out which bits belong to you.

Maybe you were really hurt and you became cruel. Maybe you genuinely felt misunderstood, but the way you tried to make yourself understood became dismissive. Maybe your anger made complete sense, but what you did with the anger wasn’t okay. Maybe you absolutely needed space, but the way you took it left the other person feeling like you’d abandoned them.

There’s room for both things. You don’t have to decide that your partner was right and you were wrong in order to be accountable. You can still be pissed off. You can still think they have things to own. You can still want them to understand your experience.

And you can also say, “That bit was mine. I don’t like how I handled it and I can understand how it affected you.”

I think that’s when an apology actually starts to mean something, because it’s coming from reflection rather than simply wanting everything to be okay again.

And then you have to understand the impact

We can get really caught up in intent when we’ve hurt someone. But that’s not what I meant. That’s not what I was trying to say. You know I would never intentionally do that to you.

And intent absolutely matters. But it doesn’t make impact disappear.

Part of repair is being able to tolerate hearing what something was like for the other person without immediately trying to correct their experience of it. You might ask, “What was the bit that hurt the most?” or “What do you need me to understand about what that was like for you?” and then actually give them some room to answer.

That doesn’t mean their interpretation automatically becomes the objective truth. They might have made assumptions about you that don’t feel fair, and there needs to be space for your experience as well. But if the first thing you do every time they tell you how something affected them is explain why they shouldn’t have experienced it that way, there’s not really much room for repair.

Repair also needs to change something

Once you’ve understood what happened, what was underneath it and what each of you can own, I think there needs to be some thought about what you actually want to do differently next time.

Maybe you need to raise things sooner rather than sitting on them until you’re really angry. Maybe you need an agreed way of saying, “I’m getting overwhelmed, I need twenty minutes and I promise I’m coming back.” Maybe one of you needs to get better at actually asking for reassurance rather than setting up increasingly elaborate tests to see whether the other person will magically know you need it.

And sometimes you realise that this isn’t really a communication problem at all. There’s a boundary that needs attention, an individual pattern that somebody needs to work on, or a much bigger relationship issue that keeps turning up dressed as ten slightly different arguments.

Which brings me to something I think is really important about repair: repair without change eventually stops feeling like repair.

I want there to be room in relationships for people to fuck up. Actually, I think there has to be. We need enough generosity with each other to know that somebody can get something wrong, hurt us, genuinely own it and repair it without that automatically meaning they’re a terrible partner or the relationship is unhealthy.

And I think we need room to get things wrong more than once, because human beings don’t generally identify a lifelong pattern on Tuesday and become completely different people by Wednesday.

But there is also a difference between being human and repeatedly hurting somebody in exactly the same way while asking them to keep accepting the same apology.

“I know I do this. I’m sorry. I love you and I don’t want to hurt you” might be completely genuine. But over time, the person you love also needs to experience you doing something with that knowledge. They need to see that you’re trying to understand why it keeps happening and working on reducing the likelihood that they’re going to be sitting through exactly the same repair conversation again in three weeks.

Repair needs follow-through in action.

And if you’re constantly repairing the same rupture, I think that’s information worth paying attention to. Maybe this isn’t just the occasional mistake anymore. Maybe it’s a pattern, and maybe there’s something underneath that pattern that needs more attention, whether that’s individually, together, or with some outside support.

Emotional safety isn’t the absence of rupture

I think this is probably the main thing I want people to take away from all of this, because we can have a really unrealistic idea of what an emotionally safe relationship is supposed to look like.

It isn’t two people who never get angry, never become defensive, never misunderstand each other and somehow manage to have every difficult conversation while perfectly regulated and saying all the right things. I don’t know anyone who has that relationship, and I’m not sure I’d trust them if they told me they did.

For me, emotional safety has much more to do with what happens when things go wrong. Can we come back to each other? Can I look at myself rather than spending all my energy building a case against you? Can I own the bits that belong to me while still trusting that there will be room for my experience too? Can I hear that I’ve hurt you without collapsing into shame or immediately defending myself? Can we work out what happened underneath all of this and use that information to do something differently?

And, importantly, when I tell you that I’m going to work on something, do you gradually get to experience me actually working on it?

That’s the kind of relationship safety I think is sustainable. Not we don’t rupture, but we know how to repair. Not we never hurt each other, but when we do, we take it seriously. Not expecting each other to somehow stop being human, but knowing that there’s a well-worn path back to each other when being human gets messy.

Because it will get messy. That’s relationships.

Knowing how to find each other again afterwards is the bit I think we need to talk about a whole lot more.

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