A repair, not a case
The aim is repair, not winning the account of events.
Theme
Relationships
Repair, honesty and attention — the parts that do the real work.
Being understood matters more to most people than being agreed with.
Theme
Repair, honesty and attention — the parts that do the real work.
Being understood matters more to most people than being agreed with.
The aim is repair, not winning the account of events.
Short, plain and without a preamble. Repair does not require agreement about the cause.
Five minutes of undivided attention, given to one person, on purpose.
Close relationships are not the ones without rupture. They are the ones where repair happens quickly.
Every close relationship contains a running record of small ruptures: a sharp answer, a forgotten thing, an evening where one person was not really there.
The difference between relationships that hold and relationships that thin out is rarely the number of ruptures. It is how long they are left, and whether anyone goes back to them.
Repair is unglamorous and short. It names your own part, specifically, without a defence attached and without a comparison to something they did.
The instinct to explain first is understandable — you would like to be understood too. But explanation usually reopens the case, and repair usually closes it. The explanation can come later, and often stops being necessary.
Reflect