Conflict Repair Worksheet

Timing and order

Do this within twenty-four hours if you can, and not within the first thirty minutes. Too early and one of you is still flooded; too late and the incident has been absorbed into the general background, at which point raising it feels like starting the argument again.

Repair before resolution. The order is counterintuitive and it is the reason most attempts fail: people try to settle the disagreement first and repair afterwards, but nobody negotiates well while still holding an unacknowledged injury. Close the rupture, then take the subject up separately, possibly on a different day.

Each person repairs their own part. A repair that arrives conditional on the other person going first is a negotiation, and both of you can wait indefinitely. Somebody has to go with no guarantee, and it may as well be whoever is holding this sheet.

1. Separate the rupture from the subject

Two different things that always get repaired as one.

Write two lines: what the argument was about, and what actually hurt. They are rarely the same. The subject might be the visit to your parents; the rupture is being spoken to in that tone in front of your sister, or the sense that the answer was decided before you spoke. Repairing the subject while ignoring the rupture is why so many resolutions do not hold — the practical matter gets settled and the injury goes into the background, where it turns up as a general reluctance three weeks later.

2. The four-part repair

Name, own, impact, ask. In that order, no extras.

Name the specific moment rather than the whole evening. Own your part of it without conditions, which means no "if" and no "but" and no reference to what they did first. Acknowledge the impact in their terms rather than yours. Then ask what would help. Four sentences, and the order matters — moving the ask earlier turns it into a way of skipping the ownership, and adding anything after it reopens the argument. Whatever you want to append at the end is the thing to cut.

3. What to leave out

The four additions that undo a repair.

Repairs are usually spoiled by additions rather than by omissions. The four common ones: the explanation of why you were justified, the reference to their behaviour, the attachment-style account of yourself, and the request for reassurance that you are still a good person. Each is understandable and each transfers the work back to the other person. Write down which of the four you habitually add — most people know immediately — and cross it out of your draft.

4. Receiving one

Harder than giving one, and rarely taught.

A repair offered and not received does more damage than none at all, because it teaches the other person that going first is not worth it. Receiving means accepting it as offered rather than upgrading it: not "and the other thing you did", not a counter-repair delivered immediately to level the score, not a graded assessment of how good the apology was. If it is genuinely insufficient, say so plainly and specifically — but say it as a separate act, after receiving what was offered.

5. Repair or truce?

A test you can apply a week later.

A week on, ask three questions. Can either of you refer to the incident without the temperature changing? Did the subject actually get discussed afterwards, separately? Is there anything you are now avoiding raising? A truce passes none of these — it looks like peace and is really a jointly maintained silence, and the cost is that the list of unsayable subjects grows by one each time. Keep a running list of those subjects; when it gets long, that is the thing to work on rather than the next individual row.

If repair keeps failing

Repeated failure usually has one of three causes: the attempts are happening while someone is still flooded, they are conditional on the other person going first, or the rupture being repaired is not the one that actually happened. Exercise 1 catches the third, which is the most common.

A fourth cause is different in kind. If one of you is always the one repairing, and the other treats each repair as confirmation that they were right, that is not a skills problem. It is worth naming plainly, and it is a reasonable thing to take to a couples therapist.