Hi, this is Wayne Brown from Life Back On Track. Welcome to the latest episode.

In this one, I've been sent a question by someone and this has been sent in by Thierry. I hope I pronounced that right, of Germany. Hess, in Germany actually. And Thierry is in a similar situation that I was in years ago with my second wife and what he has asked is why does my partner keep arguing?

There's a number of different things that this could be attributed to. There are various drivers behind us when we want to keep arguing. The main one though is we just want to be heard. Now, the problem is a lot of us are not taught how to do conflict properly. What normally happens is the person who is upset, or has been triggered, instead of exploring where that came from, where they trigger originated from and how to deal with it. They launch into an attack at the person that apparently caused them to feel this way, not realising that it's actually a trigger.

Now the person who is the recipient of this attack usually goes on the defence, which means you then try and justify. You try and explain, to try and calm the person down, or you go on a counter attack. Now this is normally how we do conflict and then it goes backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, yelling and screaming and generally nothing's resolved. At the end of the day, the problem still exists.

Some of the drivers to this situation, where the person gets triggered and I won't go into great depth into that, what I will mention though, is usually we want to be heard. We don't feel that our opinion is heard. We don't feel that our feelings are heard. We don't feel like we are being heard. So usually we go for volume, we go for attack, to try and drive home our point.

The other thing is we may not feel valued. Because we don't feel valued, we are trying to make that value heard, validated, received, and for our partner to to put effort into allowing us to feel more valued. Now those sorts of drivers are all valid drivers. We all want to be heard. We all want to be valued. We all want to be, "I feel like we're part of something that's worth being in."

The trouble is we usually don't have the right skills to communicate that. So I would say Thierry, the reason why your partner is continuing to argue is they don't feel heard. They don't feel valued. They don't feel some particular aspect of the relationship is as it should be. Now a simple one that you can do is you can allow them to be heard.

All right, so a quick two little steps you can do. This isn't a very in depth process, but it can get something started so you can start to get a result. So the first thing you do is you acknowledge that they have spoken to you, alright, and you acknowledge how you believe they feel, how it looks like they feel. So you would validate that by saying "It looks like you're really upset about something. I'd really like to get to the bottom of this, and in order to do this though, we need to have a calm discussion. So if you're willing to do a calm discussion, I'm willing to hear exactly what you've got to say."

So if you say something like that, even hopefully get them to just bring the energy down a little bit. You don't want them to calm down. Do not use the words "calm down". No-one in the history of the world has ever calmed down when people say "calm down". The reason it doesn't work is we don't want to calm down because we want to be heard, we were calm before, we're not being heard, so therefore we're going to go for volume.

So saying calm down, not a good thing, acknowledge how they feel, have a guess at how they feel, it's okay if you get it wrong. The main thing you want to communicate though is that you want to help them solve that situation. So once you've got them to acknowledge that and hear that and agree to some sort of process, you can use what we call the W.I.F.L.E. stick. Now the W.I.F.L.E. stick can be literally anything, You can have a proper stick, you can use a wooden spoon, you can do literally anything, but it has to be something you can hold in your hands.

What happens is, you give this to them. They then have the ability to unload everything that they feel. That doesn't mean they unload to you in an aggressive way, or a damaging way. This is then being able to calmly explain what it is that bothering them. You're not allowed into interrupt, you just have to listen, so you allow them to say everything they need to say. Hopefully they're not doing it in an attacking way. Hopefully they're using 'I' statements, "I don't feel like I'm I'm valued here", "I don't feel that I'm supported", "I don't feel...", so hopefully they use lots of I statements, and then once they're finished, once they've got everything out, they purged themselves, they then say, "...and that's what I feel like expressing". That's what the W.I.F.L.E. stands for, "What I Feel Like Expressing".

Once they have done that, they then put down the W.I.F.L.E. stick, whatever that is, whatever item you decided to use for the W.I.F.L.E. stick, they put that down and then they're done. Now, you acknowledge what they said, you say, "okay, so it sounds like this blah blah blah is how you feel. I'd like to help you get to the bottom of that, give me time to think about what you've said, to process it and I'll get back to you".

Now, if you do something like that, that should make a big difference. Now, I've got other processes and tools to use to be able to control that a lot better. That two little steps should get you a long way towards getting a resolution and for them to feel heard and therefore to stop being so angry. Because, next time hopefully they'll realise that all have to pick up the W.I.F.L.E. stick, you see them holding it, that means all you gotta do is listen. Then they can say "I'm ...", whatever, and then they say, "...and that's what I feel like expressing", and again you acknowledge it, you say "I'm gonna go away and think about it, then I'll come back and we can resolve it" and that's it.

And you just keep doing that backwards and forwards until you find some sort of happy ground where they feel heard, valued, whatever it is they need, and you feel like you've actually met them and help them and supported them and whatever they needed.

All right, so I hope you've enjoyed that one. I hope that gave you some good insight there Thierry, so that you can go and use that. Feel free to let me know how you go. Because I'd love to hear. If you want this information to go deeper, if you subscribe to my premium podcast I'll go into this in a lot more depth. So you can click the link in the notes and then that will take you to a page and you can subscribe to the premium podcast and you can get that deeper information.

All right. Hope you've enjoyed it. If you've got any other questions anyone, send them in. That would be brilliant and I'll answer them and I'll let you know when I've answered it. All right, look after yourself, take care and remember here's to a good life.

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