How To Make Up Fast After A Fight – Conflict Resolution for Couples
We all get into arguments with our mates or friends. Things get heated, we disagree strongly, we say things or do things that later we often wish we hadn’t. Usually, we can act like we are 8 year olds emotionally during a fight. Conflict resolution is one of the last things we are concerned about.
After a heated argument, several interesting things happen. We start to calm down, and start to let go of being emotional 8 year olds. We return to our more adult selves. This can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. However, what also happens after most every fight is that we enter into a cold war with our mate. We relay the incident in our heads, thinking of all the things they said and that we should have said. We are busy making them wrong. We are sure they should reach out to us and apologize, and that they owe us an apology. So we both are in this period of giving each other the cold shoulder and waiting for the other to apologize.
The longer the cold shoulder lasts, the more the relationship damage that occurs. Some couples will stay in a cold war for days!
You don’t want the cold war to last. You don’t want your mate staying angry and replaying the incident and turning all that emotion into poison. You want to get over the fight and back to normal intimate relations as fast as you can.
Here’s how to do that. Once you’ve calmed down, and once you can tell that your mate has calmed down some, rather than wait for an apology and let the negative energy between you build up, here’s what you do. Be the adult. Be the stronger one. Reach out and just say this phrase:
“Sorry we fought, are you okay?”
When you say that, you aren’t admitting fault, you aren’t attacking your mate, you are just extending an olive branch so that you can both let go of the battle. Most time, your mate will be glad you did and say something like “Me too, that was no fun!”
There is a lot more to repairing the damage from conflict, but this is a very powerful start. Try it for yourself and see. Conflict resolution is something you CAN get better at. You can turn conflict into caresses when you don’t let the anger build up between you. Reach out, say you’re sorry, then you can begin to move towards making up! For a video on this, you can go to How To Turn Conflict Into Caresses.
