Post-Fight Procedure for Couples

Zoe and I started using a medical device to fight.

If you don’t know, ​John Gottman​ is the OG researcher on how couples fight. He took thousands of couples and studied how they fight, and over time was able to predict with 90% accuracy which couples would stand the test of time.

For years, Zoe and I have been using his method for processing fights — he calls it the Aftermath of a Fight conversation. He’s written many great books on this.

The TLDR:

After taking a break and calming down, you take turns through five steps:

Share the feelings you experienced during the fight — not arguments, just emotions.
Describe your subjective reality — what you perceived happened — while your partner validates your experience without arguing back. Something like "I can understand how you felt that way."
Explore your triggers — what old wounds or vulnerabilities got activated.
Each take responsibility for your role in the escalation.
Make constructive plans for what you'd do differently next time.

It works shockingly well. It’s amazing what having your experience validated without judgment does to calm your nervous system after a fight — even when you know your partner completely disagrees with you. Just hearing them say it does something powerful.

One issue we’ve had though, is if we’re talking about a particularly touchy topic, we get what Gottman calls “flooded.” So frustrated and activated that we can no longer maturely resolve the issue.

Gottman recommends pausing for at least 20 minutes when one or both of you become flooded. Apparently it takes your body about that long to calm down biochemically — something about norepinephrine having no enzyme to break it down, so it just has to slowly work its way out of your system. The issue is identifying when that has happened. I’m sure you know how this goes: “I’m not yelling! You’re yelling!”

We were recently reading one of his books, and found a fun little hack: pulse ox sensors. When we’re doing fight recovery, we now both don these little finger-worn sensors and set an alarm so they beep if either of our heart rates go over 100 bpm — what Gottman defines as a strong signal for flooding, the point at which it becomes physically impossible to hear what your partner is saying.

Super helpful. If you fight with your partner (aka if you have a partner) and want to resolve your differences more productively using science, check out Gottman’s books and grab a couple of ​these pulse sensors on Amazon​ — they’re cheap and they work.