How to stop an argument BEFORE it begins

It amazes me how a good restaurant can turn out a high volume of quality food consistently.  When you look into their kitchens, you see constant activity. Someone is always doing something.  And despite all the activity, each station ends up clean for the next cook to use it.

How do they create so much quality food with so little chaos?

It turns out that the secret is in good preparation.  To make a cake, a good cook will preheat the oven and then gather all the ingredients

Eggs

Milk

Flour

Sugar

Vanilla

Baking soda

Butter

Salt

All this is before putting anything into a mixing bowl.

Of course you can start just throwing things together but in a kitchen with many other people moving about you’ll constantly get in each other’s way.

Preparing in an organized way is what allows for actions to flow and for chaos to be avoided.

This reminds me of how we can avoid arguments in relationships.

When cooks focus on preparation, they side-step all the chaos by creating organization and flow.  And in relationships, we too can side-step a lot of the seemingly inevitable chaos by learning to side-step the source of much relationship pain – arguments.

But how on earth do we do that?

You do that by preparing the mind to sidestep the argument in the first place.

Here’s a story to explain.

My daughter Brittany came home from school one day.  Morty walked into her room and asked her,

“How did your day go, Brittany?”

She replied: “You’re being annoying, dad.  Leave me alone.”

So he left her room.  And felt hurt.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t an isolated incident.   

Before the age of 13 or 14 they’d always had a great relationship. Morty read to her every night and she felt secure enough with Morty to tell him about anything that bothered her. Unlike many girls 10 to 12 years old, she held her father’s hand in public and even kissed him in front of her friends.  

But once she became a teenager, she frequently got upset with him, for no reason that I could tell.  She would start an argument with him if he just asked her a question or made a suggestion.

Because of these frequent upsets Morty and I started to wonder

“What happened to the great relationship he’d had with our daughter?”

As a result of observing this situation, Morty and I wrestled with two big questions:

Why do good relationships often go bad?  

And, what can we do to prevent it?

Here’s the answer we came up with to the first question: One person is upset and he or she believes what the other person did or said is the cause of it.

Let me repeat that: Good relationships often go bad because, when one person is upset, he or she believes what the other person did or said is the cause of it.

So if what the other person did is at fault, we blame them.  But at the same time the other person thinks that we are at fault, so they blame us.  And the more we blame each other, the more defensive each of us gets.  Eventually, if this continues long enough, the relationship itself starts to fray.

Here are a few examples of how this downward spiral begins:

If your spouse leaves clothes on the floor and you get annoyed, it seems like his behavior is what’s annoying you.

If you have an argument with a friend it seems like his failure to agree with you is the cause of your upset.

And if your boss yells at you, it seems like your anxiety is caused by what she said and how she said it.

But what’s really causing these upsets?

In each case the upset is caused, not by what happened, but by how what happened occurs to you.  

Let’s see how this principle applies to the three examples I just gave you.

You are not upset because your spouse leaves clothes on the floor, you are annoyed because his behavior occurs to you as, “Why is he doing this to me?” or “Doesn’t he care what the house looks like?”   

And you are not upset because your friend is not agreeing with you, you are upset because your friend’s behavior occurs to you as

“He thinks what I have to say is not important.”

Or

“I can’t convince him of my point of view.”

And, finally, you are not anxious merely because your boss yelled at you, you are upset because her behavior occurs to you as

“She is not treating you fairly”

or

“She thinks I’ve screwed up.”

This distinction between what actually happened and the meaning you give what happened, what I am calling your occurrings, is crucial because you can’t change what happened.  

It did happen.  But you can learn to influence the meaning you give to events and gain the ability to change them whenever you’d like.

So if most of our relationship problems arise out of the meaning we give what others say and do, what can we do to improve our relationships?

If you’ve read some of the other materials, you probably know what I’m going to say.  But just in case you don’t, I’ll tell you.

It’s for just one party to dissolve their occurring about the issue at hand.

And if just one of them does, the argument will stop on a dime. Yes, that’s right.  Either party to an argument can dissolve his occurring, regardless of what the other one does.

And that will eliminate the negative back and forth between them.

Just like throwing a bouncy ball on a pillow.  There is no bounce. It just sits there.

If the other person is negative while you’re neutral, often the negativity will dissipate.

That’s why when Morty began learning this technique we literally stopped arguing … Even before I mastered it.

But you may be wondering “How can someone do this in the heat of the moment?”

I’ll answer your question by telling you how Morty eventually changed the meaning he had been giving to our daughter’s upsets.

Below is copied from material that Morty had written (in italics):

One day I went up to her room and asked her about her day as I often did and she got annoyed as she often did.

But this time I responded differently.  

I realized that my upset was not the result of what she said or did, but, instead, was the result of how her comments occurred to me.  

The automatic, unconsciously-created meaning I gave her behavior was:

The close relationship we’ve had for years has come to an end.  

So, this time I considered other possible meanings for her behavior.

It could mean that her teenage hormones were raging.  

Or that she had a problem with a teacher that day.  

Or that she hadn’t been invited to a party one of her girl friends was having.

Or that as a teen she needed to start becoming independent and breaking away from her parents.

And the most important realization I had was: her response to me, in fact, had no inherent meaning.

I couldn’t conclude anything, for sure, about our relationship in the future, based on how she treated me on any given occasion.

As soon as I distinguished between Brittany’s behavior and the meaning I had given it, as soon as I realized that my occurring existed only in my mind, that it was not the truth, it just dissolved.  

And when the meaning dissolved, my hurt and upset dissolved too.

As a result, this time I responded differently to her annoyance with me.

Instead of trying to defend myself or getting angry at her, I just left the room and gently closed the door.  

Then I said to her quietly:

“I hear a daughter who loves her father very much and who probably just had a difficult day.  I love you.”

As I turned to walk away, she threw a shoe at the door.  

But five minutes later, she came out, said she was sorry, and kissed me.

From that point on I was able to make this same distinction with Brittany most of the time.  

Because I had stopped giving meaning to how she treated me, rarely did anything she said or did, hurt me, upset me, or make me angry.  

As a result, I was able to express unconditional love almost all the time.

What do you think happened then?

Because I had stopped reacting to her behavior and had stopped arguing with her, she had no one to argue with and eventually her behavior toward me improved.  Our relationship became even closer than it ever had been.  

I’m so grateful to this process because now that Morty is gone Brittany has been left with nothing but amazing memories of her father.

Morty changed how he responded in the heat of the moment by making dissolving his occurings into a habit.  This gave him the power of a quiet mind when Brittany did something that would have made him upset in the past.

You can get the same results when you develop this habit as well.

For cooks in a kitchen the key to side-stepping chaos is to prepare.  And in our relationships we prepare to avoid arguments by practicing dissolving meaning as often as we can.  That way it will be a well-worn habit by the time the next opportunity for an argument arises.

So practice dissolving meaning as often as you can.  To do this, notice that the meaning your mind created is different than the events in front of you.  As you do this over and over you will discover more moments in which your mind has become quiet.