Hello and welcome to the Empowered Couples podcast, where here you get modern, non-boring relationship advice for you and your partner to communicate like pros, fight smarter, and stay on the same team no matter the challenge that you face. I am one of your hosts, Aaron Freeman.

And I'm Jocelyn Freeman, but you all just know us as the Freeman's.

And this episode is about breaking destructive patterns mid-conflict to prevent arguments

from escalating further.

So there are actually three stages of conflict.

If you've read our book, The Argument Hangover, you know that we break it down this way.

But there are actually tools and strategies for each of the three stages.

There's before conflict happens. There's during conflict, and then there's the after conflict stage,

right, where repair is supposed to happen.

And really, it's important that you as a couple are acquiring skills for all three stages.

And today we're going to be focusing on the mid-conflict stage, right?

So emotion is already escalating.

What do you do to prevent it from getting more escalated further and damage being done?

I do want to say that we are hosting one more free web class in 2021 on this topic.

We're going to go so much deeper. It's going to be a 90-minute web class. And it's October 5th. So you guys, it's coming up really soon. A bunch of you've already

saved your seats if you follow us on Instagram. And it's online couples workshops.com. This will be the

last one in 2021 before baby Freeman joins the family. So make

sure you go to online couples workshops.com. Save your seats because we're going to go into this,

fighting smarter, how to prevent them beforehand, how to handle emotional triggers better,

and then how to repair. The repair process is so important after

a disagreement. But like I said, we're going to be focusing on the during conflict stage.

Now, Aaron, what do we hear a lot from couples that they try to do around conflict? The word

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