Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life. I'm your host, Corey Miscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about how to avoid an argument. More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay.

So let's talk about arguments, conflicts, and how to potentially avoid hours of arguments and the subsequent cleanup. I didn't learn much about this through my meditation training.

You don't really have to worry about arguments in a monastery or on a retreat

because you're in silence and you're doing your own inner work.

And while there are plenty of external triggers,

they're usually not as close to home because they're

people that you don't know. And some people who are closest to you who really know how to push

your buttons, especially family because they put those buttons there in the first place.

But it's often within our relationships,

primarily more intimate, romantic partnerships,

but can also be with friends,

where these buttons can also be pushed.

And the deeper a relationship goes,

the more we're invited to open and the more threatening that can feel.

And this can cause us to get into patterns of defensiveness, which end, turn a disagreement, a small conflict, into something that really escalates.

And so my training ground, and a lot of this didn't really come until I was in a long-term partnership. And through the many mistakes that I have made in communication, there has been one key learning

that I now continue to come back to, even though it's not always easy. But when I do it, it has,

I would say, a 95% success rate in terms of coming quickly back

into connection, working out what needed to be worked out, and not getting into a lot of

back and forth and sometimes hours of conflict. And that learning has been to say

one vulnerable sentence instead of 10 defensive ones. Say one vulnerable sentence instead of 10

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