Hey Julia Woods
Join me, Julia Woods, a couples coach and wife of over 3 decades, as I share some of my client's stories and my own so that you can be encouraged, inspired, and gain new results in your marriage.
Hey Julia Woods
#1 Prompt for Resolving Conflicts
Conflict doesn’t have to push you apart—it can become the doorway to deeper trust. In this episode, I share a simple five-minute ownership prompt that turns heated arguments into grounded, connecting conversations by restoring regulation, responsibility, and a shared vision. You’ll hear real examples of how to spot survival modes, repair quickly, and rebuild safety so conflict actually strengthens your marriage instead of eroding it.
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Welcome to Hey Julia Woods Podcast. I'm your host, Julia Woods, founder of Beautiful Outcome, a coaching company focused on helping couples learn to see and understand each other, even in the most difficult conversations. On my podcast, I will share with you the real and raw of the messiness and amazingness of marriage. I'll share with you aspects of my relationship and the couples I coach in a way that you can see yourself and find the tools that you need to build the marriage you long for. Hi, welcome to another episode of Hey Julia Woods. Today we are going to go over my number one prompt for resolving conflicts. Recently, I asked in my Instagram stories if this was a topic that would be valuable for you. And the response was overwhelming of people responding saying, yes, I need your number one prompt to resolve conflicts. So that's what we're going to talk about today. You know, one of the things, if you have followed me long, you know that I see conflicts as a gift. They are literally a gold mine waiting to reveal what wants to be discovered to grow the marriage that you long for. Conflicts are not a problem, they are a gift. When you show up in the conflict in a very specific way, at the heart of what makes a conflict a gift is when both parties show up taking responsibility for a common outcome. And a common by a common outcome, I say that, you know, maybe the two of you are arguing over how to discipline the children, right? And so a common outcome of a conflict, maybe one of you thinks the other's being too lenient and the other thinks that the other is being too harsh, right? I don't know if any of you have had that conflict. That has been a conflict multiple times for my husband and I when our children were younger. And so you have this conflict going on. And so a common goal would be that, hey, can we talk about a united approach for disciplining the children so that we can both bring our unique gifts and our unique backgrounds together in a united way that offers a fuller picture of what's going to most benefit our children? All right. So, and then both spouses say, yes, I can agree to have that conversation. Okay, so now we have a united vision and we are both taking 100% responsibility of how we conduct ourselves, how we show up in our attitudes, in our tones, in our voice inflections, in the words that we use, in the heart at which we communicate, in the character traits that we show up in, we're taking 100% responsibility to bring ourselves to the conversation and bring content to the conversation in a way that helps us reach that common goal. That kind of conversation is a gold mine. And while there may be a conflict in there because you both see it two different ways, if you will come to the conflict in that approach and take 100% responsibility for you, the conflict will be shifted into connection because you'll begin to see the gift of who each other is. And you will begin to want to unify and bring together, not get rid of how your spouse does it or change how they do it, but instead see the gift in it and see that this is the merging of both of your approaches that is exactly what your children need. So that's one example. You can apply that to anything and everything you argue about in your marriage. But often we don't start by getting clear about what is the goal of this conversation? What is it that we are working towards together in the conversation? And so often you can just be about day-to-day business and something happens. You're in a conversation and one of you says something and the other gets offended by it, and you know, off you are. Boom, like there it goes. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You said this. No, I didn't say this. I hate it when you do that. Well, you're just too sensitive. And on and on, you know, you you express these hurtful things through your facial expressions and your body language and the words that you use and the hand gestures and all these verbal and nonverbal things begin to happen in a way that just compounds the hurt and the pain and the frustration. And before long, you don't even remember what you're fighting about. Both parties in those situations have moved into survival. So now your survival mechanism has taken over and you are in fight, flight, follow, fool, or freeze. You are in your best coping mechanism to uh what you learned in the first thousand days of your life is the best way to protect and guard yourself from the enemy or from the threat. Right? And so what happens is you move from being partners into being opponents, attacking each other. And you guys know each other better than anyone else knows you. So you use your little villain in you, that that self-protected, every man for himself. You're the the enemy here, and I've got to save myself. Woo! You use your spouse's vulnerabilities, or at least I do, right? And that is what begins to happen because you're actually not really in your right mind. You're in this um amygdala, you're in the the amygdala part of your brain has taken over, and you're seeing a very, very skewed view of what reality is, and you're damaging and harming each other's identities and the relationship. Each of you begin to see the worst version of yourself. You begin to shame yourself and feel guilt. And often that gets projected onto your spouse. And this is so sad because you are designed to be each other's safest space. And I imagine that's a big part of what brought you to choose to marry one another is because you felt so safe with this person. Your spouse was the one that you ran to in your hurt and pain. And yet, in these conflicts, your spouse is the one you're running from, trying to shoot down with every creative approach you can find to hurt and dismantle your spouse's sense of self and identity. And this is extremely, extremely harmful and painful to each of your hearts and ultimately your safety with one another and your connection in the marriage. So that kind of fighting is not a gold mine, it is a swampy pit of re wounding each other's deepest, most sensitive, painful parts. When this happens, you must pause. You must help your bodies get re-regulated. And that's not going to happen when you're in the chaos. You've got to pause, you got to get back to self-control. You need to vision who is this I'm talking to. Is this truly who my husband is, or is or my wife is, or is this my extremely skewed view of who they are? And who am I? Do often I don't even recognize myself. I'm like, dang, you stooped pretty low in that moment, and you became a really ugly version of yourself. Pausing and getting re-regulated helps us get back to who is it that we are committed to be. Because when we go into attack mode, it's like our victim mindset takes over. And the best choice we see available to us is to blame and shame and judge and criticize our spouse. These are the weapons that we learned when we were kids that could shut down our siblings or shut down that mean kid on the playground. And whatever of those wounds haven't healed, those are the places we go back to when we feel hurt or attacked by our spouse. We must shift out of the victim mindset back into a responsibility mindset where I'm taking 100% responsibility for my contribution to what isn't working here. Even if I'm only contributing 5%, okay? Let's say your spouse is having a really bad day or they're in a really bad season, they're in a really bad funk. And for you, it feels like they are the reason we are just fighting all the time. Well, a responsibility mindset is the one that says, you know what, it takes two to tango. And if we are in that ugly kind of a battle, we're both contributing. And I'm committed to take 100% responsibility for my contributions, even if it's only 5%, even if I'm only contributing 5% to what's not working here, I'll take 100% responsibility for that. Because when I do, that puts a different, that puts different ingredients into this mix, and we will definitely get a different outcome. So the best framework, the best prompt that I have just found, um, which was actually given to me by my coach, um, Dan Tacchini, and I have given it to hundreds of my clients in coaching calls, and I know it works. I use it. It is my main go-to. And it is can we take five minutes and each own what we are contributing to what's not working? In order to reconcile, in order to repair, you must meet each other halfway. Often you have a spouse who's like trying to make the whole reconciliation happen on their own. They're trying to force their spouse to talk about it, they're trying to force their spouse to stop shutting down, to, you know, they're trying to convince them, I know what the problem is here. No, you've got this framework works because it requires both of you meet halfway. You both are showing up to the table saying, yes, I'll take 100% responsibility for what I'm contributing to what's not working. Now, sometimes you may say, okay, let's take five minutes. You go to your own space, and you may recognize at the end of five minutes, oh no, I'm not ready. I haven't been able to take ownership for what I'm contributing because I'm still so furious and so angry. My mindset is still stuck in blame and seeing you as the problem. I need another five minutes. Now you don't need to say all of that to your spouse, right? At the end of the five minutes, you can say, just hey, hey, I need some more time. I'm not ready yet. I need another five minutes. And then, you know, ultimately you may need up to 15 minutes, but you you want to stay in the moment if at all possible. You don't want to wait. You definitely don't want to wait until the next day. You want to be able to get grow this muscle to get a level head, get re-regulated in your body as quickly as you can. And in that five minutes that you're taking, you're each asking yourself, okay, what's the conversation we're trying to have here? And what am I contributing to what's not working? If I could look at the argument that was just happening from a bird's eye view as though I'm a cameraman just recording both sides. And in this five minutes, I'm gonna not look at what my spouse is doing, and I'm gonna focus strictly on my role. What is going on for me that I see is not working? What often is for me is I often go to one of my coping mechanisms is to go to superior, to act like I know it all, to act like I know what the problem is here, and I know what the solution is here. And you just need to listen to me. Superiority is one of my most common contributions. And it does not work. The moment I go to superior, we are no longer shoulder to shoulder working together for a united outcome. All of a sudden, my husband is beneath me in my mind, and I'm above him. And he feels small, and I'm trying to make him feel small. And that will create a massive lack of safety and will not work to create a united outcome or partner together. So I encourage you to get really familiar with what your most common ones are because it can really speed up this process. If you get familiar with what are the biggest coping mechanisms that you go to to attack, you can shift much quicker. So my husband and I actually we just used this prompt this weekend and it worked miraculously. And so we were in the conversation and it was getting escalated. And we are getting much quicker at noticing when it gets escalate, escalated. I find for me, it's easiest to feel it in my body. When I'm in a conversation with my husband and we're shoulder to shoulder, I there's just a piece in my heart. It may get a little conflicted, a little messy, but I can I can hold myself and it's not real panicky inside. When I'm getting dysregulated and I am moving into that amygdala part of my brain, there is this, what I call this grungy feeling inside of me. And it just feels like yuck, and I feel like my insides are going to explode. Well, that's really helpful to get familiar with in yourself because we notice what we feel before we tend to notice what we're doing. And so if you can get familiar with that feeling, that icky feeling inside of you that tells you, oh, I'm in attack mode. This is not going to work to take us to the partnership or the marriage that I long for. Okay, let me, let me raise a hand and say, hey, can we pause? And, you know, I joke with my clients, whoever's the more mature one in the moment is the one that's going to request the pause. It doesn't matter who requests it, just work to request the pause. And so we did that. And it and it literally just we sat there next to each other on the couch. We were arguing on the couch. We sat next to each other. We started doing our calming breathing, and we just sat with it. Now, in the past, it's taken me a while to get to that point where I can sit and do this processing. Walking at a fast pace is a really helpful tool to help get your body regulated and help you process, move out of amygdala into the creative part of your brain where you can actually see things more honestly and creatively. And so in this, my husband and I paused and we came back together. And he came back into the conversation and he said, I own what I was contributing, is I went to shame. I went to toxic identity and I started making what you were saying about me. And while the tension was about something that I was hurt by about what he did, my hurt was is actually about something that's going on in me that's actually older than him. Like where I got hurt, I've been getting hurt there since I was little. But what happens is when I'm bringing up something he did, by nature, we tend to make it about us. But no matter what's going on, if your spouse is hurt by something you did, if you make it about you, you'll not be able to stay with what they're trying to communicate to you and what they need you to hear. If you'll hold a safe space for them to explore, they'll start to uncover what's going on deeper in them, that what you did triggered something in them. It doesn't mean you're the problem. It means a wound got triggered that wants to be healed in them. And if you can hold a safe space for them to do that, that wound will heal. And they won't be bothered by that in the future, or they'll be able to make a clear request. Hey, moving forward, because that is a bit of a raw spot for me, would you be able to do this? And then you get to decide if that works for you in helping your spouse actually heal a raw spot for them and be an aid to them in healing their heart rather than harming their heart. So that was what my husband owned. I was able to own that I was going to fear. And the problem of what had happened in my mind, I don't think it I don't think there are problems. I think that we make the best choice we see available to us according to how life occurs to us. But it felt like a problem in the moment. And the problem was no longer right-sized. When I go to fear, I can quickly go to panic. And now everything becomes exaggerated. Like, oh my goodness, the world's going to fall apart. The marriage is going to fall apart if we can't get this figured out. That's where I go in my when I'm in my amygdala. And the problem's no longer right-sized. All of a sudden, it is this big monster that's going to eat us alive if we don't get something changed. So my husband was able to see that because he was in toxic shame and seeing this as though he was bad, broken, or wrong, that he actually in the conversation was turning that against me and attacking me. So instead of being able to slow down and say, oh, I'm telling myself that I'm not enough, he was actually trying to make me feel small by telling me that I was the problem. It was, it's actually what uh it is a very common survival technique where whatever's going on inside of us, we actually project onto our spouse. And when we feel small, we start trying to attack them and make them feel small. And so he was able to see that. And then I saw that in my fear, I was actually in panic. And in my panic, I was trying to force him. I was trying to control him and make him see it the way I saw it. Because I thought, you know, the amygdala is telling me, he's got to see this or else your world is going to collapse. And of course, no one wants to see something that they're being forced to see. And it wasn't about me needing to get my husband to see something. It was an opportunity to simply invite him into what I was seeing and see if there was any part of that that resonated for him, any part of that that he might be willing to look at and see, you know, if there was anything there for him. We weren't able to do that as long as we were in fight, fight, follow, fool, or freeze. So what we began to realize is once, well, once we owned what we were contributing, our both of our heart rates began slowing down. And we remembered what we were working for. And for Jeff and I, a big part of what we are working on in our relationship right now is turning into each other in our suffering, being the safest space that the other person can come to in our pain and suffering, even if our pain and suffering is about each other. How can we be the safest place that each other can run to? And so in that, we began to look at how we could turn into each other. And after we both owned what we sh we had contributed, we were able to hold each other, hold each other for a few minutes and apologize and, you know, really acknowledge that, man, that's not who I'm committed to be. And I don't want to turn out from you. I don't want to harm you or hurt you. And, you know, he went again. And this time he asked some clarifying questions, like, you know, I this is what I heard you say. Is this really what you were saying? And he, I was able to say, no, that's not at all what I'm saying. I do understand how you could have heard that in what I'm saying. But here's actually what I was saying, or what I was really wanting to say. And that shifted a whole lot for him. And he was able to stand back in the truth of who he was, no longer believing he wasn't enough, but realizing he was exactly what I needed. I just longed for him to be able to hear what was happening for me. And I was able to go again. And um, I shared my concern in a right-sized place, no longer from the exaggerated, bigger-than-life way that I was explaining it, using exaggerating words and using extremes. And when I could calmly share it from a place of still having physical connection with him, like holding his hand and just back in my right-sized body, back in a right-sized view of what had happened, I was able to share what was going on. And he was able to empathize with me. And together we looked at what is what had happened and what we were doing, and we both saw that there was a lot to learn, a lot to grow. And we both came out from the conversation, seeing new growth opportunities in each of us, and having a new commitment of what we would do the next time when a situation like that arose. And that was some significant gold that came out of that conversation. So if you haven't tried this before, or maybe you've tried it from a different angle and you want to try it in the way I have shared or something, I just invite you to consider that this is a very simple framework because it takes the focus off your spouse and back onto you. And by being on you, you can then take responsibility for who you are being. Who are you committed to be in this conversation? Are you committed to generously be generous in your listening? Are you committed to be humble? Are you committed to be honest? Are you committed to be loving? Are you committed to be caring and compassionate? These are powerful ways of being and character traits that will lead you to the future that you both long for and will lead you to an outcome in the future in the conversation worth having. When you're focused on you, it brings you back to what it is that you need to contribute to what will work to take you to whatever your vision is for this conversation, for your marriage, for your communication, right? Every conversation is an opportunity to grow your character into the spouse you're committed to be, so you can have the marriage you long for, or a conflict is the opportunity that you take to just keep growing your bitterness and your resentment and your uh blame and your whatever you think you're right about, that your spouse is the problem, or this topic is never gonna go anywhere, or your communication, you just can't communicate because your communication styles are too different. When we are in our amygdala, we harm each other and we just get more and more disconnected. This simple prompt brings you back to being grounded in reality. I don't know if you've ever noticed or how familiar you are with your victim mindset, but it's actually default in us as human beings. And a victim mindset takes us to fantasy. It takes, it brings the past into the present as though the past is today, right? Like when you say or I say, you always do this. Remember when you did this and remember when you do that, right? We're no longer in the present. We're actually making the past our present. Or the other thing our victim mindset does is it brings us to future trip. Like we look at the future and we're like, we I can't keep going. I cannot keep doing this with you. This is never gonna work, right? We might as well just call it quits if this is how we're gonna be. That's future tripping. And so whenever we're bringing the past or the future into this present moment, we actually cannot partner and work together in creating what we want because we have to be in the present in order to do that. And that's a key element to what the victim mindset does is it it like annihilates the present and brings us to focus fully on the past and and the future. And we lose our ability to be grounded in the present where creativity exists, where compassion and empathy exist, where healing happens. Healing can only happen in the present. And that's why it's so important. If this resonates for you, I invite you to share this concept with your spouse or share this podcast, listen to it with them. And if you both think that this could help you, I invite you to make an agreement that this is something you both work to do. You'll both work to pause your next conflict and make this simple request of can we take five minutes and each of us come back sharing what we're contributing to what isn't working in this conflict. And then go again on the conversation. And this time, maybe before you go again on the conversation, if you weren't clear about what is the united outcome you're both working towards in the conversation, take a minute and do that. Like really get clear on what is the goal of this conversation? What is it that we are working together to discover? And when you do that, oh, it makes it so much easier, right? A vision. A man with a vision cannot be held hostage by circumstances. If you go into a tension-filled conversation without a vision, circumstances of, you know, your wounds and your pain and your insecurities are going to be the circumstances that hold you hostage. But if you will get a united vision, you really can't be held hostage by the circumstances. And if you start to move in that direction, you'll be much quicker to pause and get back to being grounded so you could work together towards this united future and this united outcome of this conversation. So I hope this framework was helpful for you. I would love to hear. If it was, would you take a minute and do a few things to help this podcast keep growing? Would you one share with me if you found this helpful? Um, you can do that in the comment section under this podcast episode. And then if you know someone who loves their spouse and really wants to grow a beautiful, thriving marriage, would you share this with them and let them know that you found it helpful? And um, you know, it's really cool when you can implement something in your marriage with a friend, right? They're working to implement it in their marriage and you're working to implement it in yours. And you can work together like, ooh, we tried it and here's what worked, or here's what didn't work. Ooh, we tried it and this worked and this didn't work. And it's just really powerful to grow the marriage that you long for in community. So thank you so much for joining me today. And I really hope this was helpful in allowing you to resolve conflicts so you can experience the deeply connected marriage that you long for. Thank you so much. I want to talk to you about something super exciting. It's a game changer, really. To have the relationship you long for, you must take responsibility for yourself and who you are being moment by moment. It's not about what your spouse needs to change, it's about you taking control of the only thing you can control, which is you. That's the truth that nobody's talking about when they talk about marriage. But I am inside the marriage growth community where I will help you take responsibility for your ability to lead conversations with your spouse to love and connection so you can have the marriage you dreamed of when you first fell in love. At the very first link in the show notes, you can grab my marriage growth community, and that's really going to help. I know that because it's based on the same principles I've used to coach this couple and hundreds of other couples to marriage success over the last nine years. So grab marriage growth community at the top of the show notes.