Rules of Engagement: Fair Fighting for Marriage [Vol 1-3]

Introduces a structure of rules for fair fighting in marriage, highlighting conflicts as growth opportunities and the need for shared rules, a workbook, and discussion groups.

Master emotional regulation and processing to control emotional flood in conflict, moving from lower to upper brain, and use the BTX framework to identify primary and secondary emotions.

Develop emotional regulation, resiliency, and empathetic connection to handle conflict by staying composed and listening with compassionate curiosity. Expand your conflict window by recognizing triggers and choosing responses over reactions.

Learn how emotion regulation and resiliency shape fair fighting in marriage, with practical steps to pause, listen, and respond thoughtfully during conflict.

Examine how triggers ignite conflict, recognize flooding and the brain's fight-or-flight responses, and apply the conflict window concept with regulation, resilience, and strategic timeouts for healthier marriages.

Identify and curb common bad fighting habits in marriage, such as spewing, stuffing, leaky communication, negative assumptions or projections, parental tones, validation, and criticism, to foster understanding and resolution.

Explore how people speak in conflict, including spewing, stuffing, and leaking. Learn how negative assumptions and projections, plus parental criticism, damage marriages and how to become the agent of change.

Identify common bad listening and responding habits in conflict—defensive blame, withdrawal, and quick fixing—explaining underlying causes and the role of resilience and empathy in achieving understanding and resolution.

Explore how defensiveness and blame shifting escalate conflict in marriage, and how withdrawal and fixing responses impact communication. Learn practical, empathetic listening to improve engagement.

Identify how narratives, as stories, beliefs, and assumptions, drive current marital conflicts, reveal hidden blind spots, and show how past hurts affect present interactions for healthier engagement.

Explore how unresolved conflicts shape relationship narratives—from family of origin to marriage and self—distorting present conflicts and hindering fair fighting.

Identify underlying narratives in conflicts, drill into the thoughts and feelings behind them, assess the hurt, and pursue slow reconciliation through forgiveness to neutralize their present impact.

Discover the underlying drivers for conflict in marriage and learn to uncover, verbalize, and address narratives that shape reactions to build healthier communication.

Explore the structure of fair fighting in marriage, including three key conflict positions, the conflict cycle, and constructive conversations to navigate disputes, increase safety, resolution, and intimacy.

Learn to speak in conflict by defining who initiates and who catches, rating conflict depth, and choosing the right communication lane, using concise, precise, introspective, and vulnerable pitches for connection.

Learn to catch in conflict by mirroring back, asking curious questions, validating feelings, and empathizing, while keeping one pitch at a time for calm, compassionate dialogue.

Learn speaker-listener techniques for resolving marital conflict, focusing on concise pitching, precise messaging, introspection, vulnerability, and mirrored, curious, validating catchers to foster connection.

Map conversations into tier one, tier two, and tier three of connection and five lanes of communication, then stay in one tier and one lane at a time.

Explore proactive and reactive conflicts in marriage, planning your pitch, lane, and goal to steer fights toward resolution; use a timeout emergency lane when overwhelmed to reset.

Explore healthy and unhealthy conflict loops in marriage, and learn to regulate emotions to move toward healing and reconciliation. Spot triggers, floods, and narratives to stay on the healthier path.

Organize and divide and conquer conflicts in marriage by cycling through healthy conflict loops, separating issues into problem solution, alignment, and heartland lanes, and prioritizing emotional regulation.

Learn to prevent escalation with emergency and clarity lanes, timeouts, and deliberate conversations that manage triggers, flood points, and safe re-engagement in marriage conflicts.

Explore five postures for safe conflicts in marriage, including pre forgiveness, catalyst mindset, self-awareness, introspection, and compassionate curiosity, to sustain relationships and foster proactive communication.

Learn how to set up fair fighting in marriage through medic conflicts and goal-setting conflicts, including proactive scheduling, alignment of rules, and clear problem triage for healthier fights.

Adopt a five-posture safety harness for marriage conflicts: pre forgiveness, catalyst mindset, self-awareness, relentless introspection, and positive regard with compassionate curiosity. These mindsets enable constructive, forgiving, and growth-oriented conversations.

Learn how to keep conflict safe and constructive by using timeouts to cool down and reengage. Practice clarifying conversations to ensure mutual understanding.

Learn to navigate tier two and tier three conversations by building alignment, healing hurts, and juggling emotional balls to handle messy conflicts with resilience.

This lecture presents tier two alignment conversations to dream together and align on vision by defining one issue—money or parenting—dating it, and discovering a shared plan.

Explore tier two hurtling conversations in marriage, focusing on empathetic listening, feeling heard, and avoiding early problem solving to build unity and prepare for tougher conflicts.

Explore tier two conversations to connect with empathy through difficult emotions, using regulate, relate, and reveal steps for pitchers, and resist, relate, and remember for catchers.

Explore marital conflict through empathy and listening, avoid fix‑it responses, and practice tier two conversation spaces to be heard, aligning with the rules of engagement for fair fighting.

Explore tier 3 conflicts in marriage using a cadence from read, react, and process to soft starts and emergency lane timeouts, guiding misalignment and hurt feelings.

Tier three misalignments trigger conflicts over priorities, such as career and family; the lesson presents secure home base, empathy over truth, and meadow alignment to preserve unity and relational equity.

Explore how misalignments in marriage drive conflicts over boundaries, goals, and communication, and learn practical strategies for fair resolution.

Learn to pitch your hurts in conflict with six objectives—recognition, responsibility, restore, request, reset, and remember—focusing on clarity, vulnerability, and practical forgiveness.

This lecture presents the six objectives for reconciling hearts in conflict: recognize and validate hurt with compassion, take responsibility, express remorse, repent, reset, and remember.

Examine how conflicts stem from misalignments and hurts, revealing how fears about identity, appreciation, and boundaries influence couples' communication and paths to healing.

Explain deep marital hurts with a debt metaphor and emphasize ongoing healing. Five barriers—vulnerability, empathy, behavioral changes, accurate accounting, and grace—shape reconciliation progress.

Explore practical strategies to address deep hurts and resentments in marriage by recognizing pain, taking responsibility, forgiving, and communicating clear requests to foster reconciliation.