The conflict in your
relationship has reached the point of boiling over, even to the point of breaking up. You want to try again, but you're afraid you'll soon find yourself back in the same arguments. Getting out of the cycle of conflict isn't easy, and you don't know what to do.
If only you could do something, like buy the perfect gift, or conjure up some perfect funny romantic prank that manages to change everything, like they do in the movies. Through the whole scene you'd have this magic power over your words, and manage to just say and do all the perfect things. You would bring the audience to tears.
Only, in real life, we all know it doesn't work that way. Our efforts are usually clumsy, and we stumble through, and we're tasting shoe leather more times than we'd like.
The problem is that we try too hard, and we're trying to do something where in fact we should do nothing. We forget that it's all the things we've been doing that have gotten us to this point. Sure, we realize we've been doing something wrong, but we think that the answer lies in coming up with actions or words that are the "right" ones.
And what makes us think that, after all our efforts that haven't worked, we're going to suddenly come up with the brilliant Master Plan? And what makes us think that, even if we did, we're not going to execute it in a manner that just repeats the same old patterns.
It may sound bit like something Mr. Miagi from the "Karate Kid" movie might say, but it makes sense: the first stage of repairing a broken relationship is to do nothing. What you need to do is back up, cool off, and give your partner time to do the same. That's why I call the first of this series of articles on how to get your ex back I call step "zero:" because at this stage of the game, your goal is not only to do nothing no, but to learn and exercise this vital skill of self-restraint.
During this initial cool off phase you will have to switch from an "active" state of mind where you are trying to pursue the right actions and words (and possibly frantically pursuing your partner as well), to a "passive" state of mind where you are observing yourself and your situation opening yourself to new ways of looking at things. And, you should be preparing yourself to listen and be receptive to your partner rather than trying to "do something" that will fix everything.
In fact, not only during the make-up phase, but during many moments of relationship conflict and especially during the reconciliation process, the path of non-action is often the best path to take. Instead of getting caught up in cycles of actions and their reactions, which tend to be habitual and repeat the same destructive patterns that lead to break-ups, you need to train yourself to be more thoughtful, aware, and observant of your reactions. And, generally speaking, you have to be patient, you have to give the action that you do take sufficient time to blossom.
Just this change alone can often produce amazing results, because now you're not acting and reacting the way in the same old ways that your partner thought you would, which leaves him or her free to not act or react in the same old ways. The change you make in yourself becomes the change they can make in themselves. This is how you begin to break your relationship's patterns of conflict that led to the breakup in the first place and that continue to threaten to destroy it once again.
