We explore how Relational Life Therapy helps couples move from harshness to loving firmness, from accuracy wars to curiosity, and from quiet withdrawal to active repair. Kristy Gaisford shares personal lessons, the five dysfunctional patterns, and practical tools for daily change.

• the five dysfunctional patterns: being right, controlling, unbridled self-expression, retaliation, withdrawal
• start with self: sturdiness, humility, owning impact
• customer-service rule: turn-taking and sequencing complaints
• the feedback wheel: story, feeling, request, future
• loving firmness over harshness in tough talks
• the adaptive child versus wise adult self
• relationship reckoning: grieving the ideal and choosing the real
• harmony, disharmony, repair as the normal cycle
• questions that open repair and end defensiveness

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