You break the momentum by asking the other person, “How did we get to this tense place?” Then you do something the experts call “splitting.” Splitting is when you clarify your own motives by first saying what they are not and then saying what they are. You say something like “I certainly wasn’t trying to silence your voice. I was trying to include your point of view with the many other points of view on this topic. But I went too fast. I should have paused to try to hear your voice fully, so we could build from that reality. That was not respectful to you.” Then you try to reidentify the
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