Remembering Us: A Practice that Grounds Us When We Forget What We Teach

I haven't written much this year.

Not because I haven't had ideas — quite the opposite, actually. There have been more ideas than I've known what to do with. But somewhere between changes with Scott's work, changes in my own work (more intensives and workshops and the prep for those), and the seemingly endless project of building a small home office in our backyard, life became...full.

The office project, in particular, has taken far more of our time and energy than either of us imagined. If you've ever tackled a renovation or built something from the ground up, you know that projects like these have a way of exposing every weakness in your planning, your patience...and sometimes your relationship. How wildly naive we were to think, “Oh, it's just a small, rectangular building…no problem!” It turns out that a small backyard structure can act as a giant magnifying glass for your communication flaws.

I'll be honest — there have been a few conflicts between us over these past several months that left us deeply discouraged. Not because conflict itself surprises us — we've had our fair share of it. And I've spent more than 15 years sitting with couples in conflict. I know better than most that disagreement is inevitable. But there were moments when I found myself wondering, Have we forgotten everything we teach?

Stress has a way of convincing us that all our growth has somehow disappeared. It has a way of shrinking our perspective until the conflict in front of us begins to feel like the whole story.

Finding the Rhythm

And yet...

Somewhere in the middle of this busy season, something quietly began happening. We didn't plan it. We didn't decide we needed another relationship exercise. We simply started reading together in the mornings over coffee.

One book became another. Sometimes practical philosophy, sometimes mindset oriented. Most recently we've been reading Think Again by Adam Grant — a wonderful book about curiosity, intellectual humility, and our willingness to rethink what we believe or think we know. Alongside the reading, we started listening through different courses on Insight Timer before beginning the rest of our day.

Nothing elaborate. And honestly, the magic wasn't in the specific books or the mindfulness courses we chose. We could have been reading a fiction novel or a book on Colorado state history. The anchor was simply the twenty minutes or so of beginning the day with our attention turned toward something together. It gradually became part of the rhythm of our mornings.

Not every morning. There were mornings when we were simply too hurt or too frustrated to sit together. Other mornings, life felt too hurried and we skipped it altogether. But more often than not, we found our way back to our seats in front of the fire, our coffee, our book, and whatever we happened to be listening to together.

At first, I thought we were simply creating a pleasant way to begin the day. Over time, though, I began noticing something else. Not that we were fighting less — honestly, that wasn't always true. The practice wasn't preventing conflict.

It was doing something steadier. It was consistently reminding us who we were beneath the conflict.

Relationships are shaped less by extraordinary moments than by ordinary ones we choose to repeat.

I spend a lot of my working life helping couples understand why they get stuck — helping them see the old patterns, the protective instincts, the wiring underneath a fight that so rarely has anything to do with what it's actually about. That work matters. Deeply. Understanding why we do what we do is often the thing that finally lets a couple stop taking each other's worst moments so personally.

…and lately I've found myself wondering if we sometimes get so busy understanding what hurts that we forget to also practice what heals.

Insight can tell you why the fight happened. It's rarely the thing that keeps the next one from being quite so damaging.

Understanding matters. Insight matters. Repair matters.

But our nervous systems aren't shaped only by what we understand. They're shaped by what we repeatedly experience.

When stress hits, our nervous systems immediately look for a familiar path. If criticism, defensiveness, or withdrawal are the roads we’ve repeatedly traveled, our bodies find them instantly. Your jaw clenches, your chest tightens, and suddenly your partner feels like the enemy. That is the old road.

The challenge, of course, is that painful experiences have a head start. Our brains are naturally wired to notice threat, remember hurt, and learn quickly from what feels dangerous. From an evolutionary perspective, that makes perfect sense. Remembering where the danger was was very important to our ancestors.

The downside is that our relationships can begin to feel defined by the storms, simply because our brains are so efficient at remembering them.

That's why it isn't enough to occasionally have good moments alongside the difficult ones. We have to intentionally return to and practice experiences of connection, curiosity, appreciation, and shared presence. Not because they erase the hard moments, but because they gradually teach our nervous systems another way of being together.

Our brains become remarkably efficient at traveling the roads we use most often. Every time we choose curiosity over defensiveness, or presence over distraction, we're not just avoiding the old road. We're laying pavement on one that didn't exist before.

It's slow. It's not much to look at in the moment — twenty minutes of coffee and a book doesn't feel like construction. But roads are like that. Nobody stands over wet concrete and feels like something historic is happening. You just know that months later, there's a path there that wasn't there before, and during a tense moment, your shoulders drop just enough to think, Wait. We don't have to go down the old road today.

The roads we travel most often eventually become the ones we reach without thinking.

Rehearsing the Relationship

That's what those mornings were doing, even when we couldn't see it. Even on the mornings we skipped, or the ones that came right after a hard conversation the night before — the road was still there, still being built, one ordinary twenty minutes at a time.

We are all shaped by things that hurt, and we don’t need to change that. We just need to remember that we are also shaped by repeated experiences of curiosity, appreciation, shared attention, laughter, learning, stillness, and simple presence.

We become what we repeatedly practice together.

A while back, I read a story shared by Derek Hart about a couple who had reached the point where nearly every conversation became an argument. They decided to stop trying to solve the conflict — at least for a little while. Instead, they went to a store together and bought a candle they both loved. Every evening they lit the candle, sat beside one another, and watched it burn for five minutes. No talking. No problem-solving. No processing. Just five minutes of sharing the same quiet space.

I have thought about that story often. (Not because I think you need to run out and buy a $40 artisanal soy candle that smells like 'Tranquility and Regret,' or start meditating together, or read the Tao Te Ching.)

The candle wasn't the point.

The practice was.

The more I've reflected on it, the more convinced I've become that every relationship is practicing something.

We're practicing rushing. Or slowing down. We're practicing assumptions. Or curiosity. We're practicing criticism. Or appreciation. We're practicing parallel lives. Or shared attention.

We're always rehearsing the relationship we're creating.

Beneath the Surface

In all of this, I've found myself thinking differently about what it means to become a conflict-capable couple. At first glance, reading together or listening to a meditation course hardly seems like preparation for conflict. But I'm beginning to see that conflict capability isn't only about how we learn to navigate difficult conversations.

It is cultivated in hundreds of ordinary moments that inevitably shape the emotional climate of a relationship — moments that remind our nervous systems what connection feels like, that reinforce the relationship we hope to return to after we've lost our way.

Healthy relationships don't avoid storms. The storms still come, and sometimes they arrive with surprising force. It may churn the surface. It may cloud the water for a while. But it doesn't change the depth that has been formed through the steady, intentional rhythms you have chosen to practice in the ordinariest of days.

Looking back, these mornings certainly did not keep us from conflict. But I believe they preserved something deeper. Even during our hardest moments, they had reinforced something I didn't fully appreciate until later:

I still wanted to keep choosing us.

Not because the conflict wasn't painful. Not because we handled it beautifully. But because those repeated moments of shared attention had become part of the emotional fabric of our relationship.

They reminded me that conflict wasn't the whole story.

You don't have to transform your relationship this weekend. You don't have to find the perfect ritual. You don't have to read specific books, download apps, or sit silently in front of a candle.

You simply have to begin practicing the relationship you hope to have. One ordinary moment at a time.

We didn't fix anything by reading together over coffee. We just kept showing up for each other long enough to remember why we wanted to.