Almost nobody says what they feel. They say something about you instead.
You never listen. You don't care. You always do this. All of it sounds like a verdict on your character, which is why it's so hard to hear and so easy to answer badly.
Underneath every one of those sentences is a person feeling something.
This takes what was said and helps you find the feeling in it.
Then it does the harder half. Their feeling landed in you and made a feeling of its own, and while that one is still loud, nothing they said is going to reach you. So you feel yours all the way through first. Then you go back and read their words again.
Three things worth knowing before you start.
Feelings are never right or wrong. They're weather.
A feeling is not a problem to solve. Solving it is how you end up in the argument.
Feelings are for feeling. That's the whole job.
Their words, as close to exact as you can get. The unflattering version is the useful one.
That's it. That's the whole message.
Notice what your hands want to do with it. Explain, defend, fix, prove it isn't true. All of those are answers to an accusation, and an accusation isn't what you just read.
A feeling doesn't need an answer. It needs somebody to have heard it.
Here's the part nobody does. Their feeling landed in you and made a feeling of its own, and that second one is running the next ten minutes.
Ten points. Tap each one gently with two fingers while the words are on screen, out loud if you can.
This isn't for making your feeling go away. It's for letting it move all the way through, which is the thing it's been waiting to do.
Then you'll read their sentence again. When yours has settled, theirs tends to land as information rather than as an attack, and there's no round two.
Two of the points ask you a question. Those come up in gold. Answer them out loud and keep tapping.
About ninety seconds.
Check the same feeling on the same scale. Wherever it landed is the honest number.
Read both of those slowly.
Same words. Different you. That's the only thing that changed, and it's usually enough.
A summary of what you found. Read it back before you close the tab.
Worth keeping. When you answer the words, you get an argument. When you answer the feeling underneath them, you usually get the person back.