5. Preventives and dampers: After you've got a decent description of your pet loop, the next question is how to damp it down. Here, get creative but above all pragmatic. Think about ways to keep from triggering it, ways to defuse triggers, ways to keep from feeling tempted to trigger it, ways to break the cycle even temporarily (taking an hour apart, for example) so as to slow its escalation, and ways to dampen it once it's in full swing. Try to make this as collaborative a conversation as possible. If one person is engineering the whole solution, it's hard for both people to feel real buy-in. Call in a third party if necessary. And above all, watch out for the temptation to fall into the loop while trying to design ways to avoid falling into it. Beware as always of loaded language. And be realistic. This is no time for moralizing talk about what one should do if one were perfectly reasonable. Deal with the people you are and not the people you wish you were. Scale your ambitions appropriately. In my experience a sign that a relationship is on its last legs is when my partner and I are spending increasing amounts of time making pledges to be some different way "from now on." It's not easy or reliable to consistently override your own gut with some pledge like "from now on I'll appreciate you more" (see Gumming).