Most Relationship Conflict Feels Less Like D-Day and More Like Groundhog Day
In our most important relationships, we become prisoners of a pattern. We get stuck in a cycle. We get trapped by our triggers. Our key conversations collapse into the same conflict every time. Our best intentions revert to knee-jerk reactions. Perhaps we plan to speak up, but instead we clam up. Or the opposite: we plan to calm down, but instead we throw down. It’s the last thing we want in our marriage, family, friendships, or business, but we often feel powerless to change it.
Are you afraid of doing irreparable damage to your relationships?
Can you feel the stress of unresolved conflict in your body during the day?
Do you lose sleep at night, trying to solve it with no solutions in sight?
Is your preoccupation with it disrupting your presence and productivity?
Are you weighed down by disconnection and frustration, hurt and loneliness?
Are you losing hope in your ability to save an important relationship?
If so, you’re not alone. Not even close. Research from the Gottman Institute shows that when people get triggered into negativity in their relationships, 94% of the time they are unable to pull themselves out of it. They feel like they don’t have a choice in the matter.
Would you like to join the 6% of people with the freedom to choose connection over conflict?
Twenty years ago, I got a Ph.D. in communication and relationship counseling.
Like everyone else, I was trained to believe people connect poorly because they lack communication skills. However, to my dismay, the best communication tools weren’t very helpful to my clients, and my own marriage was soon on the ropes.
So I dedicated my life to figuring out why, and this is what I've discovered...
We close our communication toolbox right when we need our tools the most.
Drawing on decades of psychological training, insights from various sciences and wisdom traditions, and real-world testing with clients and in my own life, I’ve developed a process that shows you how to access the right tools when your relationships need them most. It’s called the Peaceful Pivot Process.
Why the Peaceful Pivot Process Works
We instinctively try to create connection by:
Repairing our relationship ruptures first
Avoiding triggers in the future
Hoping for inner peace eventually
Instead, we must consciously create connection by:
Cultivating calmness before connectedness
Turning our triggers into our teachers
Showing up rupture-proof to our relationships
Free yourself from the patterns that imprison your relationships.
Read The Road Less Triggered and find out how to:
- Navigate high stakes moments with quiet confidence.
- Exit forever the tiresome cycle of rupture and repair.
- Set collaborative boundaries without contentious battles.
- Turn potential conflict into powerful curiosity.
- Make compassionate connection your default condition.
- Raise kids who are able to leave home but still love to return.
- Ensure your friendships grow deeper, not distant.
- Keep your baggage from weighing down your business.
The world is on a hair trigger, because the economic engine of civilization increasingly runs on your arousal. Triggered people are attentive people, and attentive people buy the solutions you’re selling. The only thing better for business than deregulation is dysregulation.
However, I believe the algorithmic hijacking of our nervous systems has us on the cusp of an essential leap in human consciousness: the awareness that peace in the world begins with peace in the body. I’m trying to put myself out of business one peaceful body and and one less-triggered relationship at a time.
So, what do you say: do you want to get less triggered with me?
Dr. Kelly’s Previous Books
#1 Amazon New Release – Interpersonal Relationships
Loveable: Embracing What Is Truest About You So You Can Truly Embrace Your Life
In Loveable, I write, “We rarely remember the precious months or years when we experienced our worthiness as a fact. A given. Something as present, real, and natural as breathing and playing and animal crackers.”
Loveable is written to the little one in each of us, who is all too ready to be reminded: you are enough, you are not alone, and you matter. Here, I reveal the core insight gleaned from decades of practice as a clinical psychologist: you are here for a reason, yet you cannot truly awaken to it until you have first embraced your truest, worthiest self and then allowed yourself to be truly embraced by others.
“Wise and encouraging, honest and inspirational, Loveable is a handbook for how to be human.”
Weaving heart-warming storytelling, gentle insights, and the wisdom of my faith tradition—including my belief that we are all “the living, breathing bearers of the eternal, transcendent, and limitless Love that spun the planets and hung the stars”—these pages invite you to remember the name you were given before all other names: Loveable.
#1 Amazon New Release – Interpersonal Relationships
True Companions: A Book for Everyone About the Relationships That See Us Through
The three ordinary human experiences which plague most relationships can be transformed into the fertile ground for enduring, lifelong companionship.
“I know this book will touch many lives. Kelly Flanagan has harvested the rich rewards of true companionship from the everyday struggles of doing real life together―a gift to every couple and every kind of companion everywhere.”
In the pages of True Companions, you will learn:
- The one experience that causes the most conflict in relationships but could become the source of the best connection
- The one goal that must be mutually agreed upon in relationships, if you hope to trade in your protection for connection
- The one perspective that will allow you to keep your priorities straight, your relationships first, and your companionship thriving
Award-Winning Debut Novel
The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell: A Novel
Elijah Campbell is on the verge of losing his writing career, his faith, and his marriage when a recurring childhood nightmare drives him back to his hometown, Bradford’s Ferry. There, his encounters with loved ones both past and present shed light on the reason his wife left him—and the meaning of his nightmare. However, beyond the light he begins to glimpse something even more terrifying—a decision he must make…to continue hiding the secrets of his past or unhide the only thing that can save his marriage: himself.
“Tuesdays with Morrie meets The Shack in The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell. A pitch-perfect page-turner of a story about one man’s dismantling and reconstruction as he collides with his past. Authentic, heart-rending, absorbing, and wise, this book hits the bull’s-eye of psychological and spiritual relevance.”
—Cheryl Grey Bostrom, award-winning author of Sugar Birds
- WINNER: ILLUMINATION BOOK AWARD, General Fiction
- WINNER: AMERICAN FICTION AWARDS, General Fiction, Literary Fiction
- SILVER MEDAL: NAUTILUS BOOK AWARD, General Fiction
- SEMIFINALIST: CAROL AWARD, Contemporary Fiction