Every fight you've ever had started as a body event before it was a conversation. Today's the session where you actually see it happen — because once you can see the curve, you can catch it before it peaks.
Something lands — a comment, a dish left in the sink, a tone you didn't like — and before you've decided anything, your heart is already faster. That's not weakness and it's not you "overreacting." It's the oldest system you own, built to protect you from danger, firing at your kitchen table instead.
Nothing about the moment itself decides what happens next. What decides it is what your body does in the next ten seconds.
Heart rate climbs. Stress hormones move into your blood. And somewhere past three on a 0-to-5 gauge, the part of your brain that reasons, listens, and chooses its words carefully starts going quiet. This is flooding — a measurable body state, not a character flaw. Your body isn't malfunctioning here. It's doing exactly what it evolved to do. It's just aimed at the wrong target: your person, not a predator.
Here's what flooding does to the fight itself: the topic shrinks. What started as "you didn't do the dishes" stops being about dishes and starts being about who's right, whose voice is louder, who said what three months ago. The original issue is still in there somewhere. It just stopped being the point.
Here's the diagram you'll see for the next six weeks: the escalation curve for two. Both of you have a line, rising on the same 0-to-5 gauge — and the two lines don't have to move together. One of you might climb faster. One of you might stall at a two while the other keeps going. And critically: one line can bend away from the climb entirely, while the other keeps rising alone.
That's the whole shape of this program, before we've taught you a single skill: you can't control the other line. You can't make someone else bend theirs. What you can build, starting this week, is the skill of catching your own line early enough to bend it yourself. Your half. That's the entire game.