Spell Casting for Beginners

Alt. Title: The Magic Words (and Actions) That Can Repair Relationships

What if I told you there’s a “magic” spell you could cast to help resolve any relational struggle you’re having? I’m not talking about some J.K. Rowling-style magic. (”Harry—yer a wizard!” — Hagrid) Nor am I talking about some Jedi mind trick. (”These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” — Obi-Wan Kenobi) I’m referring to the everyday, accessible magic of relational mindfulness.

Before I share the spell, let’s set the stage a bit.

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Here’s an Earth-shattering revelation: relationships are wonderful and they are hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying, has never been in one, or is named Pollyanna. The question isn’t whether you and your partner will face challenges…because you will. The question is what you will do when it happens.

This isn’t just a relationship happiness issue, but a performance one as well. In my coaching practice, I often help clients orient their intention around the health of their close relationships as a key toward unlocking better performance. Like any important partnership, relationships require attention, curiosity, and selflessness to thrive. When our “relational garden” isn’t tended well, performance suffers. In this way, the health of our relationships is a good barometer for our ability to succeed at our stated goals.

Luckily, relational conflicts are resolvable. This is where relational mindfulness can serve as such a powerful way to not just maintain our important relationships but also help them blossom over a lifetime.

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Terrence Real has spent over thirty years as a therapist, author, and teacher figuring out exactly that. He is the founder of Relational Life Therapy and the author of several books on relationships, including his latest, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. Real’s central argument in Us is both simple and a little uncomfortable: most of us are terrible at being in relationships, and the reason is that we were never taught how to be good at them. We were raised in a culture that prizes winning, individualism, and self-sufficiency. None of those things are particularly useful when you’re trying to build a life with another person.

At the heart of Real’s work is an important distinction. He argues that when we are triggered or in conflict, we are operating from what he calls the Adaptive Child: a reactive, survival-based part of our personality that developed in childhood to help us cope. The Adaptive Child is reactive, emotional, and not particularly interested in connection. It wants to win, escape, or fix. On the other side of that coin is what Real calls the Wise Adult: the calm, considered, and present part of us that is actually capable of showing up for another person. The goal, Real argues, is to stop letting the Adaptive Child run the show in our closest relationships.

Here is where most of us get into trouble. When our partner is hurting, our Adaptive Child reaches for the most available tool in the box: fixing. We offer solutions, perspective, and advice. We do this because we love them and genuinely want them to feel better. But the effect is almost always the opposite of what we intend. The person who needed to feel heard ends up feeling managed instead, and now you’ve got two people who are upset.

Real calls the antidote to this “generous listening.” This is a practice of crossing over into your partner’s experience and putting your own agenda aside in service of theirs. It sounds simple but it’s not easy. It requires something specific to pull off: the right words, at the right moment, said from the right place. When I first read Real’s language for his antidote years ago, it read like a magical spell that we could cast to break through the impasse, reestablish connection, and return to our happy place. I’ve used this spell many times in my relationship and it works! Not because I’m actually casting magic, but because it primes the Wise Adult in me to step forward.

Spell time!

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“I’m so sorry you feel bad. I don’t want you to feel bad. I love you. Is there anything I can say or do right now that would help you feel better?”

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Let’s break down Real’s language.

“I’m so sorry you feel bad.”

This is acknowledgment, plain and simple. No judgment. No “well, technically...” No pivot to the facts of the situation. You are not agreeing with your partner’s interpretation of events. You are not conceding the argument. You are simply recognizing that someone you love is in pain. That’s it. It costs nothing and it means everything.

“I don’t want you to feel bad.”

This is alignment. It is a reminder (to your partner and to yourself) that you are on the same team. The Adaptive Child turns relationships into a competition with winners and losers. This sentence refuses that framing. It says: your pain is my concern. We are not opponents here.

“I love you.”

Real calls this “remembering love.” In the heat of conflict, love is the first thing to go offline. Not because it disappears, but because the flooded brain loses access to it. This sentence is a recentering act. It is a choice to reach for the part of you that knows why this relationship matters, even when (especially when) that part feels very far away. If you can say “I love you” and mean it in that moment, you’ve already done most of the hard work.

“Is there anything I can say or do right now that would help you feel better?”

This is the heart of the spell and the piece that makes it so radical. Notice what it’s not doing. It’s not offering a solution. It is not assuming what your partner needs. It is putting your partner in the driver’s seat of their own comfort and trusting them to know what they need better than you do.

This is what Real means by generous listening. You are not fixing. You are not advising. You are not making it about you. You are crossing over the bridge into their experience and asking, with genuine curiosity, what would be helpful in the moment.

This might go without saying, but there is a final part of the spell that is crucial for it to work. You need to actually listen to the response. If the response is “I’d like to be alone right now,” give your partner space. If it’s “get me a sandwich,” by all means do that!

The spell works well for resolving misunderstandings. But understanding why we misunderstand loved ones in the first place can help us fine-tune our spell-casting abilities.

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Yael Schonbrun is a clinical psychologist, faculty at Brown University, and author of the forthcoming book Why Don’t You Understand Me?: The Surprising Science Behind Connecting in a World of Missed Signals. (It’s excellent and available for pre-order now.) In her research and her wonderful Substack newsletter Relational Riffs, she studies the science of how people connect and, more often than not, fail to.

Schonbrun’s forthcoming book makes an argument that is essential for proper spell-casting: misunderstanding is not primarily a communication problem, it’s a perception problem.

Most of us assume that if we just say things clearly enough, the people we love will understand us. And when they don’t, we assume the breakdown happened somewhere in the exchange: a poor choice of words, a wrong tone, bad timing. But Schonbrun’s research points elsewhere. Understanding, she argues, happens inside people, in how we filter, interpret, and make meaning of what we hear, not between people in the words themselves. The glitch is in the receiver, not the signal.

It gets worse. Schonbrun’s book draws on research from psychologist Nicholas Epley showing that our instinct to imagine what our partner is thinking and feeling, what researchers call “perspective-taking,” not only fails to improve our accuracy but can actually backfire. We end up projecting our own assumptions and blind spots onto the other person while feeling fully convinced that we are being empathetic. We think we are understanding but we are mostly just seeing ourselves.

This is exactly the trap the spell is designed to avoid. Rather than attempting to read your partner’s mind (and likely getting it wrong with great confidence), the spell does something far more elegant. It asks. That final question — “is there anything I can say or do right now that would help you feel better?” — is a direct refusal to assume. It treats your partner as the only reliable expert on their own inner experience, because they are.

From a performance standpoint, this matters more than it might first appear. Misunderstandings have a cost. They drain energy, occupy mental bandwidth, and have a way of showing up uninvited in other areas of life. Unresolved relational tension doesn’t stay in the relationship: it follows you to work, to the gym, to the dinner table. When you cast the spell to resolve misunderstanding and your partner feels genuinely heard and understood, you are, both at once, doing the right thing for the relationship and removing obstacles to your performance.

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So you have the spell. You can see why it works. Now the question is how to make it available to you in the moments when you need it most. Here are three practices worth building into your life to improve your relational mindfulness.

Practice Perspective-Getting, Not Perspective-Taking

Most of us were taught that empathy means putting yourself in someone else’s shoes: imagining what they must be feeling and responding accordingly. David Robson, science writer and author of The Laws of Connection, argues that this instinct, however well-intentioned, is one of the most reliable sources of misunderstanding we have. When we try to imagine what our partner is experiencing, we mostly end up projecting our own assumptions onto them while feeling confident we’ve got it right. His solution is to replace perspective-taking with what he calls perspective-getting: instead of imagining, ask.

This is the engine underneath the spell. The final question — “is there anything I can say or do right now that would help you feel better?” — is perspective-getting in its most elegant form. It replaces assumption with curiosity and confidence with humility. And it hands your partner something that perspective-taking almost never delivers: the experience of actually being asked.

The next time someone you care about is frustrated or upset, resist the urge to imagine what they need. Ask instead.

Use Emotional Coaching Before Problem-Solving

Robson also offers a two-step process for supporting someone in distress. Step one: ask the person to name what they are feeling. Step two: affirm that those feelings make sense, even if you see the situation differently. Only after both steps have been completed should you consider whether a solution is wanted or needed at all.

Sound familiar? This is the architecture of the spell, backed by research. Acknowledgment first. Alignment second. The “ask” third. The sequence matters because you cannot skip to the solution and expect it to land. The emotional coaching has to come first.

In practical terms, this means training yourself to pause before responding to a partner in distress and asking: have I acknowledged the feeling yet? Have I made clear I’m on their side? If the honest answer to either question is no, you are not yet ready to problem-solve. You are still in spell-casting territory.

Ask “Why” Instead of “How”

This last one is small but mighty. Robson recommends that in moments of conflict, you replace “how” questions with “why” questions. “How do we fix this?” keeps you anchored in problem-solving mode. “Why are you feeling this way?” opens the door to understanding. The difference is subtle but the effect is significant. One question assumes there is a problem to be solved. The other assumes there is a person to be understood.

“How” questions, in Real’s framework, are Adaptive Child territory. They move fast, skip the emotional work, and reach for resolution before connection has been restored. “Why” questions slow things down. They signal that you are more interested in your partner’s inner experience than in tidying up the situation. And they create the conditions in which the spell can actually take hold.

The good news, as Robson is careful to point out, is that none of this requires a personality transplant. These are skills that are trainable and they get easier with repetition. The first time you pause and ask instead of assume, it will feel awkward. By the fortieth time, it might still feel awkward but you’ll know that you’re doing the right thing.

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Real, Schonbrun, and Robson are making versions of the same argument from different angles: the people we love need to feel understood far more than they need to be fixed. When we lead with understanding, everything else (repair, reconnection, hard conversations) becomes possible.

The spell won’t resolve every conflict or transform every difficult conversation into a tender moment. But it is a beginning. A signal to your partner that you have chosen the relationship over the argument, connection over being right, the “us” over the “you and me.”

Cast it. Mean it. See what happens.

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Three Book Recommendations:

Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship, Terrence Real

Why Don’t You Understand Me?: The Surprising Science Behind Connecting in a World of Missed Signals, Yael Schonbrun

The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network, David Robson

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Three Relationship Policy Recommendations:

Establish a “Check Yourself before You Wreck Yourself” policy. This is where you and your partner can, in the moment, call a time-out and point out words or behaviors that are upsetting, thereby not allowing them to fester. Part of the policy includes the aggravating party not taking it personally when they are called out.

Create a “Check-In” policy. Use this to establish a dedicated time for you and your partner to connect on whatever either of you want to connect about. Do this facing each other. No devices or interruptions allowed.

Start a “Daily Compliment” policy. Yes, every day. Yes, it has to be genuine. Yes, “you look nice today” counts as long as you mean it. The bar is low. Have fun clearing it creatively.

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Thank you for reading this edition of Rhetorical Exercise. I hope you found it both useful and entertaining as you strive to perform your best at the things that matter most to you.

Peace and love,

Chris