Sleep cross

The truce is called and the time is set. Now the two of you go upstairs, cross, and this chapter is about how.

The same bed. Chapter 13 is the argument. Unless there's a reason from chapter 24, you sleep where you sleep, together, cross, and the crossness is a state the two of you are in and not a division.

Phones down. The phone in bed after a row is the row continued, alone, in the worst possible medium. The message you'd send at half past eleven is the sentence from half past twelve with a timestamp. Phones downstairs, or face down, and the row on the note and nowhere else.

The twenty minutes. An earlier book in this series, about anger, has a rule that nothing is said or decided in the first twenty minutes after the heat rises, and the same twenty minutes apply here, upstairs. The body takes a while to stand down after a row. Lie there. Don't fill the twenty minutes with the circuit. Breathe out slowly, a few times. It's not a technique. It's what a body does when it's allowed to.

The sentence. If anything is said, it's this. "We're not finished and that's fine. Eight o'clock." Said once, by either of you. It's not an apology and it's not a concession. It's the truce, restated, in the dark, and it's what lets the other person stop bracing.

Let the drift. Your mind will go to the row. Let it. It's the reprocessing from chapter 4 starting, and it does its work better if it isn't being fought. If it circuits, remember there's a note by the kettle and a time in the morning, and that the note has the subject on it and the morning has the two of you in it, and let the circuit run down.

If sleep won't come. Then it won't for a while, and that's the body still standing down, and it's fine. Lying cross and awake next to someone is not a failure of the method. It's the first night of a method that gets easier, and by the third or fourth truce you'll be asleep within the half hour, because the row isn't live and the body has learned that it isn't.

The morning. Wake, and before anything else, remember it's eight. Not to rehearse. Just to know the appointment's there and you're going to it. The rest is chapter 21.