Yes, I am imagining how heartbreaking it might be to, again and again, find yourselves in the situation of suddenly being too triggered to maintain your presence and ability to make conscious choices, and you end up treating each other in a way that really does not represent your heart and how you want to be.

Of course, both of you can individually work on your own triggers, exploring what exactly sets you off and why, what interpretations happen there in these short seconds, what reactions… Embracing feelings, giving them space, rehabilitating your soul capacity to be in its fulness while transcending the need to shrink into persona for some safety. But working on this takes time, and in the meantime you might end up wounding each other badly.

I would suggest you to have regular dialogues on this topic. Perhaps in the evening, when you both can relax, you are not triggered, and you can, as companions, with curiosity and an exploratory mind, together search for an answer to the following question: “These situations will likely happen again. How can we then, in the midst of an overwhelm, support ourselves and each other to maintain some meta-awareness and not fall into the pitfall of reactions?”

For instance, can you stop, hug for one minute, and then continue talking? Or perhaps do a time-out hand gesture and keep silent for five minutes, before you continue? Or go in separate rooms for five minutes, to self-connect? I understand that in these situations often you don’t have capacity to do anything at all but to let the stream of rage carry you. Yet perhaps together, looking at this situation as a challenge on your journey, you can, with all the creativity you can come up with, find one little doable action.

And you try it out and perhaps it will work and perhaps not. And then next week you sit down again, talk, evaluate results, see if you can come up with more ideas. Not only you might come up with strategies that will be possible and effective in moments you described, but I imagine also your awareness can increase through these conversations, making it possible to have enough spaciousness in these moments to pause.

I hope this is meaningful.