How do you handle it when someone is criticizing, invalidating, or being mean to you? Do you fight back, shut down, appease, or walk away? Sometimes these strategies are super effective. Other times, they escalate conflict, increase resentment, or damage your relationship and self-respect. To be fair, sometimes you need these strategies; in some situations, escalating or avoiding is very effective.

Enter verbal aikido, an opportunity to add dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills to your toolkit and transform these painful interactions. This conversational strategy draws on principles of the martial art aikido and a small, powerful set of DBT skills. Like physical aikido, the goal is not to harm your attacker or escalate the situation. At minimum, verbal aikido aims to immobilize the attack. At its best, it transforms the conversation entirely.

The martial art aikido is called “the way of harmony.” Instead of meeting force with force, practitioners work with their opponent's energy to immobilize them and stop the attack. Verbal aikido applies this same logic to communication: Verbal attacks, criticism, bullying, and invalidation are not resisted or escalated; instead, they are met with nonresistance and redirection. When I first started teaching verbal aikido, my goal was to help clients immobilize the other person’s verbal attacks. The amazing part is that this approach can actually lead to a harmonizing of energy and........

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