Retune the gain

Make the response stronger or weaker per unit of input or error.

Your partner mentions the dishes, mildly, and you respond as if accused of total domestic failure: a 20-minute defense, hurt silence, an evening lost. The input was a two-sentence comment. Your response was sized for a different, much larger event. Both of you now flinch before raising anything at all.

Retune the gain makes a response stronger or weaker per unit of input or error. Gain is the multiplier between what comes in and what you send back. The cue: reactions systematically oversized for their triggers, escalating small frictions, or undersized, so real problems get a shrug until they explode. Steps: collect three recent episodes and honestly compare input size to response size; pick a deliberate multiplier, matching a two-sentence comment with a two-sentence answer; install a damper for the transition, one breath and one clarifying question before responding; then review whether small comments are staying small. The visible change: minor frictions stop amplifying into lost evenings, and because raising issues gets cheaper, more of them surface early, while they are still minor. Gain runs both directions, so don't only turn it down; chronic under-response to genuine hurts is the same dial set wrong the other way, and some events deserve a large response.