When your best friend or partner or kid snaps at you, it’s easy to frame them as difficult. Anna Elton, a marriage and family therapist in Palm Beach, Fla., would like you to consider a different story. “When you see anger, it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” she says. “Anger is the secondary emotion. The primary emotion could be sadness, could be disappointment, could be stress.” That’s where empathy enters the picture. Tapping into it helps you look past the surface to find out what’s actually going on underneath, Elton says.

Your empathy level is what decides whether you feel closer to someone after a hard conversation or whether you feel like you’re on opposite sides—or, as Elton says, being on the same team vs. “you against me.” Practiced over time, it changes how you show up in every relationship. You can get better at it with practice,  and empathy will serve you well: it can help you end arguments faster or avoid them altogether.

Here are five easy ways to build up your empathy before or after your next disagreement.

Pretend like you’re talking to a child

Imagine you’re explaining a disagreement to a child. Walk them through what happened, suggests HJ Cho, a clinical social worker in Bridgewater, N.J. Try not to use loaded words, a drawn-out backstory, or language that casts the other person as a villain—and focus on explaining what actually occurred, including how you felt and what you were thinking.

“We’re not projecting; we’re not catastrophizing,” Cho says. “We’re relaying this situation so it can be understood by all.”

The exercise works because forced simplicity surfaces a more neutral version of events: ”the one that has room for another perspective,” Cho says.

Trade places with your partner on paper

Pick a recent interaction that didn’t go well, and write a paragraph about it from your point of view. Then rewrite the same situation from the other person’s perspective—and use “I” statements, as if you actually were your clueless partner or rude boss.

You might write about your experience like this, for example: “My partner is distracted and doesn’t care about what I say when I’m talking to him about my day.” Then, consider what he might have been going through. Your next paragraph might look like this: “ ‘Well, I had a stressful day and I was mentally drained. I don’t have the energy to fully engage, but I deeply care.’”

“You put yourselves in their shoes so you’re not just being reactive,” says Eden Garcia-Balis, a marriage family therapist in Los Angeles. The point isn’t to convince yourself that they were right. It’s to discover that more than one thing can be true at once. “Multiple explanations can exist all at the same time,” she says. “You can feel dismissed and they can feel stressed at the same time. And then, when you’re empathetic, you can come up with a solution together.”

Talk to yourself like a friend

Before you can extend empathy to anyone else, you have to extend it to yourself. That’s something Cho often tells her clients. “Empathy that we show to others is built on the empathy that we hold for ourselves,” she says. “It’s important that we show empathy to ourselves, because otherwise, we really struggle to show empathy to other folks.”

The next time you’re spun up before or after a hard conversation, take 60 seconds to say to yourself what you’d say to your best friend in the same situation. Not “calm down” or “you’re overreacting.” Instead, opt for real validation: “That was a hard thing to hear. Of course you’re upset. It makes sense you’d feel this way.”

The point isn’t to convince yourself you’re right; it’s to get regulated enough to actually be present with the other person. “When you’re regulated, all systems are online,” Cho says. “That just really allows you to be the best version of yourself.”

Take a 90-second perspective shift

Here’s one you can even do in the heat of an argument. Set a timer for 90 seconds, and answer three questions as if you’re the other person, Elton advises:

When the timer ends, return to your own perspective and ask yourself: “What did I miss?”

This is a good way to gain control over your emotions—the first step to building empathy. “Sometimes we just get flooded with emotion, and we want to argue back or show why we’re right,” Garcia-Balis says. “This really helps you take a step back, regulate your emotions, and reflect: ‘What else can be possible?’” 

When you’re in the middle of a disagreement, the person across from you can start to feel like a stranger. That’s one of the biggest reasons empathy gets harder to access mid-fight, says Patty Van Cappellen, a social psychologist at Duke University. “Conflict is typically when people see themselves as being more distant,” she says. “Like, ‘I don’t recognize this other person.’”

The fix is what she calls psychological closeness. “Focus on aspects in the relationship that will bring you closer,” she advises. That might mean that mid-fight, or before you start having a hard conversation, you remind yourself of something you share with this person: A hardship you endured together; an inside joke; the trip where everything went comically wrong, but you had a blast. Then proceed.

Ultimately, empathy is what lets you stop reacting to your partner and start hearing them. “When you're able to identify that emotion within your partner,” Elton says, “it creates connection and a sense of feeling seen and understood.”