Raquel Reis: Negotiating Calmly With a High-Conflict Ex

"Let me get back to you." Relationship coach Raquel Reis calls that her favorite sentence in any area of life, and she wants you using it at the moment an offer sounds good, not only when it sounds bad. Agreeing quickly because you want the conversation to end is how people land in an order they will spend the next two years trying to modify.

Raquel Reis is a relationship coach based in New York City who works with couples and with individuals on communication and conflict, and on turning differences into teamwork instead of a fight. She has trained across a range of modalities and is straightforward that a good deal of what she teaches came out of her own mistakes. She also notices that people who come to her alone tend to move faster than couples, because they show up without the illusion that they are going to change anybody else. She is a friend of Lisa's, and this conversation applies her work somewhere it rarely gets applied: negotiating with an ex who has no interest in cooperating.

The premise is that you can only manage yourself, and Raquel argues that is a stronger position than it feels like from inside it. She goes through the Gottman Institute's research on the soft start-up, the finding that how a conversation begins predicts how it ends, and why opening with something you can honestly appreciate lowers the other person's defenses before anything is decided. She explains negative bias override, why a nervous system that has spent years under threat keeps scanning for danger and stops noticing the small conciliatory gestures coming back, and why regulating your own physiology matters more than executing any tactic correctly.

The back half is immediately usable. Curious questions rather than statements, since a statement can be attacked and a question asks for an answer. The silence after the question. "I hear you," which agrees to nothing. What she calls an emotional diet: no blaming, no complaining, no defending, treated as businesslike as you can manage when the subject is your children and your money. And closing even a bad conversation with thanks for the time and a request for space rather than a decision. Lisa connects it to the strategic communication Been There Got Out teaches, describes realizing she had never once paused in a twenty-year relationship, and makes the case that people who try mediation once and declare it useless are the ones who end up in court for years.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why the way a negotiation opens tends to predict the way it ends
• Starting with an appreciation, and why it lowers the other person's guard
• Negative bias override: why you stop noticing the other side's concessions
• "Let me get back to you," and why it applies most when the offer sounds good
• Asking curious questions instead of making statements, and what the silence does
• The emotional diet: no blaming, no complaining, no defending
• Why trying mediation once and abandoning it is not a fair test of mediation
• How regulating yourself changes the other person's behavior without changing them

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Tactical empathy, and why negotiating with a difficult ex is worth trying
5:00 Why one person can change the dynamic, and what you can actually control
12:00 The three parts of a negotiation: tactical, somatic, and how you see them
15:00 Starting with an appreciation, and the soft start-up
17:00 Negative bias override, and letting yourself feel the discomfort
24:00 "Let me get back to you," and Lisa on twenty years of not pausing
29:00 Never deciding under pressure, and what a coerced agreement costs later
32:00 Curious questions, silence, and the emotional diet
38:00 Mediation as a process, and court as the expensive alternative
42:00 Appreciation at the close, good customer service, and co-regulation

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183

🎧 More with Raquel Reis on this podcast
Ep 176: Growing Up in a High-Conflict Home

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.