explosive fights / advice before trying counseling
My partner and I are just married (after three years of being together) and we are really struggling with explosive fights. Obviously, I think she's starting them, she thinks I am, etc. — but that's not particularly useful. We're both sensitive, high-strung people.
It has gotten to the point where we are fighting multiple times a week (think, cursing at each other, saying really horrible things, threatening to leave, etc). It feels awful, and once we calm down it's this horrible devastating feeling for us both.
I brought up counseling, and she is adamantly opposed to it. I am sure if I said something like "we do this or I file for divorce" (etc) then it would happen — we do not want to get divorced, we love each other. But it would be extremely difficult and would take a lot of work, and I don't like the feeling of ultimatums.
Right now, I'm wondering what we can try *before* I go down that road.
What techniques/tricks/etc do you use to defuse or stop fights?
We have tried doing twenty-minute time outs, where either one of us can call them, and we just leave each other alone for twenty minutes. That often is very powerful.
It works about 50% of the time. But it doesn't always work, because one person can't back off. And there's a lot of resentment that's built up. We feel lonelier because of it, and that makes us more sensitive.
Do people have other suggestions that we can add in to our toolkit? Neither of us had good models from our respective families, we are both very proud etc people, and relationships do NOT come easy to us.
tl;dr We fight a lot, and we fight mean. What are some tools we can use to reduce the number and lengths of fights.