LPT: When you're about to have a difficult conversation, write out what you want to say beforehand, not to read from it, just to get it out of your head
I'm not a therapist or anything, just someone who used to completely fall apart during hard conversations. Arguments with partners, talking to a boss about something that's bothering me, telling a friend something they don't want to hear. I would either go completely blank or say things in the worst possible order and then spend days replaying it and thinking about what i should have said instead.
Someone suggested this to me years ago and I thought it sounded like overkill, but I tried it before a genuinely stressful conversation with my landlord about some stuff that had been building up, and it made a noticeable difference.
The point isn't to script the whole thing out. It's that when something is stuck in your head and feels heavy, writing it down externalises it. You stop carrying it around mentally and it becomes something you can actually look at. You start to see which parts are the real issue and which parts are just noise. By the time you go into the conversation your head is a bit clearer, you're less reactive, and you don't feel like you're trying to think and talk at the same time.
I don't always even look at what I wrote before going in. Sometimes just the act of writing it is enough. The conversation still might go sideways, there's no controlling that, but at least you showed up knowing what you actualy wanted to say.
Takes maybe ten minutes. Has saved me from a lot of conversations i deeply regret.