If you’ve ever been in 12-step, you may have heard of the term “find the five”. It’s a guideline for responding to situations that might cause you to want to act out in some extreme way.

My boyfriend hasn’t responded as often or in the way I would like him to, so I’m either going to ignore him completely until he noticed or I’m going to lash out at him and accuse him of ignoring me/doing something more important/not caring about me.
Those are both extremes. So how so I find the five?

There’s no hard and fast rule, but a good rule of thumb is that it’s somewhere in between the two extreme ways you might want to respond.

So I respond to him like normal and ask him why it’s taking him so long to respond. I tell him I feel hurt when he did or didn’t do x, y, or z. I communicate my feelings instead of accusing and lashing out or withdrawing and burying.

It’s harder in some cases to know what the five is but it often starts with NOT doing the extreme behavior you may want to do. You know where that will lead. That’s what I remind myself.

I don’t have to react to this now. I can walk away. I can distract. I can think about it.

It’s taken me some practice but it gets easier to find the five :)