Founder, Repaired
Builder. Learned conflict repair the hard way. Greenville, Michigan → wherever the work takes him.
Thomas Zinn grew up in Greenville, Michigan and has spent most of his adult life building things: companies, tools, frameworks, systems. He is a co-founder of PayIt2, a payment platform for customer-facing organizations, and runs Zinnovation LLC as a vehicle for his software projects.
Repaired started with Thomas being bad at conflict. He was anxious in relationships, then avoidant, and divorced twice; much of that, by his own account, was on him. The understanding came later, from work on himself and inside a relationship where the two of them see the world differently and react differently when something lands. He had read the relationship research, and he and his partner had tried to build their own process for handling conflict. The tools they found helped the relationship generally, but not the conflicts specifically. Repaired is the process he needed: one that assumes you are in the middle of a rupture and carries both people through the reasons a repair is hard and past the moments where it usually breaks.
The name came out of a breakfast conversation about how hard it is to find help when a relationship hits a rough patch. It stuck because it works on two levels: coming back together as a pair, and repairing something worth keeping.
Thomas approaches most things the way he approaches engineering: empirically, with skepticism about conventional wisdom, and with a strong preference for systems that work over systems that sound good. He is not a therapist. The research behind Repaired, on communication science, attachment theory, and conflict resolution, was done by people with decades of clinical and academic work. His contribution was taking it seriously and building something usable out of it.
Outside of work: disc golf, philosophy, systems thinking, and anything with a genuinely unsolved problem at the center. He writes more personally at mrzinn.com.
· 9 min read
The research traditions behind couples therapy each explain a piece of why conflict goes wrong. Almost none of them hand you a sequence. The Repaired Method is that sequence: where it comes from, what the five phases are, and why each one exists.
· 8 min read
The worst time to figure out repair is mid-conflict. Here is the sequence for the quiet moment before the next hard one: six steps, each grounded in decades of research on what actually helps two upset people find their way back.
· 8 min read
The two most researched approaches to couples therapy start from different places: one from decades of observing couples argue, one from attachment science. Here is what each actually does, where the evidence is honestly strong for each, and how to think about choosing.
· 9 min read
Every piece of conflict advice says to listen first. But the moment that makes listening necessary is the same moment that makes it nearly impossible. The problem is not you. It is the sequence.
· 11 min read
Six frameworks explain why relationships break down and what to do about it. But knowledge is not the same as a process. Here is what each framework contributes, and what structured repair provides that none of them do alone.
· 10 min read
ACT is one of the most rigorously tested psychotherapies available. Its application to conflict is underappreciated: rather than changing what you think or feel, it asks whether your behaviour in difficult moments actually serves your values.
· 10 min read
Terry Real's RLT is one of the most direct approaches to couples work available. It names the five things people do in conflict that reliably make things worse, and gives you a concrete framework for doing something different.
· 10 min read
IFS is a model of the mind built on a simple idea: we contain multiple sub-personalities, or parts. Some protect us, some carry old pain, and one of them, the Self, is always intact. Here is how it works and why it matters for conflict.
· 10 min read
EFT is one of the most rigorously tested couples therapies we have. Developed by Sue Johnson, it is built on attachment theory and focused on the emotional bond, not just communication skills. Here is how it works and what the evidence says.
· 9 min read
John Gottman spent decades watching couples argue in a lab, then following them for years to see what happened. Here is what the data found: the Four Horsemen, repair attempts, flooding, and what actually distinguishes couples that stay together.
· 8 min read
NVC is a framework for having hard conversations without making them harder. Here is what it actually means, how the four-step model works, and why most people use it wrong.