I know, right? What a yucky topic: conflict. You might be saying, “I don’t like conflict!” Not many people do. It’s just uncomfortable and many folks are straight-up conflict avoidant. Besides, how could conflict be healthy? Isn’t conflict bad, and aren’t we all supposed to want to achieve a state of no conflict? Well, truth is, there really is such a thing as healthy conflict, and that’s the topic for today. Ready to tackle this one? Here we go.
We all know that none of us are perfect. Narcissists especially, (and the rest of us most of the time too), would love to have you believe they are perfect, but it simply isn’t true. It is inevitable, then, that we are all going to get our feelings hurt from time to time, by our imperfect friends, coworkers, significant others, etc. It’s gonna happen. We’re going to hurt them sometimes, too, no matter how hard we try not to. We have a unique opportunity to gather information during this kind of event though, and can use the information to either perpetuate the hurt and further damage our relationship, or actually help our relationship. That’s right, I said that we can use the inevitable hurts in our relationships to make them better and stronger. This is achieved through the process of healthy conflict.
To demonstrate healthy conflict, I am going to take you through the process in a very typical scenario. I’m also going to point out along the way how each person has the opportunity to change hurtful, damaging conflict into healthy conflict. Let’s take a look at our example couple, John and Anna.
In the first step of healthy conflict, one person says “ouch.” This is a necessity in any healthy relationship. If there is going to be true intimacy and safety in a healthy relationship, each member must know that their feelings are important to the other person and will be heard, especially when those differences or imperfections jump up and bite us in the proverbial rear end. So we’ll begin with Anna, who softly and humbly says “ouch” to John: “John, that behavior you did really hurt my feelings.” John now has the opportunity to grow, learn, understand, and change. This is John’s first opportunity to encourage healthy conflict. He can say, “I want to understand your feelings, tell me more, your feelings are valid, I’m sorry, I will not do this behavior again,” and then John does everything in his power to never do it again. If John does receive this humbly, the conflict ends here. Increased safety in the relationship ensues, Anna feels heard and validated, and John grows. This is the healthiest scenario, both people have done their part. Wouldn’t that be nice? This is possible…however, it pretty rarely goes down that way, right?
It is, after all, extremely difficult and against our natural ego-filled, prideful state (especially for the shame-filled and counterdependent among us) to have the humility to say “I’m sorry” or “I screwed up.” That is paramount to admitting our worst fear: that the person we hurt will now think we really are the bad person we always believed down deep we were. So instead of humbly saying “I’m sorry”, we instead say “you need to change how you feel about this” or some other version of “this is your problem, not mine.” It is very minimizing of the other person’s feelings and completely valid world view, and usually comes out extremely defensive. This kind of response usually causes major damage to the relationship, and hurts the other person’s feelings and triggers their pain even further. They now will likely feel unheard, not understood, like the other person doesn’t care about their feelings, and abandoned. John has just missed his first chance to help heal the situation, and instead has potentially made it MUCH worse. Anna likely feels abandoned and withdraws love and acceptance, John fulfills his lying ‘self truth’ that he is “not worthy of being loved.”
So then what happens? Anna at this point has her first opportunity to have an effect on the dance they are doing. Now this is truly difficult because Anna has made herself vulnerable by saying “ouch”, and in response she has gotten an arrogant and minimizing response. Not exactly a safe situation. And now she is supposed to change her natural response? What is her natural response? It is going to be right in line with John’s worst fear of course…thinking he is a piece of crap and not worthy of being loved. Am I right? After all, John just treated Anna extremely poorly and pridefully…he IS a piece of crap, right? Anna feels justified in thinking as much. While it is true that John did just react with his issues and did not handle it well at all, there is another choice to be made here for Anna, too. Not gonna lie, it’s not easy and it’s going to take some extreme self-control and having your own issues settled down quite a bit. The name of this intervention is GRACE AND DIFFERENTIATION.
Not for the feint of heart, Anna will have to stare her fears of being abandoned and unheard square in the face in order to pull it off. And not only for a minute. She is going to have to hold this discomfort likely for some time, like days. What does this “grace and differentiation” intervention look like? I’m glad you asked. It is understanding John when he gets angry, knowing he has issues biting him in the rear and giving him grace because your issues bite you sometimes, too. Not taking it personally when he cuts off, (and if he is reactive like this, he will). Not chasing him down and insisting we talk about this right now, and letting it percolate, if necessary. (Read my blog about “The Myth of Urgency” here) Holding her ground that she is allowed to feel and think differently than he does, while allowing him to think and feel differently than she does. Now here’s the big one, folks….You Don’t Have To Agree. Oh, we get caught up on this, don’t we? The fear is that if the other person doesn’t agree with us, then they might not love us. It is enmeshed, it is relationally unsafe, and it is unrealistic! But we get caught in this power struggle hell all the time until we let go of the notion that the other person has to agree with us.
So Anna can keep herself safe, stay non-reactive, hold her own opinion about the situation, give John space to come back toward her or not (that’s the hard part where she has to risk and really feel her abandonment), and keep…oh, this one is hard…loving and accepting him for where he is. If John continues to act the same way time after time, every time Anna says “ouch”, their relationship will suffer tremendously and it will eventually end. And vice versa. If Anna were to react with the attitude of “get over it” every time John says “ouch”…same thing. Most people really don’t expect their partner to be perfect when it comes down to it, but they do need to see genuine sorrow at, and a turning away from, the behaviors that hurt them. They need their partners to have humility, and grow.
There is a major pitfall to avoid, and it needs to be addressed. Sometimes, people will take on too much and become a doormat. This is equally unbalanced with being too prideful. I am not suggesting this over-correction, or co-dependency. What I am suggesting is an acceptance by both people that they each have a different view, both are valid, and they don’t have to agree. They do, however, have to learn where their partner’s pains are and be sensitive to them, if they want their partner to stay in relationship with them. If we play that out, it looks like this: John says “I understand this behavior hurts you, but I’m going to keep doing it anyway because in my world view, I’m right.” and Anna will go on her way, eventually. She does not agree that the behavior is OK with her, and she doesn’t have to agree. Is the behavior in question a deal breaker for either person? Then they will likely not have a relationship for long. That’s OK, and they can each go on their way agreeing that neither is going to change.