These habits/personas in conflict derail healthy friction
The primary tradeoff in conflict is personal preference and communal preference. Anyone with a robust family or community life has been caught in the friction between communal well-being and personal well-being.
When conflict arises, especially conflict that comes with annoyance we tend to do three things that ensure we end up with disproportionate hurt and at times harm.
One, the “negotiating” martyr, we assume our personal preference is the best and at times only way for our community to be healthy/successful/dynamic — fill in the adjective. It can often, for many if not all people, feel validating to make your personal concern a global concern. It can feel less scary to justify your needs as global needs because our notions of “selfishness”. The issue is this can increase the emotional stakes in your body AND keep you from examining the tradeoffs you personally can and cannot make.
Two, the “bend the knee to me”, nothing becomes acceptable but total deference that verges on punishment. In conflict we often need to understand where breaks and fissures have happened so you get to their root causes. We then spend disproportionate time on punishing an “error” rather than understanding together what happened. We miss out on whether this was a matter of broken commitments, differing beliefs, differing styles, or differing roles — the core of conflict. We make a tradeoff on personal satisfaction vs communal health, without even knowing it.
Lastly, “I’m mad you made me mad” the hardest part of conflict is how different nervous systems interact with conflict. Because of our personal histories, conflict can be really dis-regulating for some nervous systems. So then we spend the entire time being upset about what is happening with our nervous systems and mad that our nervous systems need regulation rather than the conflict itself. You can solve for a conflict but one or both parties are mad they had to do any kind of regulation and punish each other for that. That kind of dysregulation is important to be attentive to with resourcing; a mediator, facilitator, a therapy appointment, breathing exercises, neutral peers, etc can support the nervous system challenge while making sure the actual friction that brought you into conflict is attended to. Often we give our full attention to dysregulation but miss doing the work of engaging with the underlying issues. This creates cycles of conflict that get worse over time.
We often are not clear where our relationships, projects, community and work end; and we begin. So these conflicts are bound to feel existential because they threaten our sense of security. Many read this and say “oh I’ve seen that person” instead of “ohhhh, I’ve been that person”. The morass of leadership we find ourselves in will only end when we can start to see when our fear of not being enough allows us to soberly admit when our instincts drive our worst behaviors.
