Am I bad at conflict?

"Hey, it's Taha. I just wanted to give you a heads up before we start. This episode contains some strong language." If you want to talk about conflict, I'll say that when I feel like the three of us are encountering conflict, you kind of just don't engage with conflict in a way that I'm used to. Like, hey, I'm going to look at this straight in the face and we're going to communicate clearly in a way that I just cannot comprehend. I really respect it at a high level, but in the moment, I'm like, shut the fuck up, I want to fight. I'm going to show up in a conflict or in a situation that is quite tense. I feel like, I don't know, you're really getting mediating the conversation to like not bring it to a boiling point. Like, you let the conversation simmer. Is Taha doing a masterclass on conflict resolution? Oh, finally, a good episode in the season. Today on corner b's, we face what happens when connection turns to conflict. I've been thinking a lot about what happens when our relationships break down. It seems to me like we're getting worse at disagreement and more volatile when we face conflict. Even across the world, the temperature on our politics is getting more heated, but I also think that slowly, our patience for each other is decaying. At some point, I feel like we stop believing that we owe each other patience at all. The people that we disagree with became people we can just discard. Sometimes I feel like I'm losing my ability to handle conflicts or even engage with disagreements constructively. I worry we all are. I remember like years and years ago, I remember I was talking to someone that I worked at a restaurant and she was like, you know, my dad gave me this really good advice about conflict. Whenever you have disagreement with somebody or you find something annoying about someone who should just sit on it for 48 hours and see if you're still angry about it and if you still are, then you should talk about it. But if you're not, let it go. That stuck with me for a really long time and I wonder if that's just made me avoid it with conflict because I'm like, I'll just think about it in 48 hours and I forget about it. Or if it's a helpful tool, I don't know. I just fundamentally disagree with whoever's dad told them that I don't agree with the 48 hours. Why? I think it's for people who don't know how to manage their emotions though. Like if you are going to be annoyed with somebody and explode on them, I think that it is better if you sit with it for a second and come to the conversation a little bit more level headed. The waiting 48 hours makes it so that the problem can get bigger and bigger in your head. So like, I'm not saying you do it in that moment when you're feeling super annoyed and you maybe it can't articulate it. But you have to be like, as soon as I feel this way, I need to understand how I feel so that I can then tell someone about it in a way that they could receive well. Yeah, it makes total sense, dude. But it also sounds like you know what somebody's just like, yeah, you just run a marathon. I did not realize this about you guys. I also didn't realize that that's how you felt about me in my conflicts. What do you mean? Yes. I don't think I'm uniquely good at conflicts. I think you are actually. I think that you are really good communicator. Taha's a good communicator. In conflict. You're a very good communicator in conflict. Okay, where are my bad communicator? Everywhere else. What does it mean to be bad at conflict? I can tell you, buddy, because I'm bad at it. I think that there are multiple ways to be bad at conflict. The two ways that it really shows up in my life and the ways that I handle it is I'll avoid the conflict, I'll bottle things up, and I'll let the emotions I feel faster to the point of it. I lose clarity of why I am upset or why there is conflict in the first place, and it just becomes this really heavy ball of resentment. And if and when it eventually comes out, there's just this anger inside of me, and it leads me to say things that I don't mean or aren't really useful or aren't productive. I would, in fact, stoke that fire. We are beating this dead horse. We are making enemies. And I understand that that's unhealthy, but at my base level, at my like, I'm not thinking about this or I don't even care about this person that much. I'm like, they were mean to me. They were mean to my friend. They're cooked. Or I'll just avoid it to the point where I'm just like, and I just stop talking to a person. And that's also not a great resolution. Yeah. I think I agree. I think that what I would consider a bad form in conflict is like when you are intentionally trying to not work together towards a solution, I don't know whether that's avoiding it, whether that's intentionally being cruel. I think the way that I handle conflict shows up differently in many different relationships. Like in a professional context, I think that there's a certain way that you need to handle yourself. I think in like some in your dating, I think you need to handle that in a in a different way. My family, my sister, man, she does not get a good version of me in conflict. She stole something of mine. I'm a teller that she stole something of mine. I'll be mean to her because she's my sister. I agree that it's bad, but I think the reason why I fell back on it twofold. One, it is kind of cathartic to like release anger. And like even if you regret it, it is just like this moment of like all of these thoughts that were in my head. Like I'm just going to say it. Even though I think it's a bad idea and there are healthier ways to do that. I think that's kind of one of the benefits. But the other reason why I tend to avoid conflict and let it fester is because I'm really bad at like speaking in a moment of conflict. Like my brain just goes fully white noise. I stutter. I can't get like the words to convey the things that I'm feeling. And like as I misunderstood more and more, it's like this is not the thing I'm trying to say. But it's it's what they're hearing and I can hear it how they're hearing it. And I just like it spirals. And I'm like I just don't want to deal with that. And then we have to talk on. Built different. It's just like whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm sensing a little pension here. We've formed a spectrum here of conflict avoidance, conflict confrontation. But is there like conflict neutral? That's what we're looking for. Maybe I mean, I feel like this is what I want to explore in this episode. Like is there a correct way to to handle conflict or is it just like ambiguous? Like is always kind of imperfect and we have to like try and live with it or not live with it. I don't I don't know. I'd love to say that I'm just great at conflicts. But maybe Sabrina and Melissa are just a little bit worse than me. That doesn't mean that I know what I'm doing. And as I started to listen to the voice notes I got from our audience, I started to get an insight into the different ways that people were handling conflicts, dysfunctions and all. For basically as long as I can remember, my uncle would just say the most horrific things about other people and always try to get a rise out of people at family dinners. I want to mention a recent re-ignition that I have regularly with my brother having to do with voting. So we would just fight and fight and fight and argue and it was ruining Thanksgiving's and Christmas's. So I just sort of decided, you know, I've had enough of this guy. I used to have my friend, but our relationship began to feel like it was only checking in about the work that I was doing. Because I found out earlier on that his goal was to go into law enforcement, I think it did create a rift in our friendship. Specifically, my brother is a person who doesn't vote and I am a person who feels strong enough about it that even though I hate politics, I actually am working with my local Democratic Party. That culminated in my friend telling me that they don't care about the art, which as the person who had been doing the art for over a year really hurt to hear. And she's brushing me off as per usual. And I'm saying, is that clear? Do you hear me? I should not answer me. We should look on our phone, she's ignoring me. I'm repeating myself, did you hear me? Did you hear me? And she's like, and what if I don't hear you? She's told her to fuck off but to never speak to her again, they weren't friends and just not talk to her. This didn't go well. We really just weren't able to get to a place where my friend was fully able to take accountability for the hurt that he had caused in my eyes. They didn't really see it as something that needed to be done. So we were really unable to fix things. My bias is towards resolving the tension that I feel when I am in conflict with someone. I feel like I carry a negative emotion until I have resolved it with them. And so for me, it's so much more important to actually go through that process. A lot of that looks like expressing how I feel about something and trying to understand where they feel differently about that and so that we can come to some sort of agreement. Or at least I understand why they don't agree with my perspective. But I don't know. I don't know what the right way to handle conflict is. And the thing that I worry about is maybe I also have it wrong. It's very much like an active problem and I realize that it may not ever be fixed to be honest just because of their unknowing unwillingness to change in that aspect or to learn, I suppose. And I'll know that one day I'll just say, "Hey, I'm non-binary, get disowned and then leave." Well, I'll never leave not tell them because I feel like that would leave this conflict unsettled and I want to settle this conflict one day. Both of us get upset at each other but I'll yell and scream about it and then we'll ignore each other and then we'll forget we're ignoring each other and then another election will come around. I decided I'm never gonna change this guy's mind so I'm just gonna stop talking to him even though we're family. I'll try to give my point of view and of course they will share their point of view and usually we both realize that we're not gonna change. I like to think of myself as an optimist and after listening to so many stories I feel like there has to be a better way. There has to be a way for us to move through conflicts more constructively and get to a point where we don't have to have so many loose threats, graveyards of relationships that remain intention or are completely destroyed. I think there's a lot of pain behind the bitterness and anger but I also know that there are people trying to make this better, people who are studying this stuff and trying to understand the ways that we can build more resilient relationships and one of those people is Harval Hendrix, a couple's therapist of over 50 years who co-created a form of therapy that he uses in his own practice and also used in his own marriage to save it from the brink of divorce. So I asked him what leads to conflict in the first place. Well from my perspective and experience of sitting in the chair listening to couples for now about 50 years I finally balled it down to one thing. I was trying to answer this question myself and I had about 14 or 15 things on the list of what causes a couple's conflict and finally when they had just all balled down into all of these 14 things are about the objection to difference. So that was interesting. Why would we object to difference? So it's actually more it's more about the objection to difference than difference itself. So you could have a very a very different set of people who are in a relationship but if they have a tendency to be accepting of that difference that there's less likely to be conflict. Yes it's the objection to difference that you can't see it that way. You can't be that way. You can't say that. It's not that way. Why would you have an opinion like that? So I spent a lot of time figuring out why that reaction to difference and there's a lot of literature now on this basically goes all the way back to infancy and childhood in which for a long time the baby is oriented to his own world and the baby doesn't become uncomfortable unless something different from what they're accustomed to shows up and then they cry or whatever but what evolves is a brain and a mind that sees itself as the center of reality. I feel sometimes when I learn about how the factors of childhood development affects how you handle different things including conflict as an adult. I feel like a little sense of dread because I'm like because I can't control how I had my childhood. But you can change now and one of the things you change has to be cognition. You begin to think differently to look at the world differently and say okay so somebody else can have an opinion different from mine but that doesn't mean mine is invalid so it can cognitively begin to change and then you have to move to curiosity. I'm emphasizing curiosity because actually not a lot of people are curious. They're just reactive. Reactive is you scare me so I have to to block out what you're saying or what to do or think and curiosity is you don't scare me you intrigue me but that's not the usual response so it's a really powerful and serious thing this idea of difference. This is the thing that you also have to finally get as you mature is that everybody's coming from a valid place their position makes sense to them that's their world and mine makes sense to me it's my world they're two worlds and so what we want to do is bring difference together. Yeah I actually feel like the core reframe that I'm getting from this is that actually having the conversation is the resolution of it rather than confronting that difference in a competitive way. It's definitely something that I can get on board with but in a lot of the time when there is conflict you are participating in a conversation with someone who is maybe less than willing to get into a constructive space. How do you go about handling conflict when not everyone is on board? That's a good question and it's pretty much a universal question because not many people have a consciousness about managing conflict. They experience reactivity and that's life. So here's what I've found works for me and what have helped people learn to do in their intimate relationships and friendships is that you always show curiosity and mirror. Even if people say things that really outrage you that you practice experiencing being triggered as an opportunity to connect. So what does that look like? So someone says something eraging to me. How do I turn this into an opportunity to connect? So Taha, let me see if I'm getting you. So you really think that X, Y, and Z is a logical, rational person and that the decision they made to invade that country and kill all those people is a good thing. Am I getting you? And I would be like, yeah, that's that's right. You know, screw them or whatever. Can you say more about that? So I'm like trying to bait you into a conversation, right? It's like, well, look, I'm not them. So who cares? I'm not. So you're not there. So who cares? I'm not getting that. Yeah. Yeah, like you're getting that. Yeah. Right. I can see how you're just completely deflating my the combative energy that I'm trying to put out there. Yeah. That's it. You got it. Right. But see, that's what happens in the polarizing conversation. Right. If you both then go into a poll, then you have a fight. But if you refuse the fight, but stay connected and engaged, what happens is they move out of the energy of what they were trying to do. It's an amazing shift. Okay. And this is safe. So many marriages that when your partner is yelling at you say, hey, you really think I'm a bitch. Am I getting that? And you don't ever want to have sex with me again? Does that not feel patronizing? You could do it patronizingly or you have to do it authentically. Okay. You have to say, I really want to understand this. But when you're when you're frustrated, surely even when I'm if I'm trying to practice this, it's going to come across as patronizing. I won't be able to do it when you walk out of the room unless you go through some practice after practices. But my guess is you'll have 25 or 30 opportunities today to practice it. It may not be conflictual. It just be somebody says something. Okay. And you say, oh, so let me see if I can get English. So use every conversation with anybody as an opportunity. Just mirror somebody who said to a three sentences and just mirror them back and practice being authentic with it. Now, it's going to feel and other people are going to feel like you're learning something. You're trying it out on them. That's fine. That's like learning tennis. You're you have to get muscle memory before you can play tennis. And so you have to get brain memory before you can do mirroring spontaneously and accurately and authentically. And it's a good thing to start with the non-polarizing opportunities because just what's going to happen as your brain becomes more proficient at seeing another instead of reacting to the mirroring them, your brain is going to begin to be organized itself. Because what you want to do is self-regulate. But if you do anything toward countering what's coming at you, then you will both go into dysregulation. And then you have the fight. So I have a question for you. You were described by the couples counselor that you went to as a couple from hell. So what was causing so much conflict? Well, everything. We had differences about parenting. We had differences about how I should spend my time. We had a blended family. And I had I thought children should be given a little leeway. Helen has more regulatory sensitivities. She want kids to come in at 10 at night. And I thought it was okay if they came in at 11. So I reject Helen. It's okay if kids come in at 11 instead of 10. No, they have to come in at 10 because the New York streets are dangerous. Well, no, it's not that dangerous because the kids are teenagers when they can find their way home. So it's just that argument of not not willing to see the other person's point of view. When you kind of grow up and get over your centrality in the universe and become curious, then you go into collaboration and you sit down and Helen says blah, blah, blah, blah. And when she talks, I listen and mirror and then show curiosity. And I discover she has some anxiety and her reaction has to do with she wants her children to be safe. Well, who can argue with that? So okay. So you want the children to come in at 10 instead of 11 because you think that the streets are a bit different in that one hour. Am I getting that? And she says yeah, way, way out. But now she's relaxed because I'm now seeing her. so that her difference is honored. And I see that, and I say that makes sense, 'cause I want the kids to be safe too. So can we talk about this a little bit more? So we talk about that until we decide, well maybe 10, 30 would be all right. Or Helen, I think the safety of the kids is absolute in 10 o'clock, and it is really true that after 10 or 11 in New York City things begin to change in the evening. So why don't we agree to go with 10 for now? And then there's the children grow older, we can revisit what our curfew is. So you go through that process until you co-create an outcome you both can accept and live with. - I think I've accidentally found healthy ways of handling conflicts. Some of the stuff that Harville was talking about mirroring and trying to be curious about the other person's perspective. For me, I feel like comes from a selfish place. I find it really difficult in my head to understand why someone would do something cruel or offensive. I feel this rage towards people who seem evil for no reason. And I just don't like feeling that way. One of the ways I've been able to resolve that feeling in my life, that rage is by just trying to understand why. Why someone would do something like that. And for me, finding an explanation that doesn't require me to imagine them as evil really helps with that. I think of that process as selfish. I need to understand them. I need to come up with a story and explanation for why someone thinks the way they do or believes what they do. Something that feels reasonable enough for me to move on without feeling angry, because otherwise, I feel like that anger can really consume me. And more than that, I feel like they win if I leave feeling angry. It doesn't necessarily come from a place of wanting to resolve conflicts amicably. But strangely, I think I'm realizing that it might be more constructive than I intended. - Just thinking about it is getting me frustrated because we were just talking past each other. And it took months of repeated arguments until we finally started calling it out as we just preferred different definitions of this word. But we do accept the other person's point of view. It's just not worthwhile to try and knock the other person out of their opinion. As long as we recognize that we've both heard each other, actually being able to recognize that we're speaking about different things has been very helpful in other disagreements. - I am almost 21 and my mom still treats me like I'm a kid. And I mean, I get it. - I am her kid. - But at the same time, I'm a grown adult who is able to make rational decisions and choices of her own. - The two of us had a talk after one day work are really bad and then we both came to a realization. She is scared of bad stuff happening to me. And I am scared of being boxed into a child forever. (dramatic music) As I ruminated on the things I'd learned, I continued to worry about what I was hearing and also seeing in the world more broadly, some of these conflicts were obviously just interpersonal things. But many were ideological disputes that felt much higher stakes. They were questions about survival, human rights and morality. Places that kind of feel impossible to collaboratively reconcile difference. So, I decided to call up Eli Finkel. - My name is Eli Finkel. I'm a professor of psychology at Northwestern. I wrote a book called The All or Nothing Marriage. I host a podcast that analyzes romantic films from the perspective of relationship science. It's called Love Factually. - The interesting thing about Eli is that while he spent the majority of his career studying relationship science, in more recent times, that study has taken a new turn towards political polarization. And I wanted to understand how we could become better at conflict when the stakes feel so consequential. - I think probably number one, it would be recognizing sort of a flaw in our psychological architecture, which is this. Our thoughts arrive to us as if they are true, but they are in fact interpretations. And so when we feel angry, we don't automatically say, "But is my anger justified?" We feel like an injustice was done and something must be done to correct it. Does that mean we're right? Not necessarily, we're wrong all the time. And usually for significant fights, this is in the political world, this is in our personal lives, conflict at work. Both people feel that they've been deeply aggrieved and the things that they did that were arguably destructive were like totally reasonable once you consider the full context. And besides, the other side started it anyway. So what's the single thing that you should do? You should view your anger as a prompt toward additional thinking, rather than believing that some objective moral transgression has happened and that everybody in the world would view what the way you do. - I guess then it's about just practicing the ability to be like, all right, anger is a prompt to additional thinking. That would be so amazing. Like imagine a geopolitical world or a personal world where you and I are angry with each other and instead of doing the thing that feels intuitive to us, instead said, okay, humans are fallen creatures. I myself as a representative of this class called human am also imperfect. So what is my story? What's the story I'm telling myself about what happened here? Because again, facts exist in the world that they don't interpret themselves. Your anger is not because of something objective that happened. Your anger is because of a set of meanings and interpretations you placed on the objective world. How am I interpreting what happened? And before I act on this, I should at least understand how the other person interprets what happened. Not because they're right, not because I'm not entitled to my anger, but because I would like to have a better informed perspective. At the end of that whole process, I might decide, no. My anger is entirely justified. I'm deeply furious about what you did and you absolutely owe me apologies and perhaps some sort of compensation. Those are all reasonable, but nine times out of 10. Once I've stopped to say, okay, what would be a reading that my partner might have or a third party might have, you'll end up a little less angry with a little bit of a broader perspective and in a much healthier place to try to have constructive conflict. You mentioned something there that I worry about a lot, which is this idea that after thinking about it some more and actually evaluating their perspective, I've decided that actually this anger is justified. I'm like, I struggle with this a lot because what I've observed in general in my short little life is in times of fear, people tend to retreat into their in-group, whether that's their neighborhood or an ethnicity or a political state or a nationality or whatever. And they demonize some out-group. And when people see other people's ideas of how society should be shaped and those ideas don't seem to include them, their politics starts to feel like a threat to their existence. And I worry that this sort of like righteous anger can make us villains in each other's eyes. And I don't know how to find ways to understand each other or even see each other. - I am totally terrified by the thing that frightens you, that as cultures, as societies polarize the narratives around these differences focus less on disagreement about even political ideals or policies, but more on the evil on the other side. When we were talking about an intimate relationship like a marriage or something, which again, I've studied that stuff for like 30 years in the last five or 10 years, I've also started studying partisan psychology and absolutely these worrisome trends scaffold up with really significant dangerous societal implications. Here again, facts exist, but they don't interpret themselves. And if you look at, I don't know, the political left or the political right, each side is convinced that the other side favors unfairness. They define these things differently, right? The political right is much more likely to think that fairness is an individual level attribute that each individual should be judged as an individual and that I don't know if these credentials are whatever you should get the job and people on the political left are much more likely to think in terms of group based fairness. And I find both of these perspectives entirely defensible, but it's hard for them to allow that the other side is also reasonable because these are often pitched as zero sum issues. And if we allow that they have some reasonable points as well, then you lose the passion you might have for the sort of activism or advocacy that might make sure that your side wins and you end up deeper and deeper in a polarized world where you don't just disagree. you hate. You view them as evil. Now, I feel like we're that, right? We've gone to the point where we view these differences and we hate them and we view them as evil. And if I'm like fully honest with myself, I think that the process of viewing the other side as evil can make you do evil things. This is the core of my world. I completely agree with you that once you have concluded that the other side is truly awful. And you've really leaned in to your moral outrage. Of course, you have to sacrifice a little bit of democratic fair play in the US. We just have nonstop gerrymandering, right? As if that's democracy. This isn't democracy, but when our side does it, we say, look, they started it. What are you going to do? And we're willing to do that. We're also willing to do awful things. We're willing to discriminate. We're willing to be bigots. And we don't encode what we're doing as the evil that it is because it is in the service of what we perceive to be righteous goals. And we would rather not stop to think about what Osama bin Laden thought about his goals or Hitler thought about his goals. Do I think everybody out there is Hitler? I definitely do not. But are we all, you know, concerned enough with our own righteousness that we're willing to sacrifice some fair play in the service of making sure that our vision of what's good in the world is going to win the day? Yeah. I think mostly we do that. And I wish we protected ourselves a little more from being the very evil that we're trying to prevent. How do we find ways to resolve conflicts constructively in that environment? So I was always a relationships researcher. I wrote a book. The all-or-nothing marriage to explain how to have a good marriage. And I ran speed dating events for my Northwestern undergraduates so I could study romantic attraction. I mean, that was it for like the first couple decades. And then I am an American. And I looked around. This was in the first Trump administration. And I realized as major cultural conflicts were happening that like nobody's minds were changing. And so I started to be concerned, I guess, for lack of a better word as a patriot, as somebody who actually cares about my country and would rather not see it tend toward demise. And at first I thought, well, there's no role for me here. I'm not by temperament an activist. But here's the thought experiment I set for myself that made me also a political partisan chip researcher. I thought imagine that like my buddies and I, like the marriage researchers of the world, got into a lab and said, all right, let's pursue a diabolical task. Let's try to create the worst, most toxic marriage we can fathom. What ingredients would it have? What are the things that we know would make your marriage a colossal disaster? And they include things like have as much contempt for your spouse as possible. Anytime your spouse does a thing, interpret it in the least generous way that you possibly can. Make sure that everybody in your life hates your spouse, right? And then I thought, congratulations, America. You've built it. Red and blue America are currently embroiled in the most toxic marriage I can imagine in principle. And then I thought, is there anything that we can learn from the world of marriage that might be able to help us ameliorate the worst aspects of our partisan conflict? And what, what did you guys come up with? So, so we ran a study. This was among married people. We recruited 120 married couples. Over the course of two years, they reported every four months on the biggest conflict they'd had in their marriage over the previous four months. And then in the second year, we randomly assigned half of the couples to think about that conflict from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for everybody. Turns out that people in that experimental condition have a more satisfying marriage over the second year of the study, since the manipulation starts, than people who are continuing to view things from their default perspective. And that ties back to what we were talking about earlier, that if we interpret our perception of reality as the only reality and we don't stop to think, like, well, is there another point of view here? What if I wanted to adopt a friendly perspective that isn't necessarily the default reaction that I have when I'm angry? What effect does that have on the relationship? It makes it better. And do I think that we could harness those insights to make our political life a little better? Most definitely. Okay. So if you were sitting down with the national couple, red and blue, what are the types of things that you would say that would be something that we could take away as citizens? Here is the very first thing I would have them do. I would say red, I see that you're very upset about this and I understand why you are. What I'd like you to do before we talk more about why you're upset and what your perspective is, I would like you to try to channel. Why is blue upset? And as soon as you say, this is why I think blue is upset and blue will say, yes, that's correct, then you get to respond to it. But before then, you're responding to a caricature of what blue actually believes. And so there's this idea, many of your listeners will be familiar with the touring test. It's basically like when a machine can pass as a human. Exactly. So there's a concept in the world of partisan psychology that talks about the ideological touring test. And the idea there is you pass the ideological touring test. If you hang out with a bunch of people on the other side and talk about the contentious issues in ways that they really believe you're one of them. Right. So when you say, like when you as a leftist go and hang out with a bunch of rightists and say, well, I favor, you know, lower taxes on the rich because I think evil is good. And rich people are evil. And therefore I am a rightist. They're going to be like, I know you're not actually a rightist. But here's the thing. It's pretty hard to do. Because as we've discussed, a lot of our views about the other side are predicated in demonizations that we ourselves have built. I was going to say, this is something that Havel Hendrix mentioned. He called it mirroring. You have to be able to mirror what you're hearing back to them in a way that they accept. Yes. And if you can't do that, you at least should have the integrity to be honest about the fact that you're characterizing their beliefs and their behaviors in a way that they themselves deny. I'm not saying that you have to believe that your partner or the those monsters and the other party that they're correct, you have to just say from their perspective, what do they think is going on? And then once you have that, one of two things will happen. Either you'll say, oh, well, now that I'm actually channeling their perspective as it really exists, rather than the demonizing version of it that I fabricated, I actually see your point. And like that's a valid perspective. Here's my perspective. That is a massively better starting point for a conflict. The other possibility is you will say, no, now that I've understood it and you've granted me that I've understood it correctly, I still think what you did is totally monstrous. And here's why. That's also fine. I have this theory, which is completely just based on pure vibes, which is that I feel like we are facing conflicts less often. And because of that, we are worse at facing the conflict when we do. And we become more reactive when we do encounter that conflict. Because we're not facing that friction of having to understand the other side very often. So when we do, it's way easier to to to to mischaracterize them and see them as evil. I just want to see if you you had any thoughts on that. I mean, I'm definitely intrigued. And I think I buy it. I'm not aware of data on that exact issue. Let me propose a modified version of your theory and see if you buy this. But I agree with you that we're doing conflict less. But I think that's happening alongside. We're seeing conflict more. So we see it on social media. Maybe we see it in our partisan news feeds. And so we ourselves aren't having to do the hard work of listening and cultivating our communication skills. We can witness, you know, the the boxing match that is political debate on social media. And cheer on the people on our side and like, yeah, you know, crushed it way to go. And that's basically about victory rather than understanding. So I think you are right that we hide behind this shield where we see conflict all the time. But we don't have to do the hard work of listening and articulating clearly and developing good communication skills. And I think if that's true, that can help to explain how things got as bad as they did. I wanted to ask you, me and Sabrina and Melissa, who are my friends who I do, this podcast with, we talked a little bit about how we handle conflict. They seem to actually engage in conflict much less. And they like to sort of just suck it up. If it's not that big of a deal, I'll just take it on the chin and move on. And I started wondering, what happens if we start abandoning the uncomfortable parts of connection like conflict? My guess is that you will like the way you framed that more than they will like the way you framed that. He began to lay out this framework that I thought really started to explain the difference in our natural conflict styles. And I wondered what Sabrina and Melissa would think. So I got everyone together to talk about it. I have some answers to our questions. Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. Yes? What have you learned? The thing that I noticed, as I was making this episode, is what it is that causes conflicts. And the thing that kept coming up was that conflict stems not only from difference, but an objection to difference. I think that I was able to really understand that there are constructive and destructive ways to handle conflict. And I think that this explains our different ways of handling conflicts. And so we are going to do a conflict alignment chart. Ah! Okay. So Eli was talking about four different ways that people can engage in conflict and I'm going to play you some of that tape now. You can think of reactions to difficulties and relationships as varying along two dimensions. So one dimension is like, are you confronting it directly, actively addressing it versus more passively. And the other, you could think of as like more constructive versus destructive. And when you cross those two dimensions, you end up with four possibilities. So you can have an active, constructive way of engaging in conflict or you could have an active, destructive way of engaging in conflict. I've been there. Active destructive is like, you know, F you or like we're breaking up. That's the classic. Let's fight. Let's fight. I just want to fight. Yeah, like screw you, like blah blah blah blah, like white noise, tonight's sound effects on the movie. I hate it. I hate it so much. I hate it. Get me out of here. You're on a different side of the alignment chart. Go away. My corner. There is a way to actively engage in conflict. That is destructive. Like me saying like, oh, it's always better to talk about it. It's not necessarily true because depends on how you talk about it. If all you want to do is fight, then actively talking about it is never going to be constructive because the way you want to talk about the conflict is completely different. I think that that comes from a very natural place. Like us as human beings are all fallible when there is an objection to difference. It can feel like an attack and the natural instinct is to be angry. How dare you feel this way about this thing? I'm right. How dare you think about this in this way? It's so funny hearing Taha try to be a genuine destructive communicator. Fake. You can't handle the heat. You don't know how to really approach conflict in an unhealthily way. Grab the way. You've never destroyed a relationship. Yeah. But the thing that Eli said that I loved was that your anger is a prompt towards additional thinking. But that is hard because when you are angry, the only thing you don't want to do is additional thinking. I don't even want to do thinking when I'm not angry. Basically, rather than thinking of it as how dare you wrong me in this way, you have to think about it as I am angry because there is a difference that I am rejecting or being rejected for a difference. And I need to think about this more. Active constructive, which it sounds like you favor and there are certainly many arguments to favor this is, you know, directly addressing the issue head on saying we seem to have an issue here. Let's work to make it better. How do you work on that skill? It is a skill that you can practice. And yes, that's the difference between the active destructive mode and the active constructive mode is instead of focusing on the way that you have been wronged. You have to switch into a mode of trying to understand what the difference is between you and the person that you are in conflict with. You can then work from a place of like true understanding where the other person also trusts you because they have felt hurt. Some people call this different things when I talk to Harval Hendrix, he called it mirroring. Mirroring is reflecting back what someone has said to you as neutrally as possible in a way that they would accept. The goal of mirroring it is to put us in a position where we are no longer in a back and forth fighting and we are way more in a cooperative conversation. This has happened in conversations between us where I am crashing out and then you're just like, let me get what you are saying right now. It's very annoying when you do it though, but I'm like, I want to fight. But then it does help by de-escalating. I do have to seriously think about how I'm being perceived. Like I hate it when I'm being misunderstood largely because I feel like it's a failure on my part to communicate the thing. But the patience that comes with you being annoying is that I have the space to actually get the thing I'm trying to say out. And I think that that is really valuable. It is really annoying. But it's a good skill, I guess. I think it also de-escalates your own anger. I think that you can mirror while being pissed. I think that is the difference because if someone is frustrated, you can, I think, to do practice, just be like, okay, I'm just going to say what they're saying back to them while seething. That's crazy. That's a skill. Wow, but also it's a little diabolical in a way that I might be interested in. Framing it as you could be a little bit evil about it kind of scratches the same itches I want to fight, but in a better direction. This has been an attack on me. What about Melissa, huh? The thing that surprised me was that there is a passive way of constructively engaging in conflict, as well as a passive way to destructively engaging. Of course this would surprise you. I'm like, just run it, just be active constructive, it's just going to be better every time. And Eli was like, hey, maybe that's true, but like, no, everyone can do that. The passive destructive way of engaging in conflict, does anyone want to have a guess as to what this is? Well, there's something that's truly bothering you that you feel and you just ignore it. That seems pretty destructive. Passive destructive is like, I'll see it here in rage at your awfulness. My worst self is definitely passive destructive. This fosters resentment, it fosters frustration and is just completely destructive to continuing to build a strong connection with someone. Speak your truth, Queen. But there is also a passive constructive mode of engaging in conflict, which is, look, not every conflict needs to be resolved. There's certainly a significant strain in marriage research saying that if anything the majority of conflicts aren't really resolvable and from that point of view, it's entirely reasonable to adopt a loyalty perspective. We don't have to fight about this every time. I know you love me. I know you're a good person. We can handle this and it's not that big a deal. A forgive and forget mentality. So if you think about conflict as a rejection of difference, you can, without bringing up, just accept the difference through your own processing and come to a point where you are just as content as before. You have found a way to accept a difference in this relationship that you have. How do you know when you're doing that versus being avoidant? Good question, Sabrina. I just want to know that because sometimes you can say you're okay with it, but I was like asking for a friend of you. I would say the moment you know that you were doing the passive constructive rather than destructive is when you have to truly be happy with continuing to be passive because anything else is just avoiding it. But the thing that Harville said is that sometimes you're just not that invested in that relationship. It depends on what the relationship is with the person. And if it's a minimal person in your life and they see politics different for you or whatever it is and it's not going to basically impact your day to day existence, then it's an interesting idea that we have such radical points of views but we don't have to come together or discuss it. If the person is more interior to your life and I don't mean just your partner but your children or a good friend, then the relationships will be uncomfortable unless the conversation takes place. So it's again, I think that the periphery, if you don't want to bother with that, but if it moves toward the center, then the conversations are necessary and they become bonding. You can just be like, it's just not that deep because I don't care about this relationship. So deeply that I need to resolve all the small little things that are going on in this relationship. But the other thing I want to say about a passive constructive way of engaging in conflict is that it can also just be like, hey, I know this person loves me and did not show up 45 minutes late to my birthday dinner because they hate me. They just did it because they're bad at time. And that's okay and then you can move on. That's the whole good faith thing that you're talking about. Because that could also be a fight. You don't care about me. 45 minutes late. It was so embarrassing. It was the dinner between just the two of us. So speaking from experience, he'd be an hour late. Have some respect. So when you're saying a constructive approach to conflict, it's more like, Let's get rid of the emotional distortions, the bad faith, arguments, and let's like get to the root of what we disagree on. And so we can engage with each other's ideas in a way that we're really trying to hear you as a person. - Yeah. - And then from there, it is what it is. - Yeah, and look, and if it's a relationship that really matters in your life, you are both investors deeply in making sure that this thing works. In a lot of ways, that is the difference between the relationship science stuff and the political polarization. Because when it comes to individual relationships, people are deeply invested in trying to make things work. And in political polarization, that may not be the case. The thing that I think is really important about both these constructive ways of engaging in conflict. They are all about investing in the relationship more. You have to engage in the relationship in a way that is constructive because you care about the relationship. And the thing that I learn throughout these conversations is that conflict is an opportunity to rise to the occasion and to build stronger connections. When conflict arises, it's when relationships get tested. And I don't think that conflicts really threaten a relationship because there are tools in my toolbox that I can use to strengthen the relationship through understanding. And the thing that I learn throughout this episode is that I don't really fear conflict as a threat to the relationship. I see it as an opportunity to improve the relationship that I am trying to build. And when I listened back to our conversation last time, what I heard from you guys is that one of the reasons that you guys don't engage in conflict is because you view the conflict as a threat to the relationship not an opportunity to build. A stronger relationship. That's interesting because I don't believe that. Interesting. I choose to not engage in the conflicts because I don't care about those relationships or don't care about those things. Interesting. That's true. Melissa doesn't engage in conflict with us. But hey, Melissa, what about that entire friendship episode? It is what it is. It is what it is. Even though these are all tools in our toolkit, like it isn't easy. Yeah, I 100% agree. I think that it is a really hard thing to do because then the natural instinct is to get defensive and to face a conflict with anger and some sort of like moral indignation. The thing that comes up a lot is, well, it's not my responsibility to engage with these these idiots. I think that might be true. But I also think that we owe it to ourselves to be part of a world that is good at conflict because I think that that is the type of world that I'm invested in for me. This is what it is to be in a marriage. This is what it is to be in a democracy that we have some responsibility even when we think their views are abhorrent to continue to treat them as just as equal as I am. But I really also want to underscore why this is so hard for people. I mean, there really is a complicated moral calculus here that I just want to make sure I haven't been glib about. I also want to be fair to why it's hard to extend this sort of grace to everybody. And I don't just mean hard like if you had self control, you would do it, but why it's morally complicated. So for example, let's say I believe you have deeply bigoted beliefs. On one hand, it's like, yes, but in a multicultural society, we need to tolerate people we disagree strongly with. And so I owe you some level of grace. On the other hand, allowing you to speak at the microphone and spew your hatred harms these other people. And so the question of what do we owe each other actually has multiple questions in it because there are multiple groups of people that we might owe. And so the question of do I owe it to you to have grace even when I think your ideas are bigoted is in conflict with the question of do I owe it to vulnerable people to protect them when somebody wants to spout bigotry. And the answer of what we owe each other depends on how I think about those issues. My own belief is that both of these views are entirely morally defensible. I just want people to be honest with themselves about what they're doing. Even selfishly, I'm trying to live in a world where people have stronger relationships because they are good at conflict. Whether that's an interpersonal relationship or a societal one, I want to be able to engage in the national discourse in a way that is constructive because I am good at navigating conflict. And I want to be able to engage in my personal relationships in a way that is constructive because I'm good at conflict. But I think that being good at conflict means that we can maintain connections when things get difficult and I think that connection is the most important thing that we do as humans. And so I think it is my responsibility to participate in the world that I want to build, which is a world that is good at conflict. I haven't talked to her in about three years. I probably will never speak to her and I hope she's doing okay. Because at the end of the day, she was still my best friend at a time and she does deserve happiness and a good life. So I only hope that she's gotten that now. So we talked it over and we've been working out ways that we can still connect even though both of us are super busy. As hard as that was for me to reach out and say like, "Hey, I'm feeling kind of ignored." I knew that saying something was better than stewing in this. And I trusted her enough that if things had changed, she would tell me. The sitting there, thinking to myself, "You know, I'm okay with never having mended this disagreement, with never making it right with him." I guess I was expecting going to the funeral to feel a sense of regret, like I never mended this conflict. But sometimes it's just easier and maybe better for everyone to avoid conflict. It had been mostly unpleasant trip. We sat in mostly southern silence and if I said anything, it would be roughly dismissive. And I got to think in. I don't want to keep doing this. I turned to him and I said, "You don't much like me." And I don't care much for you either. And that's all right. There's no reason why we need to. But we work together. And it seems that we could at least be professional about it. If nothing else. And he didn't say another word all the way back to the shop. I figured, "Oh well, I tried." The next day came in, he said, "Good morning." In a normal way. I had to check to make sure it was the same guy. But after that, forever after that, he was normal. Just friendly, not sarcastic, not dismissive of me. Just a normal guy. And it was like that for the rest of our time. I left that job and went on with my life and never saw him again. But I was always happy for that little interaction that solved every second. Thank you for listening to Corner Piece. If you liked it, and I hope you did, you can leave us a rate and review wherever you listen to podcasts. And you can follow us if you want more stuff like that. Your feedback really helps people discover the show, and helps us make this show. Thank you for listening, and we're happy to have you on this journey with us. Corner Piece is a production from Ted and Answer in Progress. This episode was produced by Mara Alexa Kavanaugh and Marin Larson, and hosted by me, Tahakam. Band Band Chang is our story editor. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Lucy Lissel, fact-checking by Jennifer Nahm, music in this episode from Epidemic Sound, and theme music by Breakmaster Sylinder. Ted's executive producer is Daniela Balarissa, special thanks to Roxanne High-Lash, Valentina Ovenini, Laney Lott, James Ryerson, Carol Lieberwitz, and Tonsuka Sangmeng Nivong, operation support from Angela Innis. This podcast was made possible through the support of Grant 63685 from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.