5 Minutes on Our Relationship to Conflict
All of us have had the revelation at some point that we each relate to conflict differently. It’s highly individual.
Some of us avoid conflict at all costs.
Some of us charge in head first.
Some of us speak our minds and advocate for what we think is right.
Some of us bite our tongues and struggle to stand up for ourselves.
And everything in between.
It’s important to understand your own relationship to conflict. How you experience conflict. It helps us prepare for conflict, stay present through conflict, and better reflect after a conflict.
Over time we want to build flexibility in how we relate to conflict.
We want to be able to adapt to the situation, rather than be stuck in ingrained patterns. We want to mindfully choose an approach to conflict that meets the situation.
This is how we keep building conflict resilience.
Let’s start by exploring three factors that influence our relationship to conflict: communication styles, culture, and our brains/nervous systems.
3 Factors that Influence our Relationship to Conflict
1. Personal Approach to Conflict:
Our personal preferences about how to approach conflict influence our relationship to conflict. These are the patterns we typical fall into.
The Thomas-Kilman Assessment Tool is a useful tool for understanding our preferred approach to conflict.
The assessment tool places your style on a continuum of high to low assertiveness, and high to low cooperativeness.
You can imagine that if you have high assertiveness, low cooperativeness your conflict style would be quite different to someone who has low assertiveness and high cooperation.
The first person is most concerned with things going the way they hope for, and the second person is more concerned with peacemaking. A Competing style versus an Accommodating style.
The assessment tool describes five styles: Competing, Collaborating, Compromising, Avoiding, and Accommodating.
None is better than the other, but understanding your style, and the style of the other people in the conflict, can help you see things more clearly.
It also allows you to be more intentional and flexible about which approach is appropriate for the situation.
You might be able see some of your own ingrained patterns that you are ready to disrupt.
You might be able to find more understanding for the person you are in conflict with and adjust your style to have a more productive conversation.
You can learn to move between styles, giving yourself more flexibility to choose the right mode for the context.
2. Culture:
The culture we are raised in greatly affects how we view conflict and what are appropriate responses.
We learn at a young age whether conflict is to be avoided or expressed deeply.
We are taught what are healthy responses to conflict, for instance whether preserving harmony or getting everything out in the open is key to healthy conflict.
These ideas depend heavily on our family of origin and its cultural context.
The Intercultural Development Inventory helps us to understand how cultural influences shape our reactions to conflict. It purports that conflict is culturally grounded, patterned, and learned.
The Intercultural Development Inventory describes two axes of responses to conflict; emotional restraint vs. emotional expressiveness and direct vs. indirect communication.
These create four culturally-grounded responses to conflict.
Do you speak your mind or are you more likely to show discretion in voicing your goals?
Are you more concerned with being heard and understood or maintaining harmony?
Do you tend to use precise, explicit language or use analogies, metaphors and storytelling?
Do you like to use humor to diffuse tension or do you find humor too prone to misinterpretation?
Do you find someone more trustworthy if they suppress and regulate their emotions or if they express their emotions?
Similar to the TKI conflict styles, there is not one style that is more appropriate or more healthy than the others.
Adaptability is the key. By raising our awareness of our own patterns and approaches we can learn to adjust when it’s helpful.
Knowing different culturally grounded responses to conflict also can help us better understand other’s responses to conflict and give us more options for communicating appropriately - even if that’s outside of our usual patterns.
When we have more options, we have more opportunities to see conflict as a productive development. .
3. Brain/Nervous System
The brain and nervous system can be strongly affected by conflict.
Our brain is wired toward protection and sensing for danger to keep us safe. Conflict can easily trip our amygdala into flight, fight, freeze, or appease mode because it senses we are no longer safe.
(This is a great thing to know and a reason to practice nervous system calming techniques while we are in the difficult conversations).
We can’t be adaptable (helpful for two models above) if our brain has been hijacked and we are in fight, flight, freeze, or appease response.
Think fast breathing, spiral thinking/ruminating, no access to highest capacity thinking parts of our brain.
When this happens, we want to activate our parasympathetic nervous system. This is the restorative, grounded, regulated part of our nervous system.
When our parasympathetic nervous system is active we can stay connected, be creative, and experience growth, regeneration, and lightness.
When you feel yourself going into flight, fight, freeze or appease mode it’s okay to ask to slow down. Pausing can actually help you stay engaged when in conflict.
It can be as simple as saying, “I notice I’m feeling tense about this. I’m going to take a pause.”
Our brain is likely telling us to fix this, shut it down, or flee but our work is to stay with the discomfort.
If we do this, we are directly training our brain to expand our tolerance for this kind of conflict (neuroplasticity baby).
Think of a conflict you are experiencing now or in the recent past, and reflect:
What communication style(s) can you notice in yourself or others involved?
How is your conflict culture influencing your approach?
What do you notice about others tendency towards being direct or indirect? Emotionally restrained or expressive?
What do you notice in your body? What do you notice in the actions and body language of others? Is there a flight, fight, freeze, or appease response showing up?
Want to keep reading about conflict? Read my post on Types of Conflict and Tension.