Conflict: Getting Mad, Getting Even and a Healthy Option…. Part I

Whether it is dealing with a moody family member, personal trauma or countering a danger to one’s country, we are faced as individuals and communities with many daily risks to our safety, patience, frame of reference and emotional harmony. 

Current global unrest serves to demonstrate continued thinking, feeling and behaviour when dealing with conflict, that if one is threatened one must retaliate. Often our paradigm is one of looking into the past to justify this behaviour, a question of “who started it?”, “who threw the first punch?”, “who didn’t accept an apology?” Often people use illogical beliefs about others which are handed down culturally or from our parents and preceding generations in attempting to cope. Some irrational beliefs about conflict and those who pose a ‘threat’ to us may be so entrenched in our subconscious that we fail to recognise them. This is due to having either accepted these beliefs as truths, from our parents, or having employed contaminated logic when making sense of a lived experience. The psychological lens through which we see the world may thus contaminate our behaviour, which then reinforces the stereotypes we have of others, in a cycle of negative feedback. 

It may firstly be useful to ask “why should I change my worldview or approach to conflict?”, as often we are so sure of our position and ‘comfortable’ in our paradigm that we aren’t aware that our beliefs are not serving us. There are a number of reasons for changing unhelpful conflict behaviour, ranging from improving our experience of life to our impact on humanity as a collective. It is easy to get philosophical on this, and in the interests of pragmatism let us maintain our focus on the real world experience of conflict and our responses to it. Conflict causes stress and prolonged, unresolved conflict causes chronic stress, which we obviously want to avoid. Resolving conflict efficiently and healthily impacts us directly and also feeds back into society in that we model positive and useful behaviour to those we engage with, who are thus invited to employ the same thinking and behaviour, and so on. One might imagine this process being passed from person to person in a positive feedback loop. 

So how do we objectively see those parts of ourselves, which in reality do not serve us? You might imagine this akin to looking in the mirror and seeing yourself differently! A useful start is recognising when we find ourselves facing the same problem repeatedly without change, that we are using out-dated and/or non-relevant thinking. We are then likely using thinking and beliefs which were once useful to us but are now redundant, or which were never useful to us in our lives but were passed to us from our forebears. Our beliefs are not necessarily learned or employed in awareness. Their presence can be noted when we react to stressful situations and use words like “typical”, “always” and “never” in the heat of the moment. It is impossible to cover all flavours of contaminated or irrelevant belief, but if we observe a recurring pattern in our relationships and interactions with others during conflict, it can be a strong clue that we are not thinking or acting from a place of useful awareness. 

A common pattern is reacting critically or angrily when experiencing a threat or making a judgement of someone. Unless the other party responds from a place of awareness and objective thinking, we may enter a negative feedback loop with them, a cycle of punishing and being punished. 

So how do we escape harmful patterns? 

As with many unhelpful behaviours, recognising their existence is a great start. Recognition however is not judgment as this is in itself punitive, merely another form of unhelpful thinking within the same paradigm. Recognition in this sense then is being aware of the dynamic between oneself and the other without judging or assigning meaning and value to it. This non-judged observation of the dynamic is useful in that we are unlikely to employ the same beliefs (in defending our behaviour or criticising the other’s) which we are aiming at shifting. 

In order to invite you to take ample time to observe your dynamic/beliefs/thinking, without judgment, I will address the next step in an upcoming article. You are also welcome to visit www.lifecoachcapetown.com for more info on how coaching can help you.