Conflict happens. If we are in relationship – romantic, platonic, familial – with someone for long enough, conflict happens. Its unavoidable. But how do you approach conflict? How do you approach arguments or disagreements? Are you willing to sit in it and work through the discomfort of conflict in order to move past it or would you rather brush it under the rug?
Some people avoid conflict entirely. Everyone has their own reasons for avoiding it but, a lot of the time, it comes down to not wanting to be uncomfortable. Not wanting to have the uncomfortable conversation. Not wanting to make another person uncomfortable. Not wanting to be uncomfortable themselves. BUT if it’s not safe to step into conflict with someone, then the avoidance may be needed and necessary (and also – get out from that type of situation when you can).
Some people live in conflict. I wanted to write ‘comfortably’ live in conflict, but I don’t think that it’s actually comfortable – I think it’s just what some people get used to and then don’t know how to break that cycle within themselves or with other people. Navigating conflict in a healthy way requires us to learn how to communicate and requires us to look at ourselves. If someone isn’t willing to do either of those things, then there’s no chance they’ll be able to work through conflict.
If someone is disregulated, chances are that they do one or more of the following when faced with conflict: avoid, blame, shut down, explode, not listen, isolate, insult, threaten, abuse, manipulate, etc etc. That can be a moment of disregulation or a life of it. It can be one disregulated conflict or a lifetime of them (or at least until a person does the work and becomes more regulated).
For a lot of my adult life, I avoided conflict like my life depended on it. In the last decade or so I’ve slowly learned how to face conflict in a healthy way – and by slowly, I mean I’m still working on it. I naturally want to push people away, shut down, isolate, and avoid avoid avoid. Oftentimes lately, I over correct and I want to talk things through until I’ve gone in unending circles of useless words for hours and hours. Rarely – only a few times in my life really – have I exploded.
It takes time and effort to learn how to approach conflict in a healthy way. It also takes two people, both willing to take the time and effort to learn how to navigate conflict within themselves and between each other. Last month, Nance and I fell into an old pattern of ours. She has a tendency when she is overwhelmed to go inward, push me away, and get really quiet. When that happens, my head starts to spin, I push us to talk things through, push her away, push more to talk things through, push her away more.
This doesn’t go over very well for our relationship when it happens. I had pushed us to talk to the point of us both yelling at each other in the middle of a walk with our dogs – one of those few times I’ve actually exploded. She walked away, I walked after her, after a few minutes we were able to talk a little bit more calmly, we ended the conflict with a long hug and later we agreed to schedule a couples therapy session to help us.
During the session, our therapist observed how disregulated both of us were. We were both spiraling in our own heads about each other and about several things in our own lives. She told us to take the weekend to not talk about anything emotional and to try to just re-regulate ourselves individually and together so that’s what we did. I’ll admit, I was surprised at how much it helped (my brain wanted to talk everything out even though neither of us would have been able to in any clear way). It didn’t occur to me that taking time to cool off, to regulate ourselves, and to reconnect in a low pressure environment would actually be really damn helpful.
Once we both were more regulated, we were able to communicate our thoughts and feelings a lot more clearly to each other. We were able to understand better what the other person was going through and we were able to express how we were feeling in those times that we couldn’t bring ourselves to talk.
Now the thing is… even in the moments of us yelling, neither of us said anything intentionally mean to the other person. Despite our nervous systems being a wreck, despite us not being able to communicate in any way really, despite a whole lot of things, we stayed kind in the words that we chose to say to each other (even if some of those words were yelled rather than spoken calmly).
In my opinion, learning how to navigate even your worst moments in conflict with kindness is wildly important. The few times that I’ve failed at this as an adult, I’ve regretted it so I do my damn best to not intentionally say anything mean or hurtful. I don’t think that its possible to not hurt people but I do think that its very possible to not intentionally hurt people.
Conflict happens. If we are going to live in a world where humans are in relationship with other humans – and I’m sorry to break it to you, but we’re all in that world whether we want to be or not – then we all need to learn how to navigate conflict in healthy ways – that doesn’t mean that we wont slide back into old patterns of avoidance or anxiety though. (Side note – Sliding back into or being in any type of abusive relationship is unacceptable. That is NOT what I’m referring to when I talk about avoidance or anxiety in conflict.)
Being human is messy and complicated. One of the few things that we actually have control over is our intention in how we navigate this world, these relationships, these interactions, these conflicts, and our inner worlds. Kindness to ourselves, to our partners, to our friends, to our family, to random strangers on the street is never something that should go unappreciated and never will go unappreciated by me.
Thanks for reading,
Chelsea
CKB Coaching, LLC 