All therapists, executive mentors, and life coaches will have, from time to time, a client or a client-couple (partnership) easily described as “high conflict.”
Perhaps you know of someone just like this – a person for whom relationships or work are filled with conflict, contention, and not just a little crying. Drama surrounds them just like that cloud of dust follows Peanuts’ Pig Pen.
It’s almost as if they could not exist were it not for the conflict that they themselves engender: Absent the daily strife, they would struggle with what to do; Absent a problem to solve, they would fill worthless and irrelevant; Absent a partner who gives them constant grief, they would feel unloved or unwanted.
I suppose this gives them purpose of a sort, and that’s ok. Except when it’s not. Except when the absence of conflict is clinically significant in the sense that they have lost their will to survive. Except when the lack of conflict erodes their will to live.
One important goal in life is the complete absence of conflict. It is a fleeting goal, however, and one which never quite happens. But if we remember that so much of what happens in our lives is, in fact, out of our control, we can begin to let go of control. And in that effort lay the rudiments of a conflict-free existence.
Hemingway wrote, in his beautiful book, A Farewell to Arms, how incredibly cruel and harsh the world is. Eventually, it will break even the best of us, the strongest of us, the most fortified among us. But …
Afterwards, many are strong at all the broken places. Those who will not break, those who will not bend, will be killed.
The stoic person knows this quite well. He or she knows that much of what happens is out of our control: We lose people we love. We are financially ruined by someone we trusted. We put ourselves out there, put every bit of our effort into something, and are crushed when it fails. We are drafted to fight in wars, to bear a huge tax, or to carry a burden we did not ask for. We are passed over for the thing we wanted so badly. If we do not bend, we break.
Our goal, aside from seeking the fleeting notion of a conflict-free existence, must be to achieve the notion of anti-fragility. And within anti-fragility is process of being broken and healing, of becoming stronger at all the broken places. We focus on what we can control: our response to life. The repairing that we engage in (for us, not for others). The learning of lessons, and the preparation for future lessons sure to come. We become better for what we have gone through, better by far than had we resisted change and never been broken in the first place.
Conflict is both avoidable and unavoidable. Only a dead fish goes with the flow. There are indeed times when we must stand and take a stand, as it were, in the face of insult and hurt. But remember this: We cannot stop the insulter or the hurter. Haters will hate, as the saying goes, and any attempt on our part to control them will result in a hardening of their response. You have seen it time and time again.
The only thing we can control, the only thing we can modulate in the face of insult and hurt, is our own response. Period. And in that response is the “teachable moment.” The idea that that which breaks us, makes us stronger at all the broken places. We can learn from the conflict that our response becomes a function of what we have learned. We can allow it to teach us something.
Perhaps it is to align our lives differently, to eliminate from our lives those who would suck the marrow in a bad way, to learn how to avoid situations that we know will come to no good end. Learning, therefore, is the means by which we become stronger.
If you are involved in repeated conflict with someone you love, or engaged in repeated conflict at work, I encourage you to examine the antecedents to that conflict. What came before? High conflict couples, for example, may have to stop and examine the relationship and ask themselves: Am I confusing love with the constant management of conflict?
Constant conflict is not love. It is an attempt by both sides to control the other. How then to proceed?
- Take a break from each other and reflect upon the relationship, the partnership, the sources of conflict, and the possibilities of resolution. What must YOU do to save the deal? Do NOT focus on what they would have to do.
- Go back in time only to find the reasons for the partnering in the first place. Why did you fall in love? What keeps you love? The positives – not the negatives.
- Meet and agree to disagree and remember to follow the rules of fair fighting.
- If there are show-stoppers in your relationship – things with which you cannot live – say so and be firm.
- Show-stoppers are for you and not for the other – remember whose behavior you can control (only your own).
- Show-stoppers are just that: Stoppers. Indicate that the relationship is ending. Seek ways to part company with aplomb and compassion.
Constant conflict is a lousy way to be in the world. Think of how you might want your tombstone to read:
He was in constant conflict and enjoyed nary a day in his life
Or
He fought the good fight, when he had to, and avoided/resolved conflict when he could.
