It comes as no surprise that every relationship will encounter conflict. Two humans trying to connect will inevitably have differences which at some point may cause a rub or tension. Being able to navigate these differences in preference, opinion, perspective, needs, and wants, is an art to be mastered.

Is Conflict Management an Innate Skill?

Many people enter relationships thinking they will naturally be able to navigate conflict - and this is sometimes true. If you grew up in an environment where you got to witness healthy conflict resolution, those skills may come naturally to you.

However, we aren’t born with those skills. So if you look back on your childhood, young adulthood, and present life circumstances and struggle to name people who you’ve witnessed navigate conflict well, it could be that you simply haven’t been taught how to do conflict in a way that’s constructive.

Relational skills are taught and caught by what we observe in others.

Unhealthy Conflict Strategies

When we haven’t been taught how to do conflict well, we resort to unhealthy and ineffective strategies:

• Avoidance strategies - ignore the issues or minimize them to avoid the turmoil of an argument

• Indirect strategies - passive aggressive actions like harboring resentment, punishing others for their wrongs to even the scales, and silent treatment

• Aggressive strategies - trying to intimidate the other person, believing our perspective is the right one, forcing them to stand down and admit they’re wrong

If you see yourself in any of those strategies and are wondering, How do I change this?? you’re in luck. You already have a tool that when wielded well, will transform the way that you do conflict. It’s called mindfulness.

Practicing Mindfulness

Have you ever been in an argument about something silly, like what the right way to load the dishwasher is, or where to go to dinner, and you got incredibly heated and went 0-100 so quickly. You’re feeling upset, but also recognizing that the topic is insignificant in the grander scheme of life, and embarrassed that it’s feeling like such a big deal to you. You’re wondering how you got here and how to get out. Often times what’s happening in these discussions is that the topic at hand (the dishwasher or dinner reservation) actually holds more meaning to you.

Perhaps the dishwasher represents how you feel in your relationship, that your partner doesn’t accept your influence and ignores your preferences. Perhaps the dinner reservation is actually about how you feel insignificant to your partner and you worry that they don’t care much about spending time with you.

But rather than leading with that vulnerability, you make it about the dishwasher or the dinner reservation because you’re not aware of what’s actually going on deep inside.

In conflict, your first powerful action for transforming conflict into connection is practicing mindful self-awareness to be able to notice when a conversation holds more weight to you than the topic at hand. There are two categories where you’ll want to focus your awareness: your body and your mind.

Your Body

In our modern era, we often miss the importance of our body’s intuition. Your body is sending messages about your surroundings all day long. It’s important for you to know that our bodies don’t know the difference between a social threat and a physical threat, so when we’re feeling socially threatened, our bodies will react as if we are in physical danger.

There are four strategies our bodies use in threatening situations:

1. Fight-mode: getting more agitated and aggressive. This might look like feeling hot, tense, shifting in your tone of voice, shorter breath and a quickened heart rate. Your body is preparing for attack.

2. Flight-mode: this might feel like the urge to leave the room, feeling short in breath, a quickened heart rate, sweating, and feeling hot. You might notice the emotion of anxiety, worry, and fear. Your body is getting ready to exit the environment.

3. Freeze-mode: If we think of this like physical survival in the wild, this would be the strategy of playing dead. In conflict, this feels like going numb, not feeling much at all, feeling as if objects are farther away or not real. One might notice that their mind goes blank and they have a hard time articulating what they’re feeling or thinking.

4. Fawn-mode: this is one in which the individual feeling threatened perceives what the other person expects of them and accommodates, even if it’s not authentic to how they feel. This might look like taking more than one’s fair share of responsibility for an issue, telling the other person they’re right, and you’re totally wrong. The strategy here is to pacify the other person’s anger in order to feel safe again. Body cues associated with fawn-mode might feel similar to freeze-mode since you have to disconnect from what you’re feeling in order to accommodate the other person.

Your Mind

Your mind is another powerful resource to clue you into when you’re in a conflict that’s about more than the topic at hand. Growing aware of the thoughts passing through your mind can help you discern what is bothering you. For example, when your partner loads the dishwasher in the wrong way, you might have the thought, Here she goes again, ignoring my input. She’s so selfish. When you can mindfully catch that thought, you can begin to explore it’s meaning. Inherent in that thought is a cognitive distortion of assuming someone else’s intentions. Sure, she might have neglected to arrange the bowls in the correct way because she’s self-centered, but also could it be that she’s stressed and was thinking about work while loading the dishwasher, and did it in the way she always has out of habit, without intending to harm you?

Practicing mindfulness to your thoughts can be improved by learning to catch cognitive distortions. Here are a few:

• Magnifying or minimizing - exaggerating or minimizing the importance of an event/achievement

• Catastrophizing - believing only the worst outcomes are possible

• Overgeneralizing - making a broad interpretation based on a few data points

• Personalization - believing others’ actions are about you, or that you are in control or responsible for others’ actions

• Jumping to conclusions - making an assumption based on a little to no evidence

• Mind reading - believing you can know what others are thinking/what their motives are

• Fortune telling - expecting a situation to turn out poorly based on little to no evidence

• Emotional reasoning - believing that how you feel about something is the way it is in reality

• Disqualifying the positive - focusing only on the negative

• Should statements - believing things should be a particular way (shame-based thinking)

• All-or-nothing thinking - using absolutes such as “always,” and “never”

When you catch yourself thinking something that’s distorted, it likely means that you’re feeling threatened and coping with thoughts of despair or distancing to protect yourself. Despair might sound like, “I’ll never get the love I want” which is an all-or-nothing cognitive distortion that makes you feel defeated so that you won’t try anymore, which consequently might mean you won’t have the opportunity to be let down again. We can see how that strategy is trying to help you but is ineffective in the long term. A distancing thought might sound like, “He’s so stubborn and has such a fragile ego.” This is a mind-reading cognitive distortion that allows you to make your partner the problem and you the hero. Again, in the short term, this is a great strategy to feel better, but in the long-term it harms your relationship and is ineffective for conflict resolution.

It is also important to be aware of our narratives. Our brains operate in a story format. We’re constantly forming a narrative about ourselves and the world. When we experience new events, our brain makes sense of it through the lens of our narratives. If we have unhealthy narratives, such as “I’m not worthy of love,” “My needs don’t matter,” “I can’t trust others,” we will be interpreting dynamics with our partner and fitting them in with these stories. When we grow aware of our narratives, we can identify where we first learned them and work to heal those messages so that we can transform how we interpret present-day encounters.

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Your awareness of your body and your mind are tools you already have, but often they are tools that have been neglected. If you’re ready to begin transforming your conflict into connection, start by practicing mindfulness to your body and your thoughts.

When you learn to attune to your body’s and mind’s cues and grow aware of the messages, you can be clued in to when your body is sensing threat. When this is happening, it’s a sign you need to reestablish a sense of safety before you can proceed. Read my next blog on how to reestablish safety to transform conflict from destructive to constructive.

Ready to make some lasting changes in yourself and your relationship? Download my 10-page free ebook with four reflective prompts and exercises to begin to transform the way you navigate conflict.