Embracing Conflict—Why It's Essential & 4 Simple Ways to Tackle It
Episode Notes
Conflict is a part of every relationship. It's normal to disagree from time to time- even (especially!) with the people you love the most. Yet so many of us fear conflict and do all we can to avoid it. In today's episode, I show you how to transform conflict into an opportunity for growth.
Here's what we cover:
1. The causes of conflict (6:48)
2. 5 benefits of conflict (10:17)
3. The top 3 reasons we avoid conflict (21:18)
4. 4 steps to mastering conflict (30:40)
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Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- Pre-order I Shouldn't Feel This Way on Amazon!
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
Transcript
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here. I loved all the feedback you've been giving me about these last two episodes, about what happiness really is. The whole point of this series is that happiness is more complex than what it seems at face value. It's all about putting yourself on the right path. So today we're going to lean right into that complexity and talk about walking into conflict, as a way of moving toward increasing degrees of happiness.
Now, if you subscribe to my weekly email, it goes out every week to over 60,000 people. You were the first to find out that I have a brand new book coming out May 7th. It's called I Shouldn't Feel This Way. This book is all about working through the inner conflict that so many of us face, those inner tensions that keep us stuck and defeated and far from the happiness we really crave.
On one hand, you feel like you should show up for your friend. But on the other hand, you are wrestling with feelings of hurt or betrayal. You feel like you should have positive feelings toward your spouse. But on the other hand, you wrestle with feeling lonely or disappointed. You feel like you should have unwavering faith on one hand. On the other hand, you wrestle with doubt or discouragement when it comes to your relationship with God.
These inner tensions, inner conflicts are normal. We all feel these ways at times and the path toward health, toward wholeness, and yes, toward increasing degrees of happiness isn't to guilt trip. It isn't to shove those inner tensions aside.
It's to work our way through them. That is what I Shouldn't Feel This Way is all about. I poured over these pages last year, laying down my own three step framework to work through those inner tensions so that you can move from stuck and defeated and trapped into courageous action. So it would mean so much to me if you go pre order I Shouldn't Feel This Way.
But in today's episode, I want to give you some background teaching. So you understand that the true path toward happiness inside yourself and in your relationships means you have to find a way through conflict. You can't avoid it. You can't bypass it. You can't pretend like it's not there. You have to learn how to deal with conflict in your relationships.
The truth is facing conflict in your relationships leads to greater degrees of happiness. The opposite is also true. If you're suppressing conflict, if you're avoiding it, if you're bypassing it, if you're on the path and you're seeing conflict there and you're doing everything you can to get around it so that you don't have to walk through it, you're actually weakening your relationships. That's the most important thing I want you to take from today's episode.
If you're avoiding conflict at all costs, you aren't helping your relationships, you're not improving your relationships. In fact, you are actually in jeopardy of weakening them. Research shows that when you learn to proactively engage in healthy conflict, you improve your relationships, improve your own well being, you earn the respect of your peers, and you will experience less depression, anxiety, and loneliness.
Listen, I want to be honest with you here. I hate conflict. I hate it. I am one of those people that when I see conflict there on the path, I will do anything to walk around it, anything, including hurting myself. I have also found it also hurts my relationships. It's not good for me and it's not good for other people.
So I need this episode today as much as you do listening. This is hard. I remember years ago someone challenged me on this very point. They said, wouldn't you rather be respected by other people than liked? I had to think hard about that because there is a strong, pleasing part of me that would settle for liked over respected, but I'm learning to change.
I'm learning to grow. I'm learning that short term instant gratification of making somebody happy is not worth the long term sacrifice of respect, of trust, of dignity that actually leads to greater relational health over time.
When we avoid conflict, we risk damaging relationships which leads to greater degrees of isolation. Conflict is necessary for growth. We have to learn how to face it. So without further ado, let's talk about how to achieve happiness through conflict and small, brave steps we can take to move through conflict instead of avoiding it.
So what do we mean when we talk about conflict? What is conflict?
In the context of our relationships, that term conflict refers to any disagreement, clash, or even a mild tension. It could be massive, it could be tiny—anything that occurs between you and another person, a friend, a family member, your own child, a spouse, a parent, any relationship where there are two different viewpoints.
There might be conflicting needs, where you have one need and your loved one has another need. There could be conflicting goals, where you want to go one way and they want to go another way. It could be conflicting values.
Here's the thing: we're going to have conflict in every single one of our relationships because human beings never completely align. You and your very best friend at times are going to have differing viewpoints. You're going to have competing needs. You're going to have different goals or even slightly different values. We don't ever line up 100 percent with another human being. This is a good thing. I worry when someone is so mapped on to another person that they don't have their own distinct viewpoint. That's not healthy. That's getting into codependency.
So in healthy relationships, on any given day there are going to be clashes between individuals. These can be tiny things. It might be who got to the grocery checkout line first, and you've got to navigate that conflict. It could be a conflict with one of your kids who doesn't like the curfew that you set. It could be a conflict with your spouse about how to unwind after dinner, what television show to watch. It could be a conflict with one of your friends who said something that kind of stung when it landed.
And these are the smaller ways that we clash with other people. There are also bigger ways. You might hold different political viewpoints from someone you love. You might hold different religious viewpoints from someone you love. You might even have the same faith, but differ about where you want to go to church or how you viewed a sermon. There might be bigger conflicts about how to raise kids or how to spend money.
These types of conflicts are part of being in relationship with other people. The only way to not have conflict is to live in isolation and that's not a good option.
We have to learn to deal with conflict.
Now, I Shouldn't Feel This Way starts with the inner conflict that we feel because usually that's where it starts. We feel something that we don't like, or we notice that we're not aligned with the other person, that we're feeling differently than they're feeling. What do we do with those feelings? Do we hide them?
Do we bury them? Do we suppress them or do we learn how to speak on behalf of what we feel in a healthy way so that we can experience the positive benefits of being in relationship with other people who at the end of the day are different from us.
This is a beautiful thing. God made us with a lot of differences, with a lot of diversity. We have different viewpoints. We have different beliefs. We see things differently. This is a good thing. We do not want to be clones of each other.
And part of our work in this world is to learn how to work our way through these differences to arrive at even better solutions.
That leads us to why is conflict so important? What are the benefits of conflict?
Well, learning to engage in conflict has been shown to be necessary for so many reasons. Number one, it improves a sense of self confidence. Learning to navigate conflict and resolve it effectively gives you an incredible boost to your self esteem. In short, it helps you grow. It helps you grow in how you show up with your kids and how you show up with your friends in how you show up with a partner, with a spouse and how you show up at work. It makes you a more effective leader in all of those categories.
Number two, engaging in conflicts improves relationships. It's not fun to name something hard or something that's not working in a relationship. It's not fun. It's hard to do. It takes some trial and error to figure it out.
But the alternative is to suffer tensions or misunderstandings or miscommunications that don't need to be suffered. Often when you are willing to address an awkward conversation where you name something, especially in healthy relationships where there's a baseline of trust, the other person is relieved.
They're like, man, that wasn't working for me either. Together you look at the problem. You're not blaming each other. You're saying, this isn't working. This thing outside of us isn't working. Can we find a better way? So for example, maybe at work, you're frustrated with a colleague who always pushes things right up to the edge of the deadline, but you're also aware that you've never actually asked them to get things to you a little bit sooner.
So it's hard. You're gonna take a risk, but when you name something and say, hey, listen, next time, could we try something new? Could we try to get this together a week out so that we have margin before the deadline to fix anything that doesn't work? Would you be willing to do that with me?
That other person might be like, yeah, that's a really good idea. I tend to work to the deadline. It's a bad habit. I'm so glad you spoke up. I'm happy to try that. Let's do that together. So you're bringing a gift that you have to the table that will actually free this other person to grow a little bit too.
Now listen, I know that it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes the other person is like, no, I'm not doing that. But at least you forced that problem to the surface and you've given yourself a fighting chance to approach it in a way that would be beneficial for both of you.
Number three, facing conflict helps you clarify your values when you face the conflict, especially inside of your own self, when you're really honest about these two different conflicting things you feel. If part of you is feeling like, oh, I don't want to be a squeaky wheel. I don't want to raise this issue in my friendship.
But another part of you is going, this actually really matters to me. I do care. I don't like it that we're always doing things that are more expensive than what I can afford, or I don't like it that my friend is always pushing me for more time than I have to give, or I don't like it that my friend doesn't reach out to me, that I'm always the one initiating. You boil it down to, I love this friend and this thing that's bothering me really matters to me.
It's a value that I have. So in order to honor that relationship, I need to honor that value. So when you face the conflict, especially the conflict inside of yourself, you force yourself to get really clear about your values. Is this something I really care about, in which case I need to bring it to the table?
Or is this a value I can set aside? I don't care that much. It's not worth fighting for. But when you face that conflict, you make a clear decision. You don't bypass what you feel. You don't avoid it. You actually look at it and clarify your values.
Facing conflict can expand your perspective. Sometimes you go to the other person and you raise an issue and you say, hey, this has been a little bit hard for me. Can we talk about it? you find out valuable information about the other person. Maybe you go to someone and say, hey, it's kind of hurt that I haven't heard from you in a couple of months. Can we talk?
The other person says to you, hey, man, I'm sorry. So sorry, I have been so stressed out because of X, Y, and Z going on in my life. I haven't had the bandwidth to reach out to anyone. Suddenly, you have information and you can pivot and you can say, oh my gosh, I don't want to pressure you.
I want to support you. How can I be praying for you? Take the time that you need.
So facing the conflict allows you to gain information that changes your perspective, that allows you to become an even better friend. Facing conflict helps you engage in problem solving. When you walk into conflict, you name something hard and it allows you to problem solve together with the other person.
It helps you build resilience within the context of your cherished relationships, not only resilience in yourself. You're learning to be brave to raise things that matter to you, but also resilience within the context of your relationship.
Sometimes it takes a couple laps around the track to get it right with someone. You might go to someone with something that you need to talk about. And they say, oh, that's hard. I don't know if I can do that, but let's see if we can tackle this together.
It puts you on the same team with somebody and together, you don't have to figure it out right away, but you can start to have conversations that show how much you care about each other and develop resilience and problem solving skills over time,
Lastly, facing conflict can create closure. Sometimes you go to someone with something you need to address. You've thought it through. It's a value. You need to raise it. You need to talk about it. Maybe they aren't able to join you in resolving that conflict. That's painful, but you get valuable information that allows you to move toward closure.
Sometimes closure is the very best next step. So facing conflict builds a muscle where you learn to name what's hard, raise it in healthy ways. It allows you to gain a deeper understanding about the other person and about the nature of your relationship.
Facing conflict isn't demanding a certain type of solution. It's not demanding something from the other person. It's saying, I care about you. I need to have this conversation with you. Will you join me in talking this through?
So, in light of all these great benefits of facing conflict, why do we avoid it? Well, there are a lot of reasons we avoid conflict, and I'm going to walk you through some of the most common, but the bottom line is most of us have a lot of fear about jeopardizing our relationships. We avoid the possibility of a rupture at all costs. There are a lot of reasons for this.
There's no shame in being someone who avoids conflict. Like I said, I'm an incredibly conflict avoidant person myself. I identify with a lot of the reasons I'm about to lay out, but it's really important to get curious and consider: why do I avoid conflict? What's at the root of that? What do I fear would happen if I were to walk through conflict instead of working overtime to walk around it or avoid it?
Here are some reasons that might resonate with your experience.
Number one, you might be someone who doesn't like to face the negative emotions that often precede a conflict. We covered the importance of working through negative emotions. You can go back to episodes 80 through 83 for a deep dive into how to start facing your own negative emotions.
But the bottom line is that we don't like those emotions. We avoid emotions like anger, frustration, sadness, or fear inside ourselves, which means we end up avoiding opportunities for growth and intimacy with other people. Facing those emotions inside of us helps us gain clarity, which in turn helps us gain conviction, which in turn helps empower us to enter into our relationships with more courage, with more clarity, with more confidence.
Number two, we have a strong bent toward harmony. For those of you who are high in empathy or who are peacekeepers, who have a genuine desire to see others thrive, you often don't want to be the source of tension or stress for another person, even when that tension or stress you're introducing is for the other person's good.
You may prioritize maintaining peace or harmony over resolving genuine issues in a relationship. This gets back to personality type or natural God-given strengths or those Enneagram types we discussed back in episodes 49, 52, and 53.
We talked about how some of these things are hardwired, sometimes you simply by nature, by your God-given design, tend to prioritize other values. So for you, it's working against the grain of your God-given design a little bit to learn the benefit of introducing some healthy conflict for the good of everyone.
Another reason we avoid conflict is a lack of skills. You don't know how. You'd love to figure out how to talk about something hard with your kids, with your spouse, with your friend, but you literally don't know how. Because you don't have the skills, because no one taught you, when you have tried to introduce conflict, maybe it didn't go well. Maybe the other person responded poorly. So you stopped trying.
Sometimes we avoid conflict because of wounds from our past. If you grew up in a high conflict family where there was a lot of negativity around conflict or where you have some trauma, where conflict was dealt with in an abusive way, or maybe where someone even used toxic strategies with you.
When you did try to talk about something that was hard for you, parts of you learned to survive, right? You've learned how to cope. I will never go down that road again. I want to honor that. If you're someone who has learned to survive by avoiding conflict at all costs, that makes sense.
That part of you learned how to survive through not saying anything. I want to honor that–that's a survival tactic you may well have needed in the past.
If you're currently in an abusive relationship or in a toxic relationship, you may be using that coping strategy of avoiding conflict. I get it. That makes sense. If this is the case for you, I want you to honor that. I can't engage in conflict because the cost is too high, either because of this current toxicity that I'm involved with, or because in the past I was so hurt that it creates too much anxiety or tension inside of me to consider dealing with conflict in a different way.
If that's the case for you, that's a great reason to reach out for support from a therapist to learn how to both heal from those past wounds and engage conflict in different ways in your present and future relationships.
Then finally, sometimes we avoid conflict because of cultural or social norms. It may be that you grew up in a family that really valued politeness, that things were shoved under the carpet and that wasn't all bad. It kind of worked in your family of origin and now you find yourself in a whole different world where maybe you married into a family with different cultural norms or different social norms, and you don't know how to fit in because that's not the way that you were raised or that's not how you did things in your own family.
You're working through that. Again, I want to honor that. There are a lot of different cultural norms around conflict and there's no one right way to do this. Navigating conflict within the context of your relationships can look really different from one relationship to another, from one family to another. I want to honor that.
I don't like one size fits all solutions. The way that one couple, for example, resolves conflict might look so different from the way another couple resolves conflict. Some families use a lot of humor as their way of dealing with conflict. Some are really direct.
Regardless of how you go about facing conflict, what matters is that there's a path through it. In fact, part of the joy in relationships is learning, within the context of your own unique relationship, how to face conflict.
For example, some couples hit it head on. They might have weekly meetings where every week they get together to have an issue-clearing. It's the place they set aside every week to put the issues on the table and talk them through.
Some couples have a weekly therapy session where they use that time to raise issues that need clearing. Some families have monthly family meetings with the kids and everybody in tow. This is the time where we're going to raise the issues that aren't working. We're going to go head on into conflict.
So that's a really structured approach to conflict within relationships. Others do it a little bit more organically where you bring things up directly as they occur in the moment. Some couples use written communication when it comes to navigating conflict, because they find that writing things out tends to take out the emotion and gives the other person time to respond.
Now for one couple, that might work. For another couple that doesn't work at all. So again, there are different ways to approach this. What matters is when I ask this question to you: “how are you navigating conflict in your most precious relationships?” is that you have an idea of how you walk through it.
You know, we tend to kind of tease each other. That's what works for us. When we're both having coffee, we tend to kind of teasingly raise the things that are hard, but we both feel pretty good about that.
Or, I'm someone who needs to name it when I see it. I've got to bring it up. I've got to address it. This is what I have to do. Or I'm someone who needs structure. I will not raise the conflict so I've got to have scheduled check-ins for that express purpose.
Whether you're someone who does that a little bit more organically, whether you're someone who does it in a very structured way, whether you're someone who uses humor, whether you're someone who needs to really rely on the clarity of the written word to communicate, what matters is that you feel empowered to face conflict in your most beloved relationships.
I want to leave you with four steps you can take to find happiness through conflict. These are for those of you who really hate conflict, to begin to shift your mind to help you begin to move through conflict instead of avoiding it.
As you consider these four steps, I want you to remember what we talked about back in episode 84–that the goal of happiness is not instant gratification. Happiness is about putting yourself on the right path, the path of more creativity, the path of a clearer calling or purpose, the path of courage, and the path of connection.
When you raise a hard topic with someone, you ignite each four of those qualities. You have to get creative. You have to be courageous. You have to think about your values. You know what? I think there's a higher purpose here than my own comfort level. I think there's a calling here to go deeper in this relationship.
You are taking a step toward connection. This leads us to the very first step I want you to take as you consider your own relationship with conflict. It's to reframe conflict as a courageous conversation. As an opportunity to be brave. It's an opportunity to walk into a courageous conversation.
So when you notice yourself avoiding that conflict, because you don't want to hurt someone, you don't want to disappoint someone, you don't want to be a bother. You don't want to cause someone else stress. You don't want to jeopardize a relationship. Remind yourself that this is an opportunity to be brave. It's an opportunity to hold a courageous conversation.
When you reframe conflict in this way, you remove the pressure, you remove the expectations. You don't have to do it perfectly, it will probably be messy, but what you're doing is giving yourself permission to be brave. You're giving yourself permission to say, I care enough about both myself and this other person and the relationship that I'm willing to be brave.
You reframe your benchmark for success. Your benchmark for success isn't to get the other person to do something, to get your way. Success won't be that the conversation goes perfectly because it might not. Success will be, did I take one tiny step toward being a little bit more brave?
So number one is to reframe how you think about conflict in your mind. Conflict is an opportunity to be brave. In fact, if you don't face the opportunity for conflict, you might actually harm the relationship. We tend to tell ourselves, well, if I hurt someone or if I disappoint someone, or if I am the squeaky wheel or create stress, then that's bad, but what if doing those things actually leads to a healthier relationship and what if not doing those things allows or enables an unhealthy pattern to continue?
Number two is that you got to deal with the guilt and the self-gaslighting. This is exactly where I came up with the title of this next book that's coming out called I Shouldn't Feel This Way. That's our inner guilt tripper talking. It's telling us, you shouldn't feel that way. Stop caring, stop being frustrated, stop caring so much. And that guilt-tripper is trying to help, trying to keep the peace, but you've got to face those negative feelings in order to find a better way.
When you face those negative feelings you are feeling inside, the frustration, the hurt, the annoyance, the anger, you gain clarity. You also calm your own nervous system. You shift from guilt tripping and gaslighting yourself to holy curiosity. I wonder what that's about. Why do I feel this way?
You invite God into that process. God, what is going on here? Why are these feelings here? They're not going away. What do I need to know about this situation? Can you help me understand? Maybe this isn't something I should try to make go away. Maybe there's an invitation here.
What if these negative emotions are an invitation to be brave? So when you shift from guilt tripping yourself to facing those negative emotions in partnership with God's Spirit, you're already taking a brave step.
Sometimes this can take weeks or even months to work through, especially when there's a history of a really toxic or abusive relationship where you've learned to avoid conflict for a very good reason. Learning to really honor and validate those painful emotions that you experience is in and of itself a brave step toward facing conflict.
You're learning to face that conflict inside yourself and inviting God in to help you work through it instead of trying to sideline legitimate emotions.
So number one is to reframe conflict as an opportunity to be brave. Number two is to stop guilt tripping and gaslighting yourself and really face that inner conflict, those negative emotions that are refusing to go away. Those two things happen inside yourself. You're reframing your own thoughts about conflict and you're working through your own inner tensions, your own conflicting feelings.
Then when it comes to actually taking a brave step toward conflict in your relationship, number three is to start with a safe person first.
Don't go right into your hardest relationship with your hardest conversation. Start by naming it with a safe person. You can ask for support from a safe person in a couple of ways.
You might ask them to support you on your journey of learning to face conflict rather than avoid it. You might say, I really need to work on facing conflict. I need to start naming some things that are hard. I need to work on this especially in these relationships, would you hold me accountable for that?
Would you support me on that? Could we check in about how I'm doing on that goal once a week or once a month? Could you be someone who journeys with me as I work to go through conflict instead of avoiding it? So naming it to a safe person can be helpful.
Secondly, you might start practicing with a safe person, which is what I call starting with the low hanging fruit. You might go to someone who feels pretty safe and where you don't see any really good reason not to, and practice being a little bit more honest,
Maybe you have a friend who always wants to go out to pizza for dinner and you actually don't really like pizza. So you practice the next time you're getting together saying, could we do something different? Could we try taking a walk instead of going out to eat? Now, listen, that's really low stakes. Arguably that might not even be raising conflict, but for some of you, just introducing a shift like that might be the next brave step you need to take..
Lastly, a fourth step is actually to have that courageous conversation now. There's a whole section on this called The Negotiation Conversation in The Best of You. So I'm going to go through these steps quickly.
When you start any courageous conversation, you affirm the good, with something like, I care enough about this relationship that it's important to talk about this. You state the deeper longing that you have for yourself or for the relationship. You propose an option that might work for both of you and in the words of Brene Brown–I love that she says this–you want to stay awkward, brave, and kind.
When you affirm the good, you name the deeper longing, you propose an option, and you embrace the awkward and you stay brave and kind, it's really hard to go wrong. It's really hard to go wrong. Remember, you don't have to get it perfectly. If you start off affirming the good, and you have clear options and you have clear conviction and even if you stay awkward, if you're brave and you're kind, it's really hard to go wrong.
Here's the thing. No matter how the other person responds, you will have taken a brave step to put yourself on that path toward deeper satisfaction and greater happiness. You're taking command of your own life. You're not avoiding conflict. You're walking through it and you're reframing your expectations of yourself.
Your goal is to show yourself that you are worth facing conflict one brave step at a time. This is part of growth. Jesus was the Prince of Peace and also Jesus named what was hard. He did not walk around conflict.
He walked through it. Part of growing to become the truest, best version of your God-given self is learning to move through conflict in partnership with God's Spirit.