By Melisa De Seguirant, LPC, LMFT ~ Oct 2024
Navigating Conflict Successfully
Are you comfortable managing conflict in your relationships?
Conflict happens! How do we work with it? What happens if we habitually try to avoid it? What skills are important to effectively resolving conflict when it occurs? What happens when conflict is ongoing?
How has conflict been modeled for you?
One way to start to understand our habits with regards to conflict, is to explore how it has been modeled for us over the course of our lives.
Take a moment to reflect ~
- Did you witness conflict in your family of origin? If so, what did it look like?
- What was the impact of the conflict you witnessed (or didn’t witness) as a child?
- How did your primary caretakers address conflict with you?
- What patterns have there been in your interpersonal relationships with regards to conflict?
- What does conflict make you feel in your body? Is your instinct to avoid? To lean in? To fight? To fawn or freeze?
- How would you like to approach conflict differently in the future?
When managed effectively, conflict can actually strengthen relationships. Why? Lived experience of working through conflict respectfully and collaboratively builds confidence in the overall integrity of the relationship. Furthermore, when we can trust that conflict will be handled with care, we feel more permission to show up authentically as opposed to trying to tiptoe around differences and possible points of friction.
IDEA: Conflict can be a reparative experience.
Many of us have experience with conflict not being handled appropriately, or meaningfully repaired. These experiences can lead us to fear conflict, and can cause reactivity in our nervous systems when we sense conflict arising.
Having the opportunity to engage in conflict that doesn’t turn into chaos or cause harm, but actually results in more vulnerability and understanding within a relationship can be hugely beneficial to our nervous systems, repairing some of the wounding from more negative interpersonal experiences.
Models for Navigating Conflict Effectively
Nonviolent communication (NVC) is a multipart communication model first developed by Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD in the 1960s. It emphasizes 4 components: Observations, feelings, needs and requests.
The idea behind NVC is that conflict is inevitable, and can be navigated ethically and in a way that accounts for the universal human needs of emotional safety, interpersonal connection and acceptance.
Learning the language of NVC involves becoming skilled at observing our feelings, determining our related needs, and learning how to effectively verbalize requests.
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Imago Dialogue, developed by Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt in the 1980s, offers a similar framework for productive communication, focusing less on expression of needs and more on the basic steps to effective communication: Mirroring, validation and empathy.
Other frameworks, including restorative justice practices, provide additional roadmaps for effective communication and meaningful conflict resolution. The exact model chosen may be less important than the intention behind developing the capacity to skillfully manage conflict.
It is also useful to engage in new frameworks collaboratively, rather than to attempt to impose a framework on someone you are already in conflict with who does not share the same skillset. Insistence on one “right way” to navigate conflict and assuming the “expert” role in the process creates an unhelpful power imbalance that undermines resolution and repair. In many cases, especially when conflict is ongoing, it is helpful to seek out the support of a neutral third party (a relationship therapist, coach, mediator etc.) to avoid such power imbalances, increase accountability, collaboratively repair harm done and also gain a deeper understanding of the underlying factors contributing to the conflict in the first place.
#conflict #relationships #nonviolentcommunication #relationshiptherapy
Melisa is a licensed psychotherapist practicing in the states of Oregon and California, and specializing in working with individuals within the queer, polyamorous/ ethically non-monogamous and neurodivergent communities.