I have a colleague. Despite my messianic purity, sometimes we argue. Sometimes we do this well, and sometimes we do this badly.
On those bad days, I quickly start to feel defensive, wounded, misunderstood. My instinctive protectiveness kicks in: I go on the attack, I rebuke. The only way for me to feel safe is for my colleague to cede to my perspective, accept my rightness. Yes, I can be a total dick.
My other, equally problematic response is to internalise: I wilt, I accept that I am in fact an awful human being (as some deep part of me has always believed). I must repent, self-punish. I disappear, and feel all the worse for it.
Both of these responses emerge from viewing conflict as a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser. Victory and defeat are total. Victory protects the ego and self-image. Defeat makes it crumble.
Conflict does not have to be this mutually-assured destruction. Instead, it can be the meeting of two different perspectives striving for the same goal — whether that is the well-being of two people in a relationship, the success of an organisation, or two drivers trying to get to their destination as quickly as possible.
When we actively reach for that bigger goal, we are able to step out from our egoic responses. We disengage from the immediate tensions and fears and into a wider, safer landscape. In neurological terms (amateur-hour neuroscience alert!), we move away from our amygdala (the source of fight and flight) and our default mode network (where we ruminate and feel the weight of immediate experience). Instead, we further engage our prefrontal cortex, where we can consider, rationalise, and make meaning. Some wonderful studies have demonstrated how this can be the difference between crumbling and flourishing under stress.
The simplest way of doing this when conflict emerges is a short mantra:
We're on the same team.
It won't kill those defences dead, but it allows us to contextualise them in relationship with the bigger goal. It means we are far more likely to understand — rather than shut down — the defences and anxieties of our comrades-in-conflict. It gives us just a little bit of space to work towards the goal that we share.
Recognising that you are striving for the same thing makes productive, useful conflict far more likely, leads to shared learning, and — at best — creates profound connection.
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