The Lost Art of Disagreement

Building conflict resilience in the age of anxiety.

Hello, conflict-avoiders and confrontation connoisseurs!

Remember when your grandparents complained about walking uphill both ways to school? Well, they also had to handle conflicts face-to-face without the luxury of an "unfollow" button.

In today's algorithm-curated world, we've traded opportunities to develop conflict resilience for conflict avoidance. Both our nervous systems and ability to recognize one another's humanity are paying the price.

What's the solution? Think of conflict resilience as CrossFit for your confrontation muscles—uncomfortable, sometimes awkward, but ultimately making you stronger.

Before we can solve problems, we need to build our tolerance for simply sitting in the discomfort. In today's newsletter, I'm sharing insights from my conversation with Bob Bordone and Joel Salinas, authors of Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In. We explore why conflict in today’s world isn't worse, but our handling capacity is; the definition of conflict resilience; the neurological impacts of conflict avoidance. And we explore why the path to meaningful connection runs straight through the territory of disagreement and how we can choose to take that path more skillfully.

The entire conversation comes out on the Psychologists Off the Clock Podcast tomorrow. I hope you check it out because I left this conversation feeling so moved and inspired and also prepared to try some new skills out. And I also hope you pick up the book—it could not be a better-timed read in this polarized world we are living in.

Paid subscribers, we are doing a book giveaway for this terrific book, too. Please go to the bottom of the newsletter to enter!

Now please proceed to read this newsletter without checking your phone every 30 seconds. I promise—it's good exposure therapy!

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Yael:  I was thinking about Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now, this idea that we tend to think things are so bad now when actually things are on the up and up. So I have this more general question: “Is conflict worse than it used to be in terms of like; are we more polarized? Is conflict harder for people to engage in now than it used to be?”

Maybe you can answer that and then pivot into defining, what is conflict resilience.

Bob Bordone: Sure. Yeah. I'm not a historian, but my sense is that conflict, itself, is not worse. And that's good news. The bad news is our conflict-handling capacity has gotten worse, and for a whole bunch of reasons. And this is why in some sense we wrote this book.

That is to say, it has become much easier for all sorts of reasons to avoid conflict. Social media, right? I mean, 50 years ago, you lived in a geographic community, conflicts came up, and you had to handle them. Now, while we do live in a geographic community, we really live in cultured communities online. And you know, cable news is one thing, but social media and the algorithms are another. The ability to shut other people out that we disagree with is so easy. And then to get the comfort of being with people who agree with us is so easy that we've lost that ability to kind of handle conflict well.

I think the other thing I'd add to that is I think we see fewer and fewer models of people holding conflict well, certainly in our leadership models on politics, what we basically see is people screaming each other down. The language of fighting and winning—that is not super helpful when it comes to conflict.

So all of this is a way of answering, well, “What is conflict resilience?” Because we really do distinguish it and think of it differently from conflict resolution. Resilience is building up that capacity to sit with the discomfort of disagreement, to be able to tell your story in an assertive and confident way that maximizes the chances it will land on the other, but not in an avoidant way. And also has this capacity to listen with an openness and a generosity.

And that puts aside whether or not agreement will be found or problems will be solved. One of the things that we say is that we can't get to problem-solving. We can't get to a negotiated agreement, and we can't get to real connection without conflict resilience.

Joel Salinas: Yeah, it's a prerequisite. I mean, as Bob alluded to, there are all these really great books on negotiation tactics and how to have difficult conversations and things like that. But one of the things that we felt was really missing is this element of, just to use an analogy, if you're trying to learn how to cook, you can't really learn how to cook if you can't stand the heat of the kitchen. We need to be better equipped to be able to stand our own discomfort with that conflict situation before we can apply all the techniques and tactics that are out there already.

Yael: Joel, I wanted to ask you a follow-up question about this because the neurology of this is very interesting. So, what happens neurologically speaking, when we avoid conflict in terms of our conflict resilience?

Joel Salinas: Yeah, in a nutshell, it's this, kind of hyper-sensitization. Another example would be how lack of exposure increases the valence and the salience. Basically, your brain's radar gets like tuned really, really high, almost like an overly sensitive mic. So if, let's say, on a scale from zero to 10 of distress levels around conflict, the more you are avoiding conflict, the more on average, your typical distress level might have been a three, but the more prone it not be at a seven, the next time conflict comes up because you're just not exposing yourself to it enough that your whole nervous system is just On fire when it comes across conflict, which then makes it much more difficult to then manage in the future.

If you found this Q&A interesting and valuable, share why in the comments! And hit the “like” button and share it with others who you think would find it helpful/interesting.

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Let me also remind you that this is just a small fraction of the fascinating conversation Bob and Joel had with me which, again, comes out tomorrow on your favorite podcast player.

And because I’m on a mission to promote people talking to each other more and more skillfully (you know, because the only way out of conflict is through it), I encourage you to check out other Relational Riff posts on this general topic, like how to understand people you disagree with, how you assess other people’s bias, and expectations of confrontations.

And I’ll finish by assigning some homework, as all good therapists do! Here it is: Have one uncomfortable conversation this week. Your nervous system will thank you. And read good books like Conflict Resilience!

Paid Subscribers, enter the book giveaway below!