What to Do During a Pause in Conflict

Hint: it isn't what we might naturally do.

What happens in the quiet moments of conflict—the pauses—might be more important than the battles themselves.¹

Unsurprisingly, the inspiration for today’s post came from the recent announcement of a cease-fire in Gaza. But my intention in discussing pauses in conflict is not political; it’s psychological and relational. We can’t forget that psychology—that is, the complex associations between human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors—sits at the heart of many of our behavioral decisions, including political ones.

Understanding the psychology of what happens during pauses in conflict helps us understand our automatic responses. And it awakens us to the choices that can serve us better than our more automatic tendencies might.

The fragility of a time-out.

Let’s consider an example from the couples’ therapy room. Ayla and Loni sought therapy because their fighting had become so persistent and vitriolic that they were no longer sure it made sense to continue in their relationships. Couples’ therapy was a last-ditch effort to protect both themselves and their child from their intractable cycle of conflict.

In the first few sessions, each partner eagerly absorbed advice to monitor cues for an oncoming fight. They wrote down a plan to pause any conversation that sparked rage, to call a time-out, and to bring the content into the couples’ therapy room where they could get help in talking in less damaging ways.

But each week, they failed to follow through on their time-out plan. As journalist Amanda Ripley writes in her book, High Conflict:

… healthy conflict leads somewhere. It feels more interesting to get to the other side than to stay in it. In high conflict, the conflict is the destination. There’s nowhere else to go.

Relationship science confirms that once conflict patterns have been established, a variety of psychological forces exert a magnetic pull on the actors involved. For one thing, a history of social, emotional, or physical threats prompts us to behave in self-protective ways. And a history of conflict causes us to generate and hold onto overly simplified stories.² We believe the other party started it while we were largely innocent of wrongdoing. Any wrongdoing we did engage in seems justified because of how very terrible the other side was. We see the other side as evil or ignorant, which causes us to feel unsafe and unwilling to let our guard down, even during a pause in conflict.

But while such a stance can be justified (even wise), believing the worst in others and the relationship as a whole causes us to behave in ways that come across as inflexible, unfriendly, or even downright combative to the other side. Our stance thus contributes to the fragility of the pause.

All of these predictable features of conflict exist in the background when people call a time-out. It’s no wonder pauses in conflict feel so tenuous.

Protecting the pause.

While Ayla and Loni liked the idea of the pause, they remained primed for fights in the early weeks of therapy. They each had habits that undermined the pause. They acted coldly towards one another, turned to friends who didn’t support the marriage for advice, and remained unwilling to consider the possibility that the other partner genuinely wanted to find a better path forward. The peace didn’t stick because they repeatedly engaged in thinking and behavioral patterns that slipped them right back into conflict.

This kind of bumpy start to the couples’ work is fairly typical because partners come to therapy with major psychological wounds. It’s usually the case that each person feels alone in their hurt, convinced that the other partner has no idea what it feels like to be as hurt as they have been. Neither person feels understood and it takes some time and effort for each to appreciate that they also do not have a good understanding of the other side.

It takes some time and patience to take an effective pause. And it also takes a few wise steps.

4 Wise Steps to Take During a Pause in Conflict.

1. Engineer a fresh start. If you’re a behavioral science nerd, you might have heard of something that U Penn professor and author of How to Change Katy Milkman calls “the fresh start effect.” This effect describes the moments

   “when people are particularly motivated to take actions toward their goals because they feel like they have a new beginning and a clean slate.”

   That is, when there is a pause and we mentally press the restart button, there’s an opportunity to exit old habits and more deliberately create new ones. A truce can act like a fresh start when we take Milkman and her colleagues’ advice:

   Our prescriptive advice to practitioners is twofold. First, identify the most relevant fresh start opportunities. Second, tinker with different ways to capitalize on the added motivation that these fresh starts bring.

2. Grow your relational flexibility. In the kind of therapy that I practice (called acceptance and commitment therapy³), the central goal is to help people build something called psychological flexibility. This refers to an ability to engage in value-aligned actions and to stop engaging in actions that don’t line up with who we most want to be. We can build this skill as individuals, and we can build it inside of relationships. Trying out new ways of engaging inside of a relationship, new response scripts to old behaviors, or a new way of thinking about someone you’ve struggled with are all ways to increase relational flexibility.

3. Actively add nuance to your stories. Inside of perpetual conflict, we tend to drop into pretty bleak stories about the relationship. We adhere to stories that vilify and even dehumanize the other side. We tell stories that depict ourselves as the victim and the other side as the villain. But in a time-out from conflict, we have an opportunity to hit the restart button on old stories. During the pause, we can more actively look to “complexify” by appreciating that there is almost always more than meets the eye to a relationship conflict.

4. Remember that the truce is a small part of the larger relationship. Just like the myopic focus of couples on the wedding rather than the marriage, we easily get overly focused on the calling of the time-out rather than what we’ll do during and after the time-out. Just as we might counsel a new couple to remember that the marriage is more important than the wedding, we need to zoom out from the time-out to reflect on how we want to use it to orient ourselves for the longer term.

Pausing for good.

Exiting longstanding conflict is no easy feat. But it’s a challenge worth taking on since a pause in conflict offers a powerful moment that we can use to make significant changes to unhealthy relationships. In the couples’ therapy room, partners like Ayla and Loni use pauses in longstanding conflicts to create new understandings of one another and their relationship dynamic, as well as add healthier options to their behavioral repertoires. In any kind of relationship that has been beleaguered by conflict, we can learn to use time-outs from conflict wisely and pave a road towards greater relational peace.

Thanks for taking the time to reflect with me on how we can use pauses as opportunities for growth and connection. Here’s to finding hope and creating fresh starts from old conflicts, one step at a time.

What challenges you most during pauses in conflict? What helps you do a better job in taking advantage of a time-out?

If you found this post helpful, please hit ❤️ or share it with someone you love (and/or someone with whom you’d like to call a pause in conflict!).

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1. I had planned I was going to release a newsletter today on communicating with ants, because there are some super cool take-home ideas for human communication when we look at what ants do. But today we’ll stay a little more globally tuned. Stay tuned for ant communication in our next newsletter.

2. These simplified stories have many names, but my new favorite one is “moral typecasting.” You can read more about this in Kurt Gray’s new book, Outraged.

3. Acceptance and commitment therapy is an evidence-based therapy that has a wealth of evidence supporting its usefulness for a variety of mental health conditions, as well as parenting and relationship challenges. It sits under the umbrella of “third wave therapies” that include both change-based (cognitive and behavioral) and acceptance-based strategies (mindfulness and other acceptance-based strategies).