Stirring Up Conflict

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1. Struggling Couples Versus Healthy Couples An important differentiator between healthy couples and struggling couples is not the presence or absence of conflict. Conflict arises from time to time in all relationships, it’s unavoidable. But what we do find when thinking about struggling couples versus healthy couples is a very different underlying approach to conflict. Struggling couples take on an adversarial, […]...
2. Couples And Trench Warfare The problem unhealthy couples have is not the lack of any desire to improve the situation but rather an inherently flawed strategy to get there. They hope to go about improving things with the very same underlying mentality that caused problems to begin with. This mentality can best be called adversarial. It pits partners against […]...
3. Emotional Detachment and Approaching Conflict in Relationships Since emotional detachment as a life solution is about withdrawing from people and the world in order to reduce anxiety it shouldn’t be at all surprising that outright conflict is avoided like the plague. Where some people thrive off of conflict situations those with emotional detachment definitely do not. They want nothing to do with […]...
4. A Healthy Relationship Should Take Time And Effort Most people approach romantic relationships with an ingrained way of thinking that could be categorized as a cognitive distortion. This is that judging if their partners are right or wrong for them, judging if the relationship is good or bad, simply comes down to judging if everything feels effortless. In other words most people don’t […]...
5. Afraid To Be Yourself If all your relationships were healthy or if all your relationships were abusive you’d actually kind of have a tough time figuring out whether your relationships with specific individuals were healthy or abusive. Of course the goal should be to surround yourself with people who support you and are concerned with your growth and happiness, […]...
6. Understanding People With Constant Relationship Conflict Periods of Peace and Calm Are the Exception We all know people whose lives and relationships are defined by conflict. They’re often fighting battles on multiple fronts, always upset with and hostile towards somebody. For these individuals periods of peace and calm are not the norm but the exception, they’re brief interludes between the storms. […]...
7. Psychology of Resentment Projecting Responsibility for Unhappiness When we’re feeling resentful the typical response is to point that resentment towards the person who we believe has wronged us. This person becomes responsible for the unwanted state of our psyches and for making things better. But in the vast majority of cases, particularly when resentment has built up over […]...
8. Productive Conflict For most of us conflict situations lead to destructive consequences. Our words or actions are violent as we seek not to understand the other but to win the fight. And in putting our own unhealthy need to dominate front and center while leaving the healthy desire to reduce suffering behind we end up damaging ourselves […]...
9. The Meaning Of Conflict Most of us operate under the basic assumption that when people offer up their viewpoints they’re seeking our agreement. That’s because when most of us offer up our own viewpoints that’s exactly what we’re doing, we’re seeking agreement. Dissension can be negatively reinforcing. At the unspoken existential level agreement from our fellows equals validation and […]...
10. Conflict Without Cruelty When conflict arises in our close relationships we tend to quickly substitute our normal open, supportive attitude for a closed, adversarial attitude. With the adversarial attitude clouding our vision we temporarily cease to see our loved ones as loved ones but rather as dangerous enemies to be vanquished. And the rub is that in this […]...
11. Conflict is Inevitable Unless environmental conditions are perfectly suited to your personality, motivations, desires, and behaviors the result will be conflict once in a while. Since no two people are exactly the same and no environment can be perfectly suited to your needs there is really no way to avoid conflict. The question is not whether there will […]...
12. Conflict There is a stage in the development of groups commonly called ‘storming’ where the veneer of friendliness and getting along is replaced with conflict. The groups that don’t deal well with this stage either regress back to superficial, unauthentic encounters or disintegrate. What we can take from the idea of storming as a stage in […]...
13. Conflict And Asking People Why They Did Something In conflict situations we often feel compelled to ask our interlocutors why they think, feel, or act in ways we find objectionable. While we might justify our “why?” questions on the grounds that we’re genuinely curious there are some good reasons to keep this line of questioning to ourselves. The first reason is that whether […]...
14. Conflict Situations With Combative People It’s a little bit of a chicken and egg question to determine whether conflict situations cause people to become combative or combative people cause conflict situations. But we can say with psychoanalytic certainty that there is a characterological type prone to hostile aggression, to thinking of relationships as adversarial, to seeing the world as a […]...
15. Helping People Move Through Conflict The critical mistake most of us make when people experiencing life conflicts come to us for help is that we think what they want is our advice. Of course they often think what they want is our advice too. But more often than not our supposedly well-intentioned advice is actually a cover for the chance […]...
16. Approaching Relationship Conflict In A Healthier Way In any intimate long-term relationship conflict is unavoidable. We’ve written this before but it’s fundamentally important to understand that a lack of any manifest conflict is rarely a sign that the relationship is healthy but rather that it’s unhealthy, that one or both partners feel inhibited in getting individual wants and needs met.  Conflict very […]...
17. The Right Way To Approach Human Conflict The way most people approach human conflict is to use whatever tools they have at their disposal to make the problem go away. That sounds fine on paper but in the existential sense it’s a flawed approach because it puts the cart before the horse, it puts the problem before the living, breathing person. And […]...
18. Do Not Fear Conflict And Struggle Most of the worthwhile art and literature is produced out of conflict, it’s the creative expression of and the psychological solution to struggle. We all want life to be smooth sailing but not much of import comes out of smooth sailing. We either actively commit to our growth and self-actualization, in which case conflict and […]...
19. Conflict Is Okay Most of us have an ambivalent attitude towards conflict in our romantic relationships. Some of us try to avoid it all together. Better not to rock the boat. Who enjoys hurt feelings and friction? Actually conflict is unavoidable in a healthy relationship though, and a relationship that is free of it is sure to have […]...
20. Couples Conflict Healthy and unhealthy couples alike experience conflict. The idea that healthy couples rarely if ever fight is not true, it’s a fantasy constructed in the minds of people who have always been in unhealthy relationships and therefore have no real world context for what a healthy relationship looks like. They might secretly believe that if […]...