this one is about friendship and conflict [Music] hey thanks for joining us on the channel here hit like and subscribe and all that stuff but on sunday we just finished a series called relearning friendship and the idea behind this series was that over these past two years or so of pandemic life a lot of us have disconnected from some of the friendships in our life at the same time there's been a lot of rancor and argument and partisanship and frustration in the world and i think
what's happened is it's made it hard for us to sometimes manage conflict well and so we talked a little bit about this at the end of the series how do we have disagreement within friendships i made a big caveat in that message i talked about how there are certain things that should be a deal breaker to you you know homophobia white supremacy people who don't take your story seriously people who don't treat your perspective with the dignity it deserves it's okay
to have boundaries in fact it's really important that we enforce them in all of our relationships including our friendship so there are times when it's okay to walk away even from a friend anything that is diminishing us as a person it's okay for us to say look i don't need that in my life and i can't go down this road with you unless you're willing to change that said if all of our friendships leave no room for disagreement and i think it makes it hard for us to
continue to grow and change as human beings because we do need different perspectives pushing up against ours and informing how we see the world what has been i think really tough over these past couple of years is that we've had to do so much pushing back against really unhealthy toxic perspectives creating our boundaries and enforcing them that it can feel at times like we don't have the energy there's too much anxiety and too much fatigue to countenance any disagreement even with
people who we know care about us and are our friends and so a lot of people resonated with that message but i got some feedback from people just saying well how do you do that like how practically do you manage and understand conflict in your relationships particularly your friendships and so i wanted to talk about one model that has been really helpful in my marriage with my partner rachel in the way that we have dealt with conflict but i think it actually can be really helpful if we
translate some of those basic ideas even into our friendships and it's funny because we talk about conflict management at work we talk about how we deal with conflict and communication in our marriages very rarely do we actually talk about conflict and communication in friendships and friendships are just as important to the ways that we move to the world as any other of these relationships and so it is important that we're able to do this well so the model that rachel and i have used is
something called toward away and against and really it just simplifies all the different ways that we deal with conflict down to three buckets toward is when we go toward another person's position we acquiesce to their demands we give in to them and we navigate conflict that way a way is when we back away from conflict so maybe we physically leave the room or maybe we just disengage emotionally but we back away from conflict we allow things to settle and maybe then we come back in
with ourself and we bring ourselves back to the relationship against is where we set ideally two ideas up against each other and we battle it out we debate things out we come to some kind of agreement or compromise in the end that of course it can be very combative but it doesn't always have to be that way what i find really insightful about this is understanding that those three strategies sort of operate within a triangle and one of them is going to be our default one of them comes most
naturally to us but as healthy human beings we're actually able to access all three as appropriate sometimes it's appropriate to move toward another person to say look i don't seem to care about this as much as you why don't we do it your way all move toward what you would like sometimes it's totally appropriate for us to back away and move away from conflict and say look i am really heated up right now more than i should be for how much i am invested in this disagreement i'm going
to take some time i'm going to think about this i'm going to journal i'm going to write my ideas down and i'm going to come back and engage with you later and then of course there are times to stand up for ourselves to say no i this is important to me and we need to talk about this we need to come to some kind of resolution but i need to fight for what is important to me in this relationship or in this conflict right now all of that's good what's healthy as a
human being though is when we're able to understand what we default to and how we can access the other strategies when we're unhealthy it's that we are always coming into every conflict all the time using one strategy we're always moving toward the other person in acquiescing we're always backing away and never representing our true feelings or we're always getting into and against posture with anyone over anything and what happened early in my marriage with my
partner rachel is that i am an against person i really like debate i like processing things verbally on the fly i like that kind of engagement and that comes a lot from my family of origin rachel is very much an away person she does not like conflict it makes her uncomfortable and that again comes largely from the family that she grew up in but what would happen in our relationship is that i was trying to get a fight she was backing away and that would frustrate me and i would just sort
of chase her around trying to get these debates on the table already not a particularly healthy way to deal with conflict within marriage or friendship but what's really interesting about this model is understanding that when we are under stress we often have a secondary posture or a secondary strategy that we use to deal with conflict now that stress can come from the conflict itself things can get too heated you can get pushed too far and you flip to a secondary strategy
stress can also come from anywhere else you had a hard day at work or you've got a lot on your mind right now with school but whatever it is there's too much going on and you actually use a strategy that isn't your natural one it's your secondary strategy well for my wife she is an away person she wants to back away from conflict and let things settle she likes to process things more slowly on her own before representing her thoughts and views but if she's pushed too hard
if she's under stress she becomes a toward person she will flip and move towards she'll give in to the other person i'm an against person so i'm trying to have the debate i'm trying to get us to put our ideas on the table and wrestle them out and i push her so hard that eventually she just flips to toward and she says fine let's do it your way and that would infuriate me because i don't just want to get my way i want to win an argument again not always super healthy but
that's the way i roll and that would make me flip to my secondary posture which was away now for me that wasn't sort of moving away or moving out of the room it was emotionally disengaging from the conflict but also from the relationship and again these are not healthy things because we're not accessing them and choosing them as responses to a particular situation as much as we are just reacting we have our default posture under stress we react with our secondary posture and just having that
awareness of what was happening in our relationship that we each had very different default strategies to any conflict and we both had different stress reactions to conflict gave us this incredible new tool just to name what was happening between us and we began to use that pretty clinically for a while now we met with counselors on our own and we met with counselors together and we started to use this we would say things like i feel like you're moving away from me right now or rachel
would say things like i feel like you're against me right now and uh you know the funny thing was she could have told me that in a thousand different ways just as clearly but because we had shared language for what was happening when she would say you are against me right now it was like it would snap me out of my default posture i would be able to say oh okay right that's not what i'm trying to do but that's how i'm coming across right now how can we deal with this differently
do you need some time can we think about this separately can we write our thoughts down and then come back to each other how can we deal with this for me when i would say look i feel like you're backing away from me right now she could say oh right okay that's not what i'm trying to do but i do need some space because i don't think i don't process things the way that you do and so i need some space to think to reflect allow my emotions to calm down and then to come
back to you with how i'm really feeling and that kind of language that shared language about what was happening in the context of a relationship was it was transformative for us now over time we stopped using it as clinically as that we you know in our marriage we don't say things like you're moving away or i feel like you're against me as much right now we are just able to navigate our conflict in healthier ways because we have a better sense of who we are as
individuals and who each other is within the relationship but still simply understanding what is it that you normally do when you come up against a conflict even with a friend do you normally want to try to get into a fight in a debate do you normally back away do you normally give in to them and what does that look like and what does your stress response look like if you just have an awareness of that it opens up so many opportunities for you when there's conflict to be able to assess what's
going on and choose a strategy that makes sense right now lots of times in friendship it makes sense to choose toward i don't really care about this that much it seems important to you let's do it your way there's times in friendship where you realize i'm getting too heated i need some space you know what i'm going to take a walk we'll come back to this next week or there's times to say no this is really important to me and i need you to understand why so let's talk this out
let's process things through but let's put our perspectives up against each other and see what we can't both learn from each other in that process simple tools like that a little more awareness of self in the context of our relationship goes a long long way but here's the thing that's really important what that does it is enables us not just to represent ourselves fairly and speak honestly about what we're feeling but it gives us the context to actually hear
from our friends who we know deeply care about us and want the best for us i know that my perspective on the world is skewed because of my privilege because of my position because of all the things that i've experienced as jeremy duncan when i allow myself to enter into good healthy conflict with people who have demonstrated over time that they care about me and how i see the world i'm able to actually broaden my perspective on things i come from a very privileged experience
of the world and the only way i'm going to see the world honestly and truly is inviting those other perspectives in if i shut them down immediately because i don't have the bandwidth to deal with any kind of disagreement right now not only am i diminishing the intimacy that's available to me in relationships but i'm actually stealing from myself a more full more well-rounded perspective of the world and so when i have that awareness who am i how do i normally respond am i stressed right now am i
switching to a default stress response right now i'm actually able to choose the strategy that makes sense for me in this moment with this person in this relationship and through that we invite not just disagreement because disagreement for its own psyche is not good but disagreement that allows us to see a wider broader more full perspective of the world that allows us to really learn from the friendships that have earned the place to speak into our lives so absolutely conflict
management is just as important in your workplace in your marriage and your friendships as it is anywhere else and a little bit of awareness for yourself might be helpful in that so here's the homework think about this when you find yourself in conflict what's your default response toward a way or against and if you imagine yourself really stressed out about something or getting pushed really hard is there a secondary response that feels like it comes up over and over
again in the patterns of your life knowing those and then choosing one of the three that makes sense in this moment with this person in this relationship can go a long way to allowing you to access more than just your perspective so toward a way against a really simple tool might help you in your marriage it might help you at work and actually might help you in your friendships to navigate conflict well again if you made it this far in the video hit like hit subscribe we'd love
to stay in contact with you and by the way post down in the comments let us know how you deal with conflict and if you have any strategies that have been helpful for you i'd love to learn from that as well see you soon