3. Understand Your Own Response to Conflict (Part 1)

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves”

Carl Jung

Introduction

This is the third in a series of articles which has the collective title ‘On Working with Conflict’. You can find a short article ‘Working with Conflict: Ten Things to Think About’ here which provides an overview of the series.

This article follows on from a two-part article About Having an Awareness of the Impact of Trauma - and here are the links to Part 1 and Part 2 of this article . And to let you know that shortly after publishing Part 2 of this trauma article I came across a publication by Daryl Mahon about implementing trauma informed care in adult services – and this 2022 scoping review is definitely a recommended read.

I have written before about understanding your own response to conflict – and you can find these two 2020 articles here and here. As with other articles in this series, I am going to revisit aspects of these earlier articles and refer to more recent learning.

Riskin and Wohl (2015) say that “The modern world overflows with advice about how to understand and deal with conflict”. And I am very aware that I am adding to the overflow through this series of articles. Of relevance here is that Riskin and Wohl (2015) consider “how even people who understand and know how to use well-established tools for managing conflict sometimes fail to employ them appropriately - or at all - in the moment.” They say that such failures often result from certain ‘deficits’ in awareness, which they call the “Six Obstacles” (and which they set out as being excessively self-centred perspectives; strong negative emotions; automatic, habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving; sensitivity to emotions (too much or too little); insufficient social skills; and inadequate focus).

So this article is about developing awareness and insight about our own response to conflict. And again I have decided to present the article in two parts because there is so much to share. This first part will cover some concepts that I think have particular relevance to understanding your own response to conflict. Part 2 will explore what might be done to develop and make use of your awareness and insight.

First, some observations about my own response to conflict. I know that in life in general I don’t respond well to being ignored or disrespected. And that when this happens, I tend to focus on myself and stop being curious about what is going on with the others. I also know that when I find things irritating – such as someone keeping me waiting or not doing what they said that they would do – I often don’t say anything and just fume inside. And that I can feel defensive if I experience what seems like a challenge or a threat to my competence when working as a conflict resolver – particularly if I think that my professional ability is being disregarded or questioned. And I’ve found it fascinating over the years to explore why this might be – and this is the learning I want to share.

About Emotional Intelligence

Essentially this article about emotional intelligence – and in particular – self-awareness and self-management. I’ve read that emotional intelligence, as a psychological theory, was developed by Salovey and Mayer who recognised the connection between the two personality components of cognition and emotion. In a 1990 article, they described emotional intelligence as being a form of social intelligence “that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions” (Salovey and Mayer 1990). They also considered that the ability to perceive and understand your own feelings is key to mental health.

In his much cited book Emotional Intelligence: Why it can Matter More than IQ first published in 1996, Daniel Goleman defines emotional intelligence as: “understanding one’s own feelings, empathy for the feelings of others, and the regulation of emotion in a way that enhances living”. And based on his writings - and the writings of others – I understand that the competencies considered to make up emotional intelligence can be organised into four clusters (often described in terms of pillars): self-awareness, self-control, social awareness and relationship management.

Relating to conflict, Hoffman and Wolman (2013) have written about the psychology of mediation – and their article provides a helpful overview of how people – including the mediator – think, feel and behave when in conflict. In this article they consider the benefits of a mediator being ‘psychologically minded’, saying that the most successful mediators typically have a high degree of emotional intelligence.

And Duffy (2010) has written that “only the most emotionally intelligent mediators are able to emotionally connect with the parties, but maintain an impression of impartiality – the quality of remaining ‘attached yet detached’ to the process. It is argued that these emotionally intelligent mediators have the common qualities of strong self-awareness and emotional self-regulation”. So emotional intelligence in this context can be considered as a ‘competency’ that provides mediators with the ‘ability’ to deal with a range of emotions.

About Self Awareness

Goleman uses the term self-awareness in the sense of an ongoing attention to your own internal states – about being “aware of both our mood and our thoughts about that mood” (emotional self-awareness), being aware of our strengths and weaknesses (self-assessment) and having faith in our abilities (self-confidence).

Dahl et al (2020) in their article on The plasticity of well-being?say that awareness “refers to a heightened and flexible attentiveness to perceptual impressions in one’s environment, as well as internal cues, such as bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions”. And that “Insight refers to self-knowledge concerning the manner in which emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and other factors are shaping one’s subjective experience, and especially one’s sense of self. States of insight thus reflect an experiential understanding of one’s own psychological processes and how the dynamic interplay of these processes influences experience.”

I came across the concept of ‘Mentalizing’ in the 2018 book ‘Minding emotions: Cultivating mentalization in psychotherapy’ by Elliott Jurist. He says “Mentalization, a concept of growing importance in philosophy and in many subdisciplines in psychology, denotes that the mind interprets reality and utilizes skills that produce self-understanding and understanding others.” From this I understand mentalization to be our ability to attend to mental states in ourselves - making sense of our thoughts, beliefs, wishes and feelings and linking these to our actions and behaviours - as we try to understand both our own actions and the actions of others. I have also been reading about ‘impathy’ or ‘introversive empathy’ (also referred to as self-empathy) – and will write more about this in later articles.

Why do I think that self-awareness is vital to working well with conflict? I’ve shared my view in earlier articles that the more you understand your own response to conflict, the more competent and ‘comfortable’ you will be in conflict situations. And I have also learned that developing this awareness can lead to a better understanding of the responses of others.

Relating to the earlier articles in this series on being trauma aware, my experience has been that a significant number of people working in social and caring professions have lived experience of trauma. This is echoed in the article by Mahon (2022) who writes that “It is not just service users accessing supports who have experienced traumatic incidences, employees’ working in human services are also reported to have high prevalence of trauma, which may exacerbate secondary traumatic experiences”. Looking elsewhere, Hubel et al (2020) found a high prevalence of self-reported adverse childhood events (ACEs) in a sample of early care and education teachers and Steen et al (2021) found that Social Worker ACE scores are higher than in most populations. Also, studies - such as by La Mott and Martin (2019) - identified a personal history of adverse childhood experiences as being a contributing factor in increasing a provider’s risk of developing negative compassion outcomes.

And the words of novelist and poet Jenni Fagan resonated with me – when interviewed in November 2022 and when talking about her new book of poetry The Bone Library – in saying that she had been thinking about “the words and wounds other people imprint on us; how the injuries of those we meet can create fractures we struggle to carry on top of those we already have”.

I have no solid data on which to base this opinion but suspect from what I have heard that many people who choose to work with conflict have experienced trauma in their own lives. And while I am passionate about the value and contribution of lived experience to the work we do, I suggest that when working with conflict it is crucial to understand the impact and implications of your own life experiences. This includes having an awareness of your ‘Window of Tolerance’ and what happens to you physically and emotionally when in conflict (see earlier articles in this series), as well as appreciating that not all life experiences are the same or have the same impact.

In the rest of Part 1 of this article I will set out three concepts – dignity, face and survival stances - which I have found of particularly helpful to both understanding your own response and to working well with conflict.

Dignity

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights starts with “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” And I have written before, in an article on Perceived Justice and Fairness, about how interpersonal justice includes showing dignity and respect. In a paper accompanying his presentation to the 2019 International Institute for Restorative Practice Europe Conference: Community Well-Being and Resilience, John Bailie says that: “The desire to be treated with dignity is fundamental to all human relationships. This desire manifests as the need to belong, to have voice, and to exercise agency in one’s own affairs.”

I am going to draw on two of my sources of learning to do with dignity and conflict. The first is the work of Donna Hicks - a conflict researcher and advisor with a much referenced book Dignity: it’s essential role in resolving conflict first published in 2011. Hicks has written about dignity being our inherent worth – that we all come into the world being equally valued and worthy - and that this inherent dignity can be violated. She has described how her own ‘sea change’ in understanding dignity came from seeing the result of brain scans, which showed that when someone is feeling a psychological injury it showed up in the same part of the brain as a physical wound. If interested, she has a 2013 TEDx Talk Declare Dignity: Donna Hicks at TEDxStormont in which she shares thought on what she considers dignity to be.

Hicks has written about being ‘emotionally injured’ and that dignity violations can result in wounds which create self-doubt. Also that ‘bad’ feelings are the shame and humiliation that automatically gets triggered when a dignity violation occurs and that wounds to our dignity prevent us from resolving conflict if not acknowledged and addressed. Relating to this she has also written in a 2012 blog article that “One of the biggest challenges to my dignity work is getting people to see that when they are treated badly, it doesn't mean that they are bad. When people are treated badly it means that something bad has happened to them…..” Strong connections here, I think, to my previous article about trauma awareness.

My second source of learning comes from Chris Wheeler who was previously Deputy to five New South Wales Ombuds in Australia. My view is that his 2017 article Recognising Dignity & Showing Respect, in which he distils learning from over 30 years of complaint handling, is essential reading for all who work with conflict. It includes an excellent overview of dignity and it sets out how dignity issues can be at the heart of human conflict, making strong links between dignity and respect. And how violations of dignity can trigger a range of powerful reactions, including anger, shame and/or humiliation – in particular making the connection between humiliation and a need for vindication or revenge. The article also helpfully includes eleven suggested strategies to avoid unintended violations of dignity and/or to attempt to restore dignity and relationships – and these include minimising humiliation and avoiding unnecessary challenges to a person’s sense of identity.

Face

I have long been interested in the concept of face and its relationship to working well with conflict – and this concept has increasing relevance as I learn more about the impact of trauma. It is generally agreed that the sociologist Erving Goffman introduced the term ‘face’ to social science when he defined it as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself” (Goffman 1959). And Stella Ting-Toomey, Professor of Speech Communication at California State University, Fullerton, says that the meaning of face is generally conceptualized as how we want others to see us and treat us and how we actually treat others in association with their social self-conception expectations. Also that “In everyday interactions, individuals are constantly making conscious or unconscious choices concerning face-saving and face-honoring” (Ting-Toomey 2015).

My understanding from the work of Goffman and Ting-Toomey is that face is not our actual image – as in what others see when they interact with us – but is the self-image we want to ‘project’ about our social position, social status and credibility. It is also what we perceive to be the way others see us as a result. So face relates to our self-esteem. And that when people interact, they present their faces to each other. Goffman has written about face being a mask that changes depending on the audience and the nature of the social interaction - and he makes links between face and respect.

Goffman named the actions taken by a person through communication in order to maintain face, to avoid losing face, or to gain face as “facework.” And Ting-Toomey (2015) says that “While face is about a claimed sense of interactional identity in a particular situation, facework is about verbal and nonverbal communication behaviors that protect/save self, other, or mutual face”. Ting-Toomey has studied how facework strategies differ between cultures and I understand from her writing that positive face is about maintaining approval (the need for inclusion, appreciation and respect) and negative face is about maintaining autonomy (not allowing someone else to make impositions on you).

Domenici and Littlejohn (2006) described facework as being “a set of co-ordinated practices in which communicators build, maintain, protect or threaten personal dignity, honor and respect”. And Ting-Toomey has written “It seems that when an individual’s face image is being threatened in a conflict situation, she or he would likely experience identity-based frustration, emotional vulnerability, anger, hurt, to even vengeance”. So communication can be experienced as threatening when it undermines or challenges someone’s positive face and saving face is a way of communicating which allows the other person to maintain his or her dignity.

In my 2018 article ‘About Face’ I shared some thoughts about face and face saving when working as a mediator – with my learning being that as a mediator you needed to be aware of your own face needs as well as the face needs of the parties in the mediation. And that when working with conflict, you don’t want anyone to lose face - and if face cannot be maintained or saved – there is a need for face to be restored.

I also have an interest in the use and power of apology – and shared thoughts relating to this in a September 2022 podcast with the excellent David Hossack. And I have learned when working with conflict that there is a strong relationship between the need to save/maintain face and the willingness to apologise if harm has been done. Levin and Robbennolt (2021) explain this well in an article about the role of apology in relation to the legal profession, in which they say that “When one social actor injures another, the offense potentially threatens the face of both the offender and the victim. First, the offense calls into question the offender’s claim to a positive social identity, and, second, the offense suggests that the victim is a lesser human being somehow deserving of mistreatment. Thus, both offender and victim feel lowered self-esteem and suffer “face damage.”

Levin and Robbennolt (2021) go on to say that “For this damage to be repaired, the offender must engage in “corrective facework …” - and that reluctance to apologise can be a need to preserve face rather than a lack of remorse. Also that “Lawyers may find that the prospect of apologizing threatens their sense of identity and self-esteem” and that “This may be particularly true for attorneys who have violated professional rules or norms because their behavior has compromised a core aspect of their identity as competent and ethical legal practitioners”.

Survival Stances

It’s a few years now since I came across the work of Virginia Satir, who was an American psychotherapist probably best known for her approach to family therapy - with her theory that people adopt survival stances to protect their self-worth against perceived and presumed threats. And that people learn to hide the parts of themselves that others have signalled as undesirable - and to only show those parts which meet with approval. When I first read about these stances it made immediate sense in my conflict work – and has also led to a better understanding of my own response to conflict.

Satir identified three dimensions in human interaction: the needs of the self, the needs of the other and the interaction context. And her four coping or survival stances can be explained in terms of not respecting one, or more, of these dimensions. I’ve drawn on learning from Hagen and Sabey (2019) to describe them: the Placator stance respects the context and others, while disrespecting themselves. So people in this stance disregard their own needs and feelings in order to please others – in effect denying their self-worth. The Blamer stance respects the context and their own needs but discounts the needs and feelings of others. The Super Reasonable stance only respects the context and operates exclusively in the world of data, logic, and perceived objectivism. And the Irrelevant stance has no respect for their own needs, those of others or the context of the interaction.

My learning from the work of Satir and others has been that we change our coping stances when interacting with different people in different contexts. But we usually have a ‘default’ coping stance to protect ourselves from threats. Satir considered that high self-worth, self-esteem and congruence were the main indicators of more fully functioning human beings and she defined a congruent person as one who holds equal balance in terms of self, others and context. And I understand from her work that being congruent is about responding from a position of caring for ourselves, for other people and with an awareness of the present context.

And Finally

This is not a concept as such, but contributing to understanding my own response to conflict has been extending my awareness about how we all experience ‘reality’ differently – and that not everyone sees the world in the same way as I do. So I was interested to read a Guardian newspaper article by Anil Seth, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, on perceptual diversity in which he says that since we all have different brains, making slightly different best guesses, we will all have different perceptual experiences too – even if we are faced with the same objective external reality.

Seth also says in this article that “the concept of neurodiversity has called deserved attention to the radically different ways some people experience their worlds. This framework emphasises that those differences are not deficits, though this emphasis is often lost because neurodiversity is typically associated with medically defined conditions such as autism or ADHD, which are usually thought to be difficult to manage.”

Seth goes on to say that “What is missed by the idea of neurodiversity is the possibility that every one of us sees the world in our own way, though not so markedly that the differences surface in how we behave or describe our experiences”. And you may also find of interest an interview with Temple Grandin in the Observer newspaper in which she outlines her understanding of visual and verbal thinkers.

Hopefully the concepts outlined in this article provide a foundation for increasing insight and awareness about your own response to conflict – and also about the responses of others. And in Part 2 of this article I am going to share some thoughts and learning to do with identifying (self-awareness) and managing (self-management) your conflict responses.

References

Bailie, J.W., 2019. A science of human dignity: Belonging, voice and agency as universal human needs. IIRP Presidential Papers Series, 1, pp.1-16.

Dahl, C.J., Wilson-Mendenhall, C.D. and Davidson, R.J., 2020. The plasticity of well-being: A training-based framework for the cultivation of human flourishing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(51), pp.32197-32206.

Domenici, K. and Littlejohn, S.W., 2006. Facework: Bridging theory and practice. Sage.

Duffy, J., 2010. Empathy, neutrality and emotional intelligence: A balancing act for the emotional Einstein. Queensland University of Technology Law & Justice Journal, 10, pp.44 -61.

Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor.

Goleman, D., 1996. Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hagen, L. and Sabey, A., 2019. Satir Model of Transformational Systemic Therapy. In Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy (pp. 2549-2557). Cham: Springer International Publishing

Hicks, D., 2021. Dignity: Its essential role in resolving conflict. Yale University Press. TEDx Talk

?Hoffman, D. A., & Wolman, R. N. 2013. The psychology of mediation. Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution, 14, pp.759–806.

Hubel, G.S., Davies, F., Goodrum, N.M., Schmarder, K.M., Schnake, K. and Moreland, A.D., 2020. Adverse childhood experiences among early care and education teachers: Prevalence and associations with observed quality of classroom social and emotional climate. Children and youth services review, 111, p.104877.

Jurist, E., 2018. Minding emotions: Cultivating mentalization in psychotherapy. Guilford Publications.

La Mott, J. and Martin, L.A., 2019. Adverse childhood experiences, self‐care, and compassion outcomes in mental health providers working with trauma. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 75(6), pp.1066-1083.

Levin, L.C. and Robbennolt, J.K., 2021. To Err is Human, To Apologize is Hard: The Role of Apologies in Lawyer Discipline. The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, 34, p.513 - 564.

Mahon, D., 2022. Implementing Trauma Informed Care in Human Services: An Ecological Scoping Review. Behavioral Sciences, 12(11), 431.

Riskin, L.L. and Wohl, R., 2015. Mindfulness in the heat of conflict: Taking stock. Harvard. Negotiation Law Review, 20, p.121.

Salovey, P. and J. D. Mayer (1990). Emotional Intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality 9(3): p.185-211.

Steen, J.T., Senreich, E. and Straussner, S.L.A., 2021. Adverse childhood experiences among licensed social workers. Families in society, 102(2), pp.182-193.

Ting-Toomey, S., 2015. Conflict Facework Theory. The Sage Encylopedia of Intercultural Competence, pp.325-330.

Wheeler, C., 2017. Recognising dignity & showing respect. perspektive mediation, 14(1), pp.59-70.