The 4 hidden forces underneath every argument

Conflict can be constructive, inspiring learning, growth, and vulnerability when well-managed. But when it spirals into what Amanda Ripley calls high conflict, it becomes corrosive. 

Instead of solving problems, high conflict traps us in a cycle where arguments feed on themselves, eroding trust and entire relationships. So, why are we so susceptible to it? Ripley explains, sharing our psychological tripwires and how to avoid them.

AMANDA RIPLEY: The paradox of high conflict is that we both want out of the conflict desperately, and we want in. We might be fighting about textbooks or who did the dishes last night. We can have that fight for a 1,000 years, but we could have a shot at figuring out what we both need and noticing when there’s opportunities to make that happen.

[Narrator] – How do we break the cycle of high conflict?

– High Conflict is the kind of conflict that escalates to a point where it’s conflict for conflict’s sake. We start to make a lot of mistakes in this state. We usually get into an us versus them, all or nothing mindset, and the worst part about high conflict is that eventually, we harm the thing we went into the fight to protect, whether it’s our family or our country. High conflict is like a spell, and we are all vulnerable to it. It is so magnetic, it’s very hard to resist. If you’ve seen people in your life seemingly lose their mind to a political or social conflict, do things that you never thought they’d do, think about the conflict night and day, have the same conversations over and over, it’s like they’re under spell. The paradox of high conflict is that we both want out of the conflict desperately, and we want in, so at the same time, when we are in a kind of intractable, malignant conflict, we feel this pull towards the conflict. We don’t wanna leave it, not even for a second. We might have trouble sleeping. At the same time, we would love to be free of it, so it’s a real paradox and you see it over and over again in high-conflict divorces, high-conflict politics, gang warfare, you name it. Humans are very susceptible to high conflict, especially in a low-trust environment, and at the same time that we want out, we want in. Right now, according to Graham Boyd at the University of Mississippi, we only feel heard about 5% of the time, which means are we all terrible listeners? Is anyone listening? As George Bernard Shaw is reported to have said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” When people feel heard, something incredible happens. I’ve seen it again and again, again. We’ve now trained over 1,000 people through good conflict workshops, and I see it every single time. It’s an amazing thing. When people feel heard, they say more revealing, complicated, nuanced, and vulnerable things. You get closer and closer to what we’re really fighting about, what they care most about underneath all the allegations and he said, she said, and the facts and the history, underneath it is something that I like to call the understory, which is what we’re really fighting about. That is how you get to the understory, is by listening deeply. Because when people don’t feel heard, which is about 95% of the time, sadly, what happens? The next thing they say is more extreme, more simplified, and louder in every way, right? So you get further and further from what we really should be fighting about, which is how we end up having a bunch of nonsense fights and don’t have the fight we really need to have. You might be wondering, what is this high-conflict business? Well, let me tell you a story. There’s a place in Los Angeles just off Wilshire Boulevard by an IHOP that looks like a lake, looks very tranquil. In fact, it is a natural asphalt spring that has been gurgling away since the last ice age. And in this spring, there are over three million bones. Scientists have found 2,000 saber tooth tiger skeletons in this pit right in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. How did this happen? Well, it turns out that over time, animals would be drawn to this pit thinking that it was a beautiful, peaceful lake. That’s what it looked like, so naturally they’re drawn to it, right? And then they get there, and you only have to walk through a couple of inches of this sludge before you’re immobilized. Even a large mammal is stuck. So then what happens? Well, then along comes, say, a pack of wolves who sees a bison just standing there. Wonderful, so they too are naturally drawn to the pit, then they get stuck. Slowly, slowly, all of these animals get stuck. Their carcasses slowly sink to the bottom. And more and more predators and prey are drawn in over time. That is high conflict. You get drawn in for very natural, understandable, evolutionarily reasonable reasons, but once you get in, you find you can’t get out. And in fact, the more you fight and the more you try to get out, the more stuck you become. Any intuitive thing you do to get out of the tar pit of high conflict will almost certainly make things worse. You have to do counterintuitive things, which is difficult. High conflict is a chronic stressor. It keeps you up at night, literally. You lose peripheral vision, literally and figuratively. You make a bunch of mistakes about your enemy, whoever that might be. You miss big opportunities. You actually experience repeated injections of cortisol and other stress hormones, which we know impairs memory and lowers your immunity to disease and can shorten your lifespan, so high conflict is literally deadly. High conflict is diabolical on many levels. What you find is the more entranced you get by high conflict, the more narrow and small and trapped the space becomes. It’s impossible to feel curious while you’re feeling outraged. You can’t do both. The more threatened you feel, the worse decisions you’re gonna make. So the idiot driver reflex is the way in which humans always understand their own behavior to be a product of their circumstances. I was driving quickly because I was late to something, and also, I’d just been stuck in traffic, et cetera, et cetera. But with other people, of course, we don’t give them that same benefit of the doubt. When other people are driving quickly, I might think that they just think they’re above the law, like they don’t care. They’re mean-spirited, they’re reckless, right? And that is the technical term is the fundamental attribution error, but I feel like idiot driver reflex is easier to remember. So in my book, “High Conflict,” I follow people and communities who were stuck in really ugly high conflict of all kinds, personal, political, you name it. And in every single case, there were certain trip wires that led them into this kind of dysfunctional conflict. And they’re always the same trip wires, no matter if it was gang violence or an ugly divorce. The trip wires include binary thinking, where you believe there is an us and a them. It’s very hard to resist this. The more uncertain and scary things get in the world, the more we as humans are drawn to simple dichotomies, right? Where it’s black versus white, good versus evil, us versus them, that is a very evolutionarily appropriate response and a totally inappropriate and destructive response for the modern age. So it is an instinct we have that doesn’t serve us very well today when we live in interdependent, diverse democracies. Everyone that I followed for “High Conflict” at some point reached what’s known as a saturation point, which is kind of like hitting rock bottom, right? Where something happens where you suddenly start to question whether all of this conflict is actually worth the cost. It’s a moment of dizzying disorientation where people have to decide whether they’re gonna stay in high conflict or do something radically different. I followed Curtis Toler, who was a fairly high-ranking gang leader in Chicago for many years. He was in a longstanding vendetta with a rival gang for lots of reasons that were very understandable from a long history of violence, but there was this moment when he saw his son graduating from eighth grade, and for a variety of reasons, which I explained in the book, all of a sudden, he found himself just silently weeping, which is not something Curtis typically did in public or in private. But all of a sudden, he had this moment where he started to really question existentially whether this conflict was still worth it, and this moment’s really important because a lot of people hit a saturation point, but they have nowhere to go. No one is welcoming them out of the conflict, because at this point, they’ve become so dangerous or so toxic that nobody wants anything to do with them outside of the conflict itself. In Curtis’s case, thank God, he had somewhere to go. He literally was able to move across town so people in his organization couldn’t find him so easily. He had a priest in his neighborhood who welcomed him back, who gave him a role to play in a new basketball league that was forming between rival gangs to try to reduce the violence in Chicago, and he had his faith, which was his Islam, which was something that he had over the years developed right alongside his conflict identity, and they were in constant conflict internally, right? Because he was doing things that were not okay according to his faith. So he had somewhere to go, which is critical. So in this climate today, it feels like whatever conflict you’re in, there’s just three options. You can either avoid it, like run, don’t walk the other direction and hope it’ll go away, or you can go to war, you can fight force with force, you can try to humiliate the other side, try to beat them in the next election, whatever it is, right? Or the third way seems to be you have to surrender. You have to stay silent, not speak up for what you believe in and just go along with whatever your group is doing. But actually, there’s another way, and it’s the only good way, particularly in this moment, which is cultivate good, healthy conflict on purpose. Not to avoid, not to go to war, not to say silent or surrender, but to do something else entirely. Looping is a deep listening technique that I learned from Gary Friedman at the Center for Understanding and Conflict, and it is a way to prove to the other person that you are really trying to understand them, even as you profoundly disagree. And this has totally transformed how I operate in the world as a journalist, but also just as a human, as a parent, as a spouse, more than anything else I’ve learned in 20 years. It sounds so simple, but actually, we almost never do it. Most of us never get training in it, but we can get much, much better at it. The four steps of looping are to, first, listen to what the other person is saying, but really listen to what seems most important to them, not to you. Really, what are they most upset about? What do they wanna tell you underneath what they’re saying? Listening for metaphors, for strong words, really trying to figure out what’s most important to them. The next step is to use your own language, the most elegant language you can come up with, and play it back to them to see if you’re understanding them. Summarize what you’re hearing in your own language. And then the next step, and this is really easy to forget when you’re first learning, but really important, is to check if you got it right. To literally say, “Is that right? Am I missing anything?” And be genuinely curious. Don’t just say it, right? But really wanna know the answer. One of two things happens, and I’ve now done this in different languages, different countries, all kinds of people, thousands of people. What you find is, usually, people will add on to what they’ve said or they’ll correct you in some way, but they’re slowly peeling away and revealing more and more of the understory, like what the conflict’s really about, what they care most about. This is everything, right? Because not only are you now starting to understand them better, but they’re starting to trust that you want to understand them, which is like the skeleton key to conflict. You can’t get anywhere unless people feel heard. They just will not listen until they feel heard. And then if you get to a point where you check if you got it right and the person says, “Yes, exactly,” then and only then can you go to your next question or ask them to tell you more. The impulse very often, and I know I did this for years as a journalist, is to ask plot questions or to offer a similar story that you went through and try to connect with them, or to maybe even try to offer advice, right? This is the natural inclination we all have. But what we found from the research is that before you do any of that, you have to prove to the person that you are trying to get them, and that makes everything else possible. Literally, people physically change when you do this, like their shoulders drop, they open up. Even if you didn’t get it right, they’re so grateful to be heard, that someone is trying to understand them, and almost always, they realize things about themselves that they hadn’t articulated before. So it’s an iterative process, which is why it’s called a loop, and it is really surprisingly intellectually and emotionally challenging and incredibly powerful. The power of looping is that it builds trust, but it also reveals the understory of the conflict, like what is really underneath this fight? Because you can easily get lost in the back and forth, in the blame and attacks and defensiveness, but underneath that, there’s usually just one of a few things going on, and if you can identify what that is, then you can figure out what to do next. So for example, most of the common understories are about power and control, respect and recognition, care and concern, and stress and overwhelm. So we might be fighting about textbooks or prayer or a politician we’ve never met or who did the dishes last night. We can have that fight for a 1,000 years, over and over and over. We’ll always come up with new material, or we can try to figure out what we’re really fighting about, and if it’s about who did the dishes last night, it might really be about respect and recognition or care and concern or power and control, right? If we can at least figure that out, then we have a shot, not at necessarily solving all the conflict, ’cause we need conflict in this world, we need some friction, right? But we could have a shot at figuring out what we both need and noticing when there’s opportunities to make that happen. So as an example, recently at Good Conflict, we got an email from a mayor of a small town in Colorado, and she was saying how there city council meetings were just becoming just kind of classic dumpster fires of attacks and criticism and toxicity, and so she tried looping, she tried looping her critics, not agreeing with them, but really trying to understand what they were saying and proving to them with her words that she was trying to understand them. Not just nodding and looking like she was trying to understand, but proving it. What she found was that even when people didn’t get what they wanted, which is often the case, right? They felt respected, they felt like she cared what they thought, they felt like they had some dignity in the situation, which makes all the difference. We all, as humans, can put up with a lot if we feel like we matter and like we belong, and what I’ve learned is that’s something I can give people, even as I continue to disagree. And the more I practice it in low-stake settings, the more easily I can do it under stress. So let me give you an example. I was trained on this years ago by Gary Friedman, who became a character in my book “High Conflict,” because he is a conflict expert who ran for office and then himself got trapped in conflict, which is very interesting, but what I’ve learned is that you have to practice looping in a low-stake setting. So he taught me how to loop, I started practicing it all the time. It’s a great thing to practice if you have kids at home, for example, or a roommate or someone at work who’s complaining, any emotion at all in the conversation, try looping them. And what happens is you get better and better and better at it, and it starts to be kind of fun and like a cool challenge honestly. And then what happens is when you really need it, when you’re in a hot conflict, then you can do it on automatic, which is the only way to actually operate well under stress is when something is like muscle memory. So I was at an event talking about a story I had done for the Atlantic a couple years ago, and it was a really positive story about this town, so I didn’t expect this, but at some point in this large theater during the Q&A, somebody raised their hand and just started laying into me, saying I was a terrible journalist, I’d missed the most important things about the town, really angry, and in the past, I might have gotten defensive or tried to defend myself or tried to explain why I did what I did. None of that is gonna work. This person needs to feel heard before he will listen because he’s a human, right? So luckily, I could, just outta my back pocket, use looping ’cause I’d done it so many times. So I listened to what he was saying and I said, “It sounds like you feel like you read the story and didn’t even recognize your own hometown. That must have been enraging. Is that right?” And you could just see it just felt so good for him to be heard, right? And he said, “Exactly.” And that’s all I had to do, because you know what? I needed to hear that criticism. And if I had gotten into a big argument back and forth with him, where does that get me? I got my chance to be heard in the story. This was his turn. And so I heard him and he felt heard, and we moved to the next question. That’s not always gonna work that way, but if you don’t practice it, it’s never gonna work. You have to practice it in a low-stake setting and then you can use it when you need it. When I was working on this book, I ended up spending some time talking to astronauts and future astronauts at NASA, because NASA has dealt with a lot of conflict. Turns out on every space mission, there is conflict between the crew up in space and ground control down on Earth, and it can really derail the mission. So they’ve done a lot of really interesting research about how to keep conflict healthy. You don’t want no conflict, right? That’s not good. You can end up in real danger in outer space if people can’t disagree. You need some conflict, but you don’t want it to become toxic. So what they learn is that you wanna seize every opportunity to have positive, fleeting, good interactions, and then it’s like money in the bank, so you can then have conflict that’s healthier. John and Julie Gottman, who study marriage at the Love Lab in Seattle, have found that there’s something known as a magic ratio where couples who have good, healthy conflict and stay together, they have about a five-to-one ratio of positive interactions for every conflict interaction, which seems like a lot depending on your marriage, but five-to-one is about the same ratio you need with strangers or people in your office. You need to have some buffer of goodwill, rapport, connection. Even people who when I did crisis deescalation training, if you’re in a conflict with someone at a hospital or on the street that you don’t even know, you wanna try to build rapport very, very quickly. You don’t have time for a relationship, but you might have time for rapport. So you’re trying to have five positive, fleeting connections for every one negative connection. Yeah, I mean, high conflict can be really useful, right? Because it generates energy and motivation and passion and people will stick with you for a very long time, even if you’re a leader who makes a ton of mistakes and messes up a lot of things. In high conflict, people will stick with you because there’s so threatened by the other side, like you’ve so thoroughly demonized their opponents that they will stick with you out of loyalty and fear of the other side. So high conflict can be very useful in the short term, but in the long term, all of the evidence shows that you cannot get lasting change through high conflict. Eventually, eventually it’ll turn on you, right? So you can’t solve an us versus them problem with a new us versus them. Making an enemy is helpful in the short term. A common shared enemy can be very inspiring and motivational and energizing, but in the longer term, we have to live with each other. As the negotiator William Ury once said, “There’s no winning a marriage.” You can’t find a way to trounce the other side if you have kids together, right? At the end of the day, you’re gonna see each other. So for the kinds of problems we are facing as a planet, whether it’s climate change or pandemics, we need some level of cooperation. We don’t have to like each other, we don’t have to agree, nor should we, but as soon as we fall into high conflict, we will end up harming the things we care most about. I’ve now followed people all over the planet who’ve been stuck in really toxic conflict. And what I’ve learned over and over and over again is whatever fight you’re in, whatever your mission is, you’re gonna be much more effective if you can stay in good conflict, even in your own head. You’re gonna sleep better at night and make fewer mistakes.