For the first half of my life, I was conflict averse. Conflict scared me because I felt I either wielded too much power and could hurt the other person, or they wielded too much power and could hurt me. Despite having very little real-world experience of this being true, I grew up in an atmosphere where it felt psychologically true. I created a powerful story that conflict posed a serious threat to relationship.
Over time, I began to have a different relationship with conflict. Coaching, facilitation, psychotherapy, and life gently, and sometimes not so gently invited me into new experiences of conflict. I slowly became more willing to engage it. While I still worried that conflict might trample my deepest value of connection, I had gathered enough skill and experience to trust myself to keep the relationship intact.
Just recently, I’ve come to see conflict in a very different way.
It is not the slayer of relationship.
Conflict is not the breakdown of relationship. It is often relationship asking to deepen.
When I sat with this idea and let it percolate, I could feel the visceral pull to reconnect, to reach my hand across the gap as the other person reached across from the other side. Opposites attract. We are always seeking wholeness.
Conflict can be the place where relationship is asking to become more honest, more spacious, and more real. Often, conflict arises because there is a yearning for more connection, more intimacy, more vulnerability. We feel the gap. We want the other person to see us, understand us, and trust us. Instead of pushing another person away, conflict can actually be a cry to be known.
The more I reflected on this, the more I realized this isn’t only true between people. It is also true within us.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the conflict between the narrator and the protagonist of our lives. That conflict wasn’t really about productivity or results. It was about relationship. The narrator had stopped accompanying the protagonist and had begun evaluating her. The moment the narrator returned to faithful attention, the conflict softened not because the circumstances changed, but because the relationship did.
The protagonist lives.
The narrator makes meaning.
If the narrator dominates, life becomes overinterpreted. Experience is analyzed before it is lived.
If the protagonist dominates, experience accumulates but isn’t integrated into wisdom.
Neither is wrong.
We need both.
Conflict often arises when one forgets its relationship to the other.
And what causes the tear in the relationship?
It is the loss of being known.
Relationship tears when we no longer feel held in another’s awareness.
Trust follows from being known, seen, and understood.
ReStorying doesn’t change the circumstances of a story.
ReStorying changes the relationship to the circumstances.
And because experience is always relational, the experience itself changes.
Perhaps that is what transformation really is: not escaping conflict but allowing it to restore right relationship.
Relationship with another.
Relationship with ourselves.
Relationship with life.