When Rushing to the Brain’s War Room Doesn’t Resolve Conflicts

Through years’ participation in a therapeutic community, I got used to suggestions that members adjust their levels of passivity or aggression. People who habitually expect others to comply with their demands often find that they become socially isolated because others prefer not to be bossed around. On the other hand, people who habitually avoid overt conflict by passive responses may go without fulfilling social needs because they’re afraid to ask, afraid of sparking a conflict they won’t be able to manage or which they’ll necessarily lose. I identified more with the latter pattern.

Clinicians presented a roadmap for positive change involving pendulum metaphors. Someone seeking to change from habitual passivity, they believed, would likely go through a phase swinging wildly into acting aggressively. Over time, such a person would be expected to learn to ease back from aggressive behaviors to a happy middle ground where they take care of their needs while honoring others’ boundaries and needs.

In the midst of this discourse, I stumbled into a romantic/significant other relationship. I’d never been married, and after a couple years’ going together, we married. Along this span, my wife became involved in the therapeutic community herself. Ours was an emotionally topsy-turvy ordeal of a relationship. Feedback I got from therapists included that I was people-pleasing my spouse. I heard it over and over again; however, my impulses to cave in so as not to displease her were as keen as my fear of losing my connection.

In the midst of this tumult, I tuned in radio programming featuring Sharon Strand Ellison reading from her book Taking the War Out of Our Words. I didn’t just then realize how steadfastly she had followed a conviction that conversations involving conflict didn’t have to be the way people ordinarily accepted them. What leapt out to me was the promise that there could be another way for me to cope with the battles in my marriage than becoming aggressive—and risking losing the marriage so that I could eventually find that happy middle point where I’d care for myself and be considerate of my wife’s needs—if she were still in my life. I bought the book.

Reading it would have more than redeemed what I’d paid merely in Ellison’s brilliant parsing of what she calls “the war model of communication,” the default approach in Anglo US and so many other cultures. I’ll hold off on quoting her insight about this model for communication because I believe reading it in context is one of the greatest rewards of reading Ellison’s book. All the same, defensiveness and power struggle are two very common consequences of addressing conflicts using war-model patterns—if there’s even a conversation regarding a conflict. One possibility, particularly with people like me habitually trying to avoid conflicts, is that the conflict doesn’t even get discussed. And here was my first breakthrough from reading the book. By preemptively giving in, I hadn’t actually avoided conflict or power struggle. By surrendering early and often, I allowed conflicts to destroy my self-confidence.

The process, however, wasn’t on a timeline to save my marriage. Contrarily I now imagine that, had I developed enough skill in the Powerful, Non-Defensive Communication that Ellison proposes as a game changer from our default war-model programming and the courage to use it consistently, it might have brought my marriage’s collapse well before my wife actually started divorce proceedings.

Despite that loss and forced realization of my fear of it being so central to my launching my personal attempt to learn Powerful, Non-Defensive Communication, I’ve continued to work at it. I don’t know whether to call Ellison’s very thorough description of how to use the three basic tools of communication in non-defensive ways a strength or weakness. It can be intimidating. I use an e-book version. The paperback has over 300 pages. I hardly pretend to have mastered the system. That hardly means that times I’ve attempted to use it to address conflicts I’ve encountered have been without reward.

So far, perhaps the greatest gift is that I’ve actually become willing to have conversations about conflicts. A power struggle rooted with my mother in my teen years over religion had persisted until fairly recently. I noticed that I didn’t use my most frequent pattern of surrender to the other and betray myself in this case, however. My mom would send me letters that came across to me as appeals for me to join her church. For decades I simply wouldn’t reply. In this case my war-model pattern was to flee the scene and escape. As I was able to identify that war-model pattern, it struck me. Continuing to cope through such avoidance was likely to contribute to my ongoing underearning. So I’ve invited my mom to engage in phone or video chat conversations addressing this power struggle. I don’t know yet whether this change has brought me an exit from the power struggle, but every conversation gives me a chance to ask myself how I might improve my non-defensive approach. I won’t learn it if I don’t allow myself to try it out and learn from mistakes.

I’ve also attempted non-defensive conversation with a co-worker regarding a conflict on the job. I intend to include a blog post about that presently.

I also look at Ellison’s thorough detailing of non-defensive communication strategies as a tremendous asset. This is not a book I can read once and instantly put into daily practice. It’s one that invites me to revisit and compare my experience with models it offers.

I no longer believe that a process from being a codependent doormat to taking care of myself in relation to others necessarily leads through a pendulum swing into aggressiveness before settling at a happy medium. That process strikes me as rooted in the limitations of war-model communication. Like Ellison, I’ve come to believe that it doesn’t have to be that way, and she’s provided me with a toolkit. Using it allows my working through conflict to actually lead to emotional connections with people with whom conflict had emerged. That makes this a book to read and return to over and over.