Transforming Conflict: How Finding the Fear Creates Freedom
I recently had an important conversation with my wife that can teach us a lot about how to handle conflict, especially ones that recur. Let me set the stage…
We were toward the tail end of dinner the other night and Wesley, my three year old son, was spinning around in circles while barely touching his food. As I walked toward him, I let out a sharp “stop spinning!” Wesley promptly obeyed, which led my wife to angrily tell me not to speak to him like that. Instantly, I felt my gut clench and my defenses spring up. And then I froze.
That’s my standard response whenever my wife gets angry - I freeze. Their anger, especially when directed toward me, is so scary for me that it immobilizes my system. The problem with freezing (or with any fight-flight-freeze response) is that it often exacerbates the situation that caused it in the first place.
My freeze response is something I’ve been working on for a while now. I understand that it stems from the way I experienced my father’s anger as a child. His booming, critical voice would often come out when I’d done something wrong and reduce me to a heap of tears. From an early age, I learned that anger was extremely threatening. But on a deeper level, I internalized anger into a story that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.
Knowing this, I’ve done a lot to meet my own vulnerabilities with compassion. Among the moves, offering a loving presence to my scared inner child has been hugely important to helping me get regulated and back in connection. While anger still destabilizes me, I’m slowly expanding my capacity to handle it.
But there’s a big problem if I stop just at my internal response - it doesn’t leave room to understand the anger itself. And without that, I get caught in a navel-gazing exercise which at best helps me self-regulate but at worst, causes me to disconnect from my wife.
After the kids were in bed, we started to process the dinner incident and halfway in, some of my vulnerability and upset bubbled up. At some point, I reflected that my wife’s anger made me feel abandoned or like I was being punished. For a moment it felt like I was revealing some new insight that would help us address future conflicts. But then I realized: I was making the whole thing about me, with no room for my wife’s perspective. In fact, I was using my own hurt as a way to make my wife’s anger wrong.
The breakthrough came when I turned my attention toward my wife and asked whether perhaps beneath the surface of their anger, there might be fear – fear of something dangerous happening, particularly around our children. A lightbulb went off above my wife’s head. They were scared that I was going to teach our son that yelling “stop” is how we get what we want from others. And to protect our son, my wife had to get angry at me. When I saw my wife contact their fear, I was instantly able to reconnect with them. It was easy at this point to request that the next time they feel angry at me, they also tell me what they’re scared about.
Seeing the fear beneath the anger instantly depersonalized the situation for me. If I could see that the anger wasn’t an attack on me, but rather a response to fear about something we both care about, then we could address the problem together rather than get lost in blame and recriminations.
The dysfunctional patterns that come out in conflict are defense mechanisms meant to avoid the feelings we are most uncomfortable with. And it is those exact feelings we need to welcome in order to reach meaningful resolution. So the next time you find yourself in a conflict pattern that never seems to end, get curious about the other person and see if you can find the deep fear, the one that wants to stay hidden. Don’t make the mistake of only addressing the surface reactions that arise - seek out what’s driving them. If we have the courage to connect with these deeper vulnerabilities, those scared parts of ourselves we’d rather not see, then we have a way out.
Finally, some questions to reflect on:
What makes conflict most difficult for me?
How do the stories I make about other people prevent connection?
How do the stories I make about myself prevent connection?
What beliefs and perspectives could I let go of in order to get back into connection?
What is scary about connecting with the person I am in conflict with?