CONFLICT. It’s not a good thing, right? Defined as a serious disagreement or argument, typically a protracted one or even a prolonged armed struggle involving many people. We all have them when we experience a clash of opposing wishes or needs.
I also remember in English class studying the plot diagram for literature and the conflict was that event that initiates and puts the plot into motion. (Remember Man vs. Nature and all that?)
Listening to an episode of ON BEING talking about her book, High Conflict, Amanda Ripley writes, “People who try to live without any conflict, who never argue or mourn, tend to implode sooner or later as any psychologist will tell you. Living without conflict is like living without love: cold and, eventually, unbearable.”
I am, thankfully, not currently in any state of high conflict, but I suppose I live in a world of high conflicts.
Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist who sometimes describes herself as a “recovering journalist” — and a trained conflict mediator. She’s written several acclaimed books, including High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. You can find her essay “Complicating the Narratives” on the Solutions Journalism blog. She is the co-founder of the company Good Conflict and hosts the Slate podcast How To!. She writes about human behavior and change.
Ripley drew this term from divorce courts in the 1980s where a high conflict divorce is one in which the children always lose. For all of what divides our communities and societies right now, we have children together. She thinks we need to break this pattern of distress one interaction, one life, at a time.
She says that “In high conflict, any intuitive thing you do to get out of the conflict will almost certainly make things worse. So now I try to take my first intuition, and just ask myself, ‘Could I do the opposite? What would that look like?’ Because that’s how you step out of that dance.”
Amanda’s website is amandaripley.com
Milneville 