Dealing with Conflict: from Fight or Flight to Reason

Dealing with conflict engages so many of us; it takes up so much time, burns too much energy, and can take the wrong turn and result in dangerous anomie or broken trust, broken relationships, business partnerships, even broken nations. 

Rex Urwin, Mind Matters resident Mind Architect, this February podcast, goes out to the other side of love -- the mirror side of emotional conflict, which is often the seed of larger displays of human negativity -- the better to help us understand and avoid that very wide pitfall that is  often encountered in the course of growing and nurturing our important  relationships.

​Human emotional conflict is not a scene or a place, it is always a set of personalities dealing with each other in the wrong way. Wrongmindedness is always connected to stress based chemical and physical processes. For instance, your kidneys, if the conflict level rises, produces adrenalin, a chemical which makes your brain and body respond with fight-or-flight reactions instead of reason.

You Can’t Hashtag Emotional Reactions Out of the Way 

In current terms, so many things are taking the capacity to reason out of human dealings. Social media, for instance, offer quick palliatives to conflict, which in no way go towards resolution or even reason. These simply make emotional conflict simmer inside persons involved, who more or less become latent perpetrators.

In fact, social media use often make many go into “rage” mode, all the while smiling and being winningly positive persons as long as they can help it. Then, at the opportune moment, they stab the persons they have wronged or have wronged them in the back as many times as possible. 

In a tragicomic way, all these add to humanity’s problems. Rex Urwin shows us a way out through the thicket that bodily and thought reactions, or basic and reactive instincts, create in us. He helps us understand how to have and use “response ability”: the ability to respond to negative pressure with the leading edge of reason, which tends to reside somewhere else in our minds when this pressure shows up. 

This month , it is good to know how to be “The Catcher in the Rye”, a person who can save his or her social or business group or relationship from a whole lot of trouble by being the person who, with reason as the only tool, is able to catch another person who happens to fall through the rye towards a conflict situation.   

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