How to pursue 'healthy conflict' on Thanksgiving

Family gatherings can produce tense moments even in the best of times. And these are not the best of times.

Disagreement has become toxic, tribal and venomous over the last several years in America.

But one of the preeminent books on the topic of conflict advises us on how to transform disagreement into something positive, rather than always try to avoid it.

Amanda Ripley’s 2022 book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, has become a key resource for those trying to work through differences rather than run over their opponents or retreat into contempt.

“High conflict,” Ripley explains, is “all-consuming” disagreement that gets “stuck in anger and frustration” and dehumanizes the other.

However, “when you cultivate good conflict between people who are extremely divided, people want more of it. There’s almost a transcendent feeling that arises even in deep disagreement,” Ripley said in an interview.

Here are five recommendations drawn from Ripley’s writings and interviews, on how to pursue the kind of “healthy conflict” that “can be serious and intense but leads somewhere useful.”

Ask good questions

A conflict mediator told Ripley to ask questions about people’s values and interests to move away from talking about political positions or gripes.

“How did you come to that? Why is this story important to you? How do you feel when you tell it to me?” are all examples of this kind of question.

“Whether you agree or not, these deeper motivations matter far more to the debate than the facts of the conflict (and also happen to be more interesting),” Ripley wrote. “If any of us want to understand what’s underneath someone’s political rage, we need to follow stories to these moral roots — just like mediators.”

Other sample questions include:

• Who is your why?

• How did you come to have your political views?

• What is oversimplified about this issue?

• How has this conflict affected your life?

• What do you think the other side wants?

• What’s the question nobody is asking?

• What do you and your supporters need to learn about the other side in order to understand them better?

• What do you think the other community thinks of you? What do you think of them?

• What do you want to know about the other community? What do you want them to know about you?

If someone says something based on a questionable source of information, Ripley has said she will answer this way: “It’s funny because I heard the exact opposite. How do you decide who to trust today?”

She added: “Why we’re not talking about trust and how to build it every single hour of every single day in this country I do not know.”

Listen skillfully

Ripley talks often about a practice called “looping,” in which she tries to restate in her own words what a person has just said to her, to make sure she’s understood them.

It’s “not robotically repeating the words, but distilling it into the most elegant language I can muster,” Ripley said. “Then I check to see, ‘Is that right?’”

“It seems obvious and maybe a bit contrived, but it works like magic,” Ripley wrote. “I don’t always have the self-control to loop. But when I do pull it off, it always helps — lowering the heat of the conversation. ... This sounds squishy, but it is a key to the kingdom. Having someone articulate your most important message proves that you’ve been understood, which is all most of us want.”

Another element of listening involves empathy. One former gang leader in Chicago told Ripley he would sometimes imagine a person across from him as a young child, “to see them the way they once were, and a way they could be again, a sort of innocence.”

Notice also that anger can be an expression of fear. Rather than admit our fear to others or ourselves, we might feel that to be a weakness and turn to anger if that feels more like strength.

Distinguish between anger and contempt

Anger can be productive — and healthy, Ripley has said. But contempt and disgust dehumanize those we disagree with and are a surefire way to enter into “high conflict.”

“Anger is OK. ... It is initiatory, it is important as a signal. It’s energizing,” Ripley said. “Contempt is really hard to work with, and the same with disgust.”

Contempt and disgust can lead us to seek to humiliate the other.

“All manner of high conflict often is really, at some level, about feelings of humiliation,” Ripley said. “One thing that I’ve learned is to never embarrass your opponents. It just backfires. It may feel good to you, but it just hits at the core of our human need to belong and to matter.”

Redirect energy to points of common cause

If a disagreement seems intractable or to be going in circles, but you’re not ready to break it off, you could seek to talk about which values underneath the debate you agree on, or on what problem you both want to solve, and how that could happen.

“It’s ideal if people don’t just talk, but actually work together on some kind of common problem. It triggers our instincts for cooperation rather than competition,” Ripley said. “What problem are they going to solve together that they both care about? That creates a third identity outside of the conflict. And we know it’s a lot easier to create a new identity than to get rid of an old one.”

One conflict mediator told Ripley of a family feud over a shared business. The mediator asked the family members to work on crafting a mission statement together.

“It was the first time they had been in the same room without f-bombs being hurled and someone storming out,” the mediator told Ripley. “They were so darned proud of that mission statement.”

Similar exercises could be a way out of “high conflict” at a family gathering and toward a more productive conversation.

Slow down and disengage if necessary

“It’s helpful to slow the conflict in your mind by imagining seeing the conflict from afar, rather than something that requires your immediate action,” Ripley said.

Backing up from the conflict can include being mindful of the way our bodies can hijack our emotions and thoughts and regaining control through rhythmic breathing.

“Taking slow, deep breaths is one of the few actions that influence both our somatic nervous system (which we can intentionally control) and our autonomic system (which includes our heartbeat and other actions we cannot consciously access),” Ripley wrote in her book. “When all else fails, breathing slows down conflict, so you can think again.”

But family settings often lack one of the key guardrails that can help disagreement be productive: a set of ground rules and rituals to enforce them.

So, if things are going nowhere but down, “take a break and get some space,” Interfaith America founder Eboo Patel said in conversation with Ripley.

“Sometimes, simple disengagement is the best course of action.”