How To Avoid Relationship Conflicts With One Little Word

When you are in a conflict, stop, center yourself, breathe, and ask yourself what is important here. This pulls you into the present and gives you the opportunity to stop being reactive, and instead, choose a better way to respond.

Stop, stop, stop! Photo credit: Phil Mayes

MAUDE: I was in a Zoom women’s group and was sharing about a technique that was discussed in a class I attended. This technique was designed to be used in situations where you are feeling responses like irritation, impatience, or anger in your relationships. The simple, yet very effective technique, is to ask yourself in such a situation, “What is important here?” This helps you to calm down and to think about where you want to put your emphasis in responding to a situation you are finding challenging.

When I recounted this story, I unconsciously added a word to it. I said. “Stop, and ask yourself what is important here.” One of the women shared that hearing me say stop gave her something she could understand working with when things were getting heated in a relationship.

If you stop, what are you stopping? You are stepping away from being reactive in the situation. When you stop, the very first thing you will often find is that you can breathe. In these situations, people often start holding their breath without realizing it. Stopping pulls you into the present and gives you a moment to step back from being drawn into conflict, if that’s where your mind or the other person’s behavior is going.

Most people have a variety of responses at the same time to any given situation, especially those that are challenging. Stopping enables you to make a choice of which of your responses represents the value which you want to give your energy to. It is not always possible to do this in the moment, but when you stop before reacting or responding, you get that moment to see what is going on, to breathe, and to bring your thoughts and feelings into the present.

When you react with anger, fear, or hatred, you are coming from your deep-seated and strong survival instincts. They are very strong because they are defensive postures ingrained in us and resident in the earliest part of our primitive brain. When you stop, you gain time in the present to choose a different place to interact from. You can move into thoughts and feelings of a higher and more developed part of you.

This is not about suppressing your feelings, but rather selecting which of your feelings and thoughts you want to represent in your words and deeds.

It is very empowering to realize that we have a choice in how we relate if we reach out and grab it. Sometimes all it takes is stepping inside yourself and finding the value you want to manifest with your actions and words. Peace is just a choice away.

PHIL: Maude was telling the story of advising someone who was involved in a conflict: “Stop and ask yourself what’s important here.” She thought the kernel of the advice was looking at what was important, but her friend was captivated by the injunction to stop, and I can see why.

To stop is to step back from the reasons why you’re right and that they’re a terrible person and the horrible things that might happen and just be in the body for a moment. I think to be able to do this at all, you have to know of that place, to have a sense that there is a center that endures, and you know about this through mindfulness or meditating or just the sheer accumulation of life experiences.

It’s easy for me to say this and much harder to carry it out. I get caught up in the event and only afterward see how I reacted; at the time it was pure reaction without much thought.

I recently became fascinated with how language has given us a different way to view and respond to the world. Our emotional responses still exist and are sometimes at odds with our thoughts. We have two voices in different languages trying to steer our path. Of course, this is nothing new; Freud, Jung, and modern psychology talk about this. Nonetheless, I have found the notion of my verbal and non-verbal self very useful. The verbal can be aware of the non-verbal, but not the other way around.

That is what “Stop” does. It brings the attention to the present, to the body Our thoughts are of two kinds: The past, full of our upbringings, culture, habits; and the future, with its plans, goals, worries. They don’t go away, but they aren’t real in the way that our direct experience is, so when we stop, we have the opportunity, just for a moment, of being a whole person and making a choice about what is important.

This choice is between past-oriented and future-oriented. The past orientation is reactive, responding to the events, the words, the hurts. The future is where multiple possibilities exist and we can choose which to take. I think this orientation is what Charles Kingsley was describing in his 1863 children’s book “The Water Babies.” Tom runs away and is turned into a water baby. Two mysterious fairies appear from time to time, Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, acting as the Golden Rule and karma respectively. Do you want the chance to make the world as you would like it to be, or do you want the past to control your fate?

And this is the choice when we stop in the middle of a conflict. Do we continue the conflict by reacting to it, or do we look for our highest responses, as Maude put it? If you want to live in a peaceful world, you have to act peacefully. How do you want to live your life?

Reading Corner

Here are a number of writers offering their variants on the idea.

The Power of Pause: How Taking a Break Can Transform Relationship Conflicts “The power of the pause is simple: it’s a strategy that harnesses the strength of stepping back and taking a breather in the midst of heated moments. Breathing is simple, remembering to breathe is not easy. And the more escalated and indignant people become, the more they dig in their heels. The pace of the fight is accelerated, and basically the whole thing is out of control. There are very few people who find this to be easy or natural, but the good news is that anyone can develop this skill with practice and intention.”

How Mindfulness Can Help Couples Cool Down “One of my favorite interventions, which encourages attentional mindfulness, is simply to ask, “What are you noticing now?” I find that there can be tremendous benefits simply by shifting my clients’ attention to their own bodily sensations—clenched jaw or fists, tightness in their throat or chest, churning in the stomach—and by labeling their feelings as they arise and escalate: Anger, sadness, fear, and shame are the most common ones. Noting their patterns of thoughts and behaviors helps see them for what they are: habitual and automatic, well-grooved into the brain’s neural circuitry. And like any habit, these patterns don’t need to own or define us; they’re something we can change.”

A Powerful Tool to Stay Grounded in Conflict “…a simple mindfulness practice traditionally associated with Buddhism, shamatha, meaning calm presence. This practice is centred around concentration on your breathing as it is. If you are breathing, you are already halfway there to starting this practice! The simplicity of this practice allows it to be used anywhere you are, and as we become more familiar with it, it will become a tool used effortlessly to ground ourselves in the present.”