The Conflict's Conflict

Most people come to therapy because something in their life has become difficult to manage. They may be struggling in their marriage, feeling overlooked at work, avoiding a friend, or becoming increasingly anxious about situations that once seemed ordinary. There is usually a conflict they can identify, and they would like some help resolving it. This is reasonable enough. But one of the peculiar things about psychotherapy is that resolving the conflict someone brings into the room does not necessarily resolve the problem. The circumstances may change, the relationship may improve, or the immediate distress may become more manageable, only for something remarkably similar to appear somewhere else. A person who finally learns to speak up at work may discover that they cannot tolerate disappointing their spouse. Someone who leaves an emotionally demanding friendship may find themselves entering another in which they are once again responsible for everyone's feelings. We might begin to wonder whether the conflict itself is the problem or whether there is another conflict involved in the way the person approaches it.

Most therapists learn early in their training to distinguish between the problem someone presents and the conditions that contribute to it. We know that symptoms have histories, that behavior can serve a purpose, and that what brings someone into treatment may not explain why the difficulty persists. Yet it is easy to become so occupied with helping someone manage a particular problem that we overlook what makes the same difficulty appear in different parts of their life. We help them communicate more effectively, establish boundaries, or respond differently to a frustrating situation. These changes can be genuinely helpful. But what happens when someone learns exactly what to say and still cannot bear the feeling of having said it? What if the difficulty is not simply learning how to handle a disagreement, but tolerating the fact that they are someone who can disagree?

The conflict's conflict is a conflict about having conflict. We might even say that someone is conflicted about their conflict with conflict. It sounds unnecessarily complicated until we consider how complicated life becomes when someone cannot tolerate their own irritation or aggression. They are not simply upset with another person. They are upset that they are upset. They resent someone and then feel guilty for resenting them. They want something different but fear what wanting it might reveal about their character. They finally speak and immediately regret having spoken. Each feeling produces another conflict with the fact that the feeling exists, until the original disagreement becomes almost impossible to recognize. What began as an ordinary irritation may become anxiety, guilt, resentment, withdrawal, or an exhausting effort to make everything right again. The person is no longer struggling only with someone else. They are struggling with the fact that they are someone who can have a conflict at all.

This is how suffering becomes knotted into so many seemingly unrelated difficulties. A person may arrive in therapy complaining of exhaustion, loneliness, anxiety, resentment, or an inability to maintain satisfying relationships. Each problem appears to have its own explanation, yet the same difficulty may be involved in each one. Their anger cannot be acknowledged without threatening their understanding of themselves as loving, agreeable, generous, or good. The problem is no longer simply what they feel toward another person, but what they imagine those feelings make them. Their efforts to avoid one uncomfortable experience may produce several others. What connects the suffering remains unnoticed because attention continually returns to the latest disagreement, disappointment, or symptom rather than the familiar way the person responds to these experiences.

Harriet Lerner explores something of this difficulty in The Dance of Anger. One of her central contributions is to consider anger as a signal that deserves our attention rather than an emotion that must either be suppressed or discharged. Anger may tell us that something in a relationship has become unacceptable, that we are surrendering too much of ourselves, or that an arrangement between two people is no longer working. Yet recognizing anger does not necessarily mean we know what to do with it. Someone may swallow their irritation to preserve a relationship, only to become increasingly resentful. Another may repeatedly express the same complaint without changing anything about their participation in the relationship. Lerner is interested in the recurring patterns between people, where each person's familiar response helps maintain an arrangement that neither particularly enjoys. The question is not simply whether we should express our anger, but whether we can understand what it is telling us about the relationship and our place within it.

Most people do not particularly enjoy conflict, and there are good reasons for this. Conflict can become frightening, cruel, humiliating, and destructive. But somewhere along the way, many of us have learned to treat aggression itself as though it were inherently bad. We confuse feeling angry with behaving violently, experiencing resentment with being unloving, or disagreeing with someone with threatening the relationship. This confusion can be especially familiar in communities where politeness, hospitality, and good manners carry considerable social value. We learn to be agreeable, to avoid making others uncomfortable, and to regard someone who expresses irritation as a person who has somehow failed to behave properly. We may become quite skilled at being pleasant while remaining almost entirely unfamiliar with what we actually feel. The problem is not that manners are bad, but that they can become a way of making certain feelings difficult to recognize.

This brings us to a distinction between being nice and being kind. Niceness might be described as treating someone as though I like them when, at the moment, I really do not. I smile, accommodate, reassure, and perhaps insist that everything is fine, although something in me has already begun objecting. Kindness asks something more difficult. I may allow myself to recognize my irritation, possibly even express it, while remaining connected to the other person and curious about what has happened between us. Kindness does not require that I enjoy the conflict, nor does it grant permission to behave cruelly. It asks whether I can remain in a relationship without requiring myself or the other person to be entirely agreeable. There is a considerable difference between protecting someone from unnecessary harm and protecting myself from the discomfort of being disliked. Sometimes being nice prevents the very conversation that kindness would make possible.

Peace is not the absence of conflict. War is. War attempts to eliminate the opposing position, while peace requires that different positions remain possible without requiring one to destroy the other. Of course, disagreement does not guarantee peace, and not every conflict can or should end in compromise. There are relationships in which distance and firm boundaries are necessary. But in ordinary relationships, many people imagine that peace depends upon keeping their disagreements to themselves. They become responsible for maintaining an atmosphere in which no one is disappointed, irritated, or confronted by an unpleasant truth. What appears peaceful may actually depend upon one person continually surrendering their position. Eventually, the person who has been accommodating everyone begins to wonder why no one seems particularly interested in accommodating them. The absence of an argument has concealed a disagreement that has never been allowed to take place.

Terrence Real develops an interesting account of this problem in Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. He considers how the ways we learned to protect ourselves in earlier relationships can take over our present ones. A person who learned to avoid anger may withdraw whenever a disagreement begins. Someone who grew up feeling overlooked may become unusually forceful in demanding attention. These responses once served a purpose, but they may no longer help us maintain the relationships we want. Real is interested in helping people move beyond their immediate defensive reactions and recover a sense of connection with the person sitting across from them. His work reminds us that conflict is not necessarily evidence that a relationship is failing. The greater difficulty may be how quickly two people become opponents who can no longer recognize what is happening between them.

One of the more interesting consequences of avoiding conflict is the way sacrifice can become a kind of private financial system. Someone repeatedly gives up what they want, makes themselves available, tolerates something they dislike, or agrees to an arrangement they privately resent. They may insist that they are doing these things out of love, friendship, loyalty, or professional responsibility, and perhaps they are. But the sacrifices are not always given freely. Somewhere in the background, an account is being kept. The person begins waiting to be appreciated, hoping the other will recognize everything they have surrendered without ever having been told what it cost. By the time they finally express their disappointment, the other person discovers that they have apparently accumulated an enormous debt they never knew they owed.

Appreciation is a peculiar form of repayment because the debt may have been gathering interest for years. The person who sacrifices does not simply want to be thanked for what they did yesterday. They may want recognition for every occasion when they swallowed their irritation, agreed when they wanted to refuse, or remained available when they would rather have been somewhere else. Even a sincere expression of gratitude can seem insufficient because it arrives too late to account for the accumulated resentment. And if the person continues making sacrifices, the balance keeps growing. What initially appeared to be generosity can become an arrangement in which one person feels increasingly unappreciated while the other remains bewildered by the size of the obligation. The debt becomes impossible to repay, not necessarily because the other person is ungrateful, but because the sacrifices have never stopped being made.

We can find this arrangement in marriages, friendships, families, and workplaces. A spouse says they do not mind taking care of everything around the house, then becomes furious that no one seems to notice. A friend repeatedly agrees to plans they do not enjoy and eventually withdraws because the friendship feels one-sided. An employee takes on additional responsibilities, refuses opportunities to ask for assistance, and gradually becomes convinced that their colleagues are taking advantage of them. Sometimes they are being taken advantage of, and this should not be overlooked. Yet it is also worth asking how they became involved in an arrangement that required so much of them while making so little room for their objections. What would have happened if they had said no? Would someone have been disappointed, or would the person have discovered something about themselves that they could not comfortably tolerate?

The immediate conflict concerns the dishes, the friendship, the workload, or the unappreciative spouse. The conflict's conflict concerns the person's difficulty tolerating what happens within themselves when they express a desire that differs from someone else's. They do not simply fear disagreement. They fear what disagreement might reveal about who they are. Perhaps they have spent much of their life recognizing themselves as the agreeable one, the generous one, the understanding one, or the person who never causes trouble. To speak up is not merely to risk an unpleasant conversation. It threatens a familiar understanding of themselves that has become important to preserve. They may discover that saying what they want means allowing someone else to find them selfish, unreasonable, demanding, or simply less pleasant than they had hoped to appear.

These ways of understanding ourselves often have long histories. Someone who grew up believing that disagreement was disrespectful may continue approaching ordinary differences as though they threaten the relationship. Another person may have become the responsible one in a family where everyone else seemed overwhelmed. Someone else may have discovered that being pleasant was the surest way to avoid an unpredictable parent's anger. We do not necessarily remember choosing these arrangements, and they may have served important purposes at the time. But over the years they can become so familiar that we begin mistaking them for who we are. The person who learned to be agreeable may not simply believe that disagreement is unpleasant. They may believe that being someone who disagrees makes them unpleasant.

This becomes particularly difficult when their own feelings contradict the person they believe themselves to be. They experience irritation, envy, disappointment, or anger while insisting that they are not the sort of person who feels such things. What if I am selfish? What if I am difficult? What if I am not the kind and understanding person I have always believed myself to be? The anger is not necessarily the most troubling part of the experience. The difficulty lies in what having that anger seems to say about the person who feels it. They may be less frightened by the disagreement itself than by the possibility of being recognized differently by someone whose opinion matters to them.

The people whose judgments matter are not always present. A person may continue imagining how a parent would respond to their choices long after the parent has died. Someone may feel guilty about disappointing a spouse who has expressed no disappointment. Another may experience an ordinary disagreement as though an entire audience were watching and deciding whether they are a good person. We carry relationships into other relationships, sometimes without recognizing how much of the present conversation has become occupied by someone who is not there. The person who fears appearing selfish may not know whose judgment they are anticipating, although they may have spent much of their life organizing themselves around it.

These conflicts do not remain neatly concealed. Someone who cannot express disappointment may begin withdrawing affection. A person who prides themselves on being understanding may become sarcastic in ways they scarcely recognize. Another may offer reassurance while making a small remark that leaves everyone in the room uncomfortable. They might quickly apologize, insist that they did not mean it, or attempt to explain the remark away. Yet something has been said. In therapy, these moments may become especially interesting because the person's words begin complicating the familiar story they tell about themselves. They may discover that they have something to say when they are accustomed to being the listener, or that their desire to be understood involves asking someone else to tolerate feelings they have rarely allowed themselves to express.

Lori Gottlieb writes about the surprising difficulty of recognizing our own stories in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. Through her experiences as both therapist and patient, she shows how people arrive in therapy with explanations that make considerable sense to them, yet gradually discover that there is more to the story than they initially understood. We may become attached to being the injured party, the responsible one, the person who has tried everything, or the person who simply wants everyone to get along. These accounts may contain considerable truth, but they can also make it difficult to notice how we continue participating in situations that leave us unhappy. The challenge is not to prove that our story is false. It is to become curious about what the story may have left out. Sometimes we are so concerned with explaining what another person has done that we scarcely notice what we have been doing in response.

Guilt often becomes especially important here. A person finally tells a friend that they feel neglected, only to spend the rest of the evening wondering whether they have been unfair. Someone asks their spouse for more help and immediately begins worrying that they sounded demanding. An employee declines another assignment and spends the weekend imagining how disappointed their supervisor must be. They may return the following day to apologize for something that scarcely required an apology. The conflict has moved from the original disagreement to the person's relationship with their own anger. They cannot quite bear having spoken from a position that does not agree with their familiar understanding of themselves as accommodating, patient, and kind. The apology may become an attempt to feel like themselves again rather than repair an injury that actually occurred.

This is one reason that learning communication skills, although often useful, does not necessarily resolve the underlying problem. A person may become remarkably proficient at making requests, setting boundaries, and using the appropriate language to describe their feelings. They may know exactly how to begin a difficult conversation and still feel unbearable guilt after having it. The difficulty may not be that they lack the words. It may be that speaking those words places them in a position they cannot comfortably occupy. Even a carefully phrased boundary can feel aggressive to someone whose identity depends upon being endlessly available. Their anxiety does not necessarily mean that the boundary was inappropriate. It may reveal how difficult it is to want something that another person may not want for them.

What does this have to do with someone grieving a death or struggling with an eating disorder? At first glance, these difficulties appear quite different from an argument between spouses or a disagreement at work. A griever may be suffering the death of someone they loved, while a person with an eating disorder may be struggling with food, bodily experience, control, and an increasingly difficult relationship with themselves. Neither experience should be reduced to an inability to express anger. Eating disorders, in particular, involve different psychological and medical conditions that require careful assessment and treatment. Yet we can ask whether a familiar pattern of sacrifice, guilt, and the need to be seen in a particular way might also participate in these experiences. If someone has spent much of their life organizing themselves around the needs of others, why would we imagine that this difficulty simply disappears when they begin grieving or when their relationship with food becomes troubled?

A griever may describe years of caring for someone they loved while finding it almost impossible to acknowledge how resentful they sometimes felt. They may continue sacrificing their own needs long after the person has died, as though enjoying their life would constitute a betrayal. Someone struggling with eating may discover that refusal, deprivation, compliance, or control has acquired meanings that extend beyond food itself. We would not know what those meanings were before listening to the person. But we might become interested in how they manage anger, what sacrifices they believe are necessary to remain lovable, and how they experience the expectations of others. The important question is not whether grief and eating disorders share an underlying cause. It is whether the particular person who suffers has developed a familiar way of negotiating desire, disappointment, and relationships that becomes involved in the suffering they bring into treatment. Different difficulties may become knotted around a similar struggle without being reduced to the same problem.

This is one of the reasons therapy often involves more than identifying what is wrong and deciding how to fix it. We become interested in how the person's difficulties are connected, how they respond to feelings they would rather not have, and what they fear might happen if they allowed themselves to be known differently. These questions are not answered through a clever observation or a single interpretation. They require time, curiosity, and a willingness to discover something that may not have been apparent when treatment began. We might notice how someone reacts when they feel misunderstood, how quickly they apologize after disagreeing, or how easily they assume responsibility for another person's disappointment. What initially appeared to be several unrelated problems may begin revealing a familiar pattern, although understanding that pattern does not automatically make it easy to change.

There is another complication worth considering. Someone who has spent much of their life keeping the peace may bring that same arrangement into psychotherapy. They become the ideal patient, thoughtful, agreeable, and apparently grateful for everything the therapist says. They may be reluctant to disagree with an observation or admit that something in the treatment has disappointed them. The therapist might enjoy this arrangement, especially if both people prefer keeping things pleasant. But therapy may gradually become another relationship in which the person sacrifices their own position to remain agreeable. Their conflict's conflict has entered the room, and both people may be participating in avoiding it. The work may begin to change when the person can disagree with the therapist without imagining that the relationship must be repaired immediately. What first appears to be a difficult moment in treatment may become an opportunity to encounter the very struggle that has organized so many relationships outside the room.

None of this means that therapy should encourage people to become more confrontational for its own sake. There is nothing particularly helpful about expressing every angry feeling, nor does being honest grant permission to behave cruelly. Some people already express their anger readily while remaining unaware of its effects on others. Others live in relationships where disagreement carries genuine risks, and their caution deserves to be understood rather than challenged as a failure of courage. The question is not simply whether someone expresses anger, but what that anger means to them, what they imagine it might cost, and why they have come to manage it in a particular way. Being able to recognize irritation may make it less necessary to express it indirectly through resentment, withdrawal, or accumulated sacrifice.

Kindness may turn out to be much more demanding than niceness. It requires that we recognize the other person as someone whose wishes may differ from our own, whose disappointments we cannot always prevent, and whose response to our desires we cannot entirely control. It also requires that we allow ourselves to be known as people who are sometimes irritated, unreasonable, envious, impatient, or difficult to love. None of these experiences determines the whole of who we are. Yet when being a good person requires that we never encounter them, the effort to remain good can become remarkably destructive. We may begin resenting the very people we are trying so hard not to disappoint. What looks like generosity can become a demand for recognition, what looks like patience can conceal resentment, and what looks like peace can depend upon a disagreement that has never been allowed to occur.

The conflict's conflict, then, is not always the disagreement that has brought someone into therapy. It may be the person's difficulty tolerating the fact that disagreement belongs to their experience of being in a relationship at all. The work is not simply to become better at resolving conflicts, but to become interested in why having one seems to threaten so much. Someone who has spent years being agreeable may discover that they are allowed to disappoint another person without becoming cruel, to feel angry without becoming dangerous, and to want something different without withdrawing their affection. The suffering may begin to loosen when these connections become available for thought rather than continually appearing as separate problems requiring separate solutions. A disagreement need not become a war, an irritation need not become a betrayal, and a relationship need not be maintained through an impossible debt of unspoken sacrifices. Sometimes the beginning of a more honest relationship is the moment someone risks being a little less nice and discovers that they can still be kind.