Whether in Congress or at the Thanksgiving table, dialogue can reduce conflict
‘Tis the season for tense dinner conversations. It’s bound to happen with armchair political pundit Aunt Mae, vegan Uncle Bill and conspiracy theorist Cousin Bernice.
Even if you’ve set “healthy boundaries,” effectively “de-holidayed” your calendar or are trying on intermittent family estrangement for size you’ll run into conflict sooner or later.
A few weeks ago, our two-party congressional system looked a lot like a disgruntled married couple sitting on the therapist’s couch, at their wits’ end with arms folded and headed toward divorce.
Former Sen. Joe Manchin attributed the government shutdown to personal relationship problems within the Congress in a recent town hall meeting. Managing relational conflict is a fact of life in any long-term relationship, at work and at home.
Longitudinal marriage research has found that 69% of problems in a relationship are unsolvable.
This is a pretty grim statistic but if you’re in a long-term relationship or married, it’s likely that you’ve felt every bit of this. These “perpetual problems” or “irreconcilable differences” can be in the form of personality traits, i.e., homebody vs. social butterfly or preferences like saver vs. spender, big government v.s small government or deeply personal values such as atheist vs. religious.
The point is that all couples, healthy or not, have irreconcilable differences. Our other long-term relationships bear the same dynamic.
The hinge point is how they manage the conflict.
Gridlock will get you to same unhappy place every time
John Gottman is a relationship researcher who based therapeutic techniques on longitudinal studies of thousands of couples in his “Love Lab” where he and his team have studied interactions of married and divorced couples for over 40 years. They have been able to predict, with 90% accuracy, which couples will get divorced or stay together just by analyzing their communication patterns.
They have discovered there are two ways to handle the “unsolvable problems” of long term relationships: “gridlock” or “in dialogue.”
Gridlock is a locking of horns. How do you know if you’re in gridlock? Having the same argument on repeat with no resolution, an absence of attempt to break the ice around the issue, both are getting more and more entrenched in their position on the matter, and my personal favorite for the sake of the congressional married couple analogy" “Compromise seems impossible because it would mean selling out - giving up something more important and core to your beliefs, values or sense of self.”
So, what do you do if you find yourself in gridlock and need to move into the healthier dialogue path?
Find ways to make space for each other to hold opinions and preferences without hurling criticism, blame or contempt. Contempt is defined as believing your preference or opinion is morally superior to the other. When contempt enters the communication dynamic it foretells divorce 79% of the time. It is the most detrimental of all the habits and biggest harbinger of divorce.
Make ways to connect outside of the issue at hand and seek ways to work around the problem, not solve it (remember these problems are unsolvable in nature). The bedrock of the relationship is always friendship. Stay physically present and don’t check out emotionally. The ultimate goal is to create dialogue around the issue without hurting one another. Think debate club vs. fight club. Research shows that acknowledging and respecting each other’s deepest most personal hopes and dreams is key to saving a long-term relationship.
After doing this, couples should pursue a temporary compromise, i.e., a “just for now” fix. Though extremely difficult this can help each party define small areas of non-negotiation and identify points of flexibility, all the while avoiding contemptuous thinking, such as, “my opinion is brilliant and yours is unenlightened.”
Find small ways to connect and don’t seek to be the winner
All this is easier said than done, right? Healthy conflict management processes are incredibly difficult, just take a look at the divorce rate and family estrangement statistics.
It could be an opportune time to think of these gridlock strategies and techniques when you’re sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table and topics like immigration, the war in Gaza, inflation or health care affordability come up.
There are clear opinions held, some members of the family can be very loud and dominate the conversation meanwhile some can respond to the irreconcilable differences by stonewalling (i.e., shutting down emotionally and checking out of the conversation). Keep in mind, you’re not going to convince anyone of changing their position on perpetual issues, i.e., Grandma is probably not going to hit the campaign trail for Bernie Sanders after dinner is over.
Proving your moral high ground is futile so leave your contemptuous zeal at home with the canned cranberry sauce.
If you can be in dialogue about the issues without experiencing physiological flooding, look for some small points you might be able to have shared flexibility, try to “break the ice” with humor around the topic and work to find some soft compromise areas for both. If you can’t, then find a place to lower your heart rate, collect yourself and regain your composure before reentering conversation.
Keep in mind, the glue that holds any relationship together despite irreconcilable differences is friendship through trust and commitment. This is the real work. If you have to agree about this particular issue to continue the relationship, then it might be time to part ways but know that every long-term relationship holds unsolvable problems.
With any gridlock issue there is no winner. It’s a zero-sum game. Who is entirely right or wrong? Justified or unjustified? Neither. They both have equally legitimate perspectives in nuance and complexity. The ultimate choice is whether you want to continue in the relationship and make an effort to work it out. The good news is that if you want to put in elbow grease, there’s a path forward.
We all know our arguments at home aren’t merely about taking out the trash, and the congressional shutdown wasn’t merely about budget resolutions. Having zero perpetual problems in long term relationships is fantasy at best and delusional at worst. These false expectations can, and will, destroy every relationship we have.
If you cut off relationships that hold irreconcilable differences, you’re going to eventually eliminate all healthy long-term relationships. You’ll be left only with AI companion sycophancy and look how those end up.
Our long-term relationships at work and also at home will always hold unsolvable problems and key compromises. The throughline of both is mutual respect. The holidays are a prime time to practice managing some of those irreconcilable differences with people we care about. Sometimes the only path forward isn’t one acquiescing to the other, but rather a third way, both sides conceding some lost ground but gaining the union.
Beth Collums is a Georgia-based writer, exploring the intersection of mental health, relationships and education. She has a degree in clinical psychology and her professional background as a child and family therapist gives her a unique insight into helping parents and kids thrive. She’s lived in Atlanta since 2008 with her husband and four kids. Find her at beth-collums.com.
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