Interpersonal Conflict Quotes

conflicts in relationships—having an annoying office mate or room-mate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse—is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict;45 it damages every day, even days when you don’t see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.

The roots of interpersonal conflict are often an excessive concern for oneself, and an inability to pay attention to the needs of others. It is sad to see how often people ruin a relationship because they refuse to recognize that they could serve their own interests best by helping others achieve theirs.

The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly. The same convictions can make us reluctant to take advice from others who cannot know our private thoughts, feelings, interpretations of events, or motives, but all too willing to give advice to others based on our views of their past behavior, without adequate attention to their thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and motives. Indeed, the biases documented here may create a barrier to the type of exchanges of information, and especially to the type of careful and respectful listening, that can go a long way to attenuating the feelings of frustration and resentment that accompany interpersonal and intergroup conflict.

It has meant getting in touch with my body and feelings in real time, and learning to express them. I am learning to engage in generative conflict, to say no, to feel my limits, taking time to feel my heartache when it comes—from living in America, from interpersonal trauma or grief, from movement losses.

Because self-critics often come from unsupportive family backgrounds, they tend not to trust others and assume that those they care about will eventually try to hurt them. This creates a steady state of fear that causes problems in interpersonal interactions. For instance, research shows that highly self-critical people tend to be dissatisfied in their romantic relationships because they assume their partners are judging them as harshly as they judge themselves. The misperception of even fairly neutral statements as disparaging often leads to oversensitive reactions and unnecessary conflicts. This means that self-critics often undermine the closeness and supportiveness in relationships that they so desperately seek.

The greatest thing I learned while taking classes at Second City was the very first thing they taught: 'Yes, and...'. In improv, you keep scenes alive but accepting whatever you are given and then adding to it or amplifying it. There is no space on stage for 'No,' 'I'm sorry, you're mistaken,' or 'Yes, but...'. Those transitions kill energy, set up interpersonal conflict, engage the ego in a defensive posture, and stymie the flow of conversation onstage.

Conflict is not necessarily bad. If you can avoid taking conflict personally, it is actually a way to get better decisions and better results.

We must realistically accept that revolution is a social war, not because we like war, but because we recognize that the status quo is a low-intensity war and challenging the state results in an intensification of that warfare. We must also accept that revolution necessitates interpersonal conflict because certain classes of people are employed to defend the centralizing institutions we must destroy. People who continue to dehumanize themselves as agents of law and order must be defeated by whatever means necessary until they can no longer prevent people’s autonomous realization of their needs.

Remember, your body has no idea what “filing your taxes” or “resolving an interpersonal conflict through rational problem-solving” means. It knows, though, what jumping up and down means. Speak its language—and its language is body language.

If you have to be told how you should feel then those feelings are not strong enough to make you feel alive; they become rules that don’t fit your life script. Not every person will place the same importance as you do on one of the six human needs: certainty, variety, significance, connection/love, growth or contributions. When you know what is most important for yourself and learn to recognize what need is the most important to others, then you can begin to unlock the real reason behind conflict.

You cannot teach antifragility directly, but you can give your children the gift of experience—the thousands of experiences they need to become resilient, autonomous adults. The gift begins with the recognition that kids need some unstructured, unsupervised time in order to learn how to judge risks for themselves and practice dealing with things like frustration, boredom, and interpersonal conflict. The most important thing they can do with that time is to play, especially in free play, outdoors, with other kids.

Low trust causes friction, whether it is caused by unethical behavior or by ethical but incompetent behavior (because even good intentions can never take the place of bad judgment). Low trust is the greatest cost in life and in organizations, including families. Low trust creates hidden agendas, politics, interpersonal conflict, interdepartmental rivalries, win-lose thinking, defensive and protective communication—all of which reduce the speed of trust. Low trust slows everything—every decision, every communication, and every relationship.

If there is no interpersonal conflict in your life, no elements of your character that you are being confronted about, you are networking, you are not in close community.

Emotional expression governs, and changes, interaction. Anger, for example, produces distance, whereas vulnerability disarms. Thus, interpersonal conflict can be resolved by changing what people express

Our sense of safety and stability in the world and our interpersonal relationships become undermined by childhood abuse because we carry these early thwarted—that is, deeply conflicted—survival patterns into adulthood.

The exact meaning of the First Noble Truth is this: Life (in the condition it has got itself into) is dislocated. Something has gone wrong. It is out of joint. As its pivot is not true, friction (interpersonal conflict) is excessive, movement (creativity) is blocked, and it hurts.

While disagreements and interpersonal conflicts are common in even the healthiest of family systems, family scapegoating goes far beyond this, making recovering from its impact and effects difficult. For example, more than half of those who responded to an FSA survey I conducted have been described as “mentally ill”; “emotionally sick,” or “a liar” by a parent or other relative when there was absolutely no truth to this whatsoever. Naturally, being spoken about in this way can be confusing, angering, and even traumatizing to the target of such hostile and defamatory statements.

The author sees resistance as the holding on to an imaginary connection to others, due to the dread of re-experiencing one’s sense of aloneness and helplessness. Ultimately, resistance functions in order to protect the individual from experiencing anxiety states that arise from the threats to the neurotic resolution of the basic conflict—the conflict between dependency on inner fantasy for gratification versus a desire for real gratification in the interpersonal environment.

If two wishes are mutually exclusive, then one must be relinquished. If, for example, a meaningful, loving relationship is a wish, then a host of conflicting interpersonal wishes-such as conquest, power, seduction, or subjugation-must be denied.

William James, the father of research psychology in the United States, said “The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.” Knowing what to overlook is one way that older adults are typically wiser than young adults. With age comes what is known as a positivity effect. We become more interested in positive information, and our brains react less strongly to what negative information we do encounter. We disengage with interpersonal conflict, choosing to let it be, especially when those in our network are involved.

The assumption that all our struggles boil down to misunderstanding negates that parties in conflict do not come with equal access to power over their lives. The attempt to resolve conflict with interpersonal strategies like empathy often disregards how coercion and force shape the lives of enemies.

When the attachment figure is also a threat to the child, two systems with conflicting goals are activated simultaneously or sequentially: the attachment system, whose goal is to seek proximity, and the defense systems, whose goal is to protect. In these contexts, the social engagement system is profoundly compromised and its development interrupted by threatening conditions. This intolerable conflict between the need for attachment and the need for defense with the same caregiver results in the disorganized–disoriented attachment pattern (Main & Solomon, 1986). A contradictory set of behaviors ensues to support the different goals of the animal defense systems and of the attachment system (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 1999; Main & Morgan, 1996; Steele, van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2001; van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2006). When the attachment system is stimulated by hunger, discomfort, or threat, the child instinctively seeks proximity to attachment figures. But during proximity with a person who is threatening, the defensive subsystems of flight, fight, freeze, or feigned death/shut down behaviors are mobilized. The cry for help is truncated because the person whom the child would turn to is the threat. Children who suffer attachment trauma fall into the dissociative–disorganized category and are generally unable to effectively auto- or interactively regulate, having experienced extremes of low arousal (as in neglect) and high arousal (as in abuse) that tend to endure over time (Schore, 2009b). In the context of chronic danger, patterns of high sympathetic dominance are apt to become established, along with elevated heart rate, higher cortisol levels, and easily activated alarm responses. Children must be hypervigilantly prepared and on guard to avoid danger yet primed to quickly activate a dorsal vagal feigned death state in the face of inescapable threat. In the context of neglect, instead of increased sympathetic nervous system tone, increased dorsal vagal tone, decreased heart rate, and shutdown (Schore, 2001a) may become chronic, reflecting both the lack of stimulation in the environment and the need to be unobtrusive.

I remember a seminar I once attended that was led by a brilliant and flamboyant Hungarian analyst named Robert Bak. The issue under debate was the nature of transference, and I raised my hand and asked rhetorically, "What would you call an interpersonal relationship where infantile wishes, and defenses against those wishes, get expressed in such a way that the persons within that relationship don't see each other for what they objectively are but, rather, view each other in terms of their infantile needs and their infantile conflicts. What would you call that?" And Bak looked over at me ironically and said, 'I'd call that life.

The new moral culture of victimhood fosters ‘moral dependence’ and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one's own. At the same time that it weakens individuals, it creates a society of constant and intense moral conflict as people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims."[56

So ecological duress can increase or decrease aggression. This raises the key issue of what global warming will do to our best and worst behaviors. There will definitely be some upsides. Some regions will have longer growing seasons, increasing the food supply and reducing tensions. Some people will eschew conflict, being preoccupied with saving their homes from the encroaching ocean or growing pineapples in the Arctic. But amid squabbling about the details in predictive models, the consensus is that global warming won’t do good things to global conflict. For starters, warmer temperatures rile people up—in cities during the summers, for every three degree increase in temperature, there was a 4 percent increase in interpersonal violence and 14 percent in group violence. But global warming’s bad news is more global—desertification, loss of arable land due to rising seas, more droughts. One influential meta-analysis projected 16 percent and 50 percent increases in interpersonal and group violence, respectively, in some regions by 2050.

A survey21 of beliefs about the causes of illness across cultures shows that the three most common explanations are biomedical (referring to physical causes of disease), interpersonal (illness is caused by witchcraft, related to envy and conflict), and moral (illness is caused by one’s own past actions, particularly violations of food and sexual taboos).

It is clear that Dr. Brown understands that 'command and control leadership' creates even more conflict and that only through open and trustful and honest delegation and empowering, tension is avoidable and team spirit and cohesiveness is achieved..." Alberto DeFeo, Ph.D. (Law) Chief Administrative Officer of Lake Country and Adjunct Professor of University of Northern British Columbia

From your child’s perspective, discipline isn’t the way you teach her appropriate behavior. Rather, your child correctly sees discipline as the way you handle conflict when family members get upset or have conflicting desires. In other words, the way you discipline your child becomes her model for working out interpersonal problems. So punishment, which is the use of force, teaches her to use force against her siblings whenever there’s a problem to be solved.

This is a small book about a very important subject. A lot has been written about trust: about what it is and what it can do for people, families, companies, communities and countries. As an executive coach and consultant I often find myself engaged by companies where good work is being sabotaged by interpersonal conflict, political infighting, paralysis, stagnation, apathy, or cynicism. I almost always trace these problems to a breakdown in trust. It not only kills good work, it also inevitably creates some degree of misery, annoyance, fear, anger, frustration, resentment, and resignation. By contrast, in successful companies where people are innovative, engage in productive conflict and debate about ideas, and have fun working together, I find strong trusting relationships. As a result, I’ve come to believe having the trust of those you work with is too important not to be intentional about building and maintaining it.

The qualities of a successful military strategist will change from person to person, but there are a central few that all of them need. These include, above all else, strategic judgment, but also stamina, interpersonal skills and a feel for people; an ability to energize, inspire and motivate; the ability to communicate effectively orally and in writing; a degree of personal presence and charisma; a sincere love of servicemen and women; an ability to be tough when needed, but also compassionate when that is appropriate; fortitude in the face of adversity and the capacity to stay calm in the midst of chaos; an ability to deal with setbacks, missteps and mistakes; a sense of what leadership style is required to bring out the best in those immediately below, and also for the organization collectively. A great strategic leader also needs to be able to foresee how a conflict will end.

This book deals with four ultimate concerns: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. The individual's confrontation with each of these facts of life constitutes the content of the existential dynamic conflict. Death. The most obvious, the most easily apprehended ultimate concern is death. We exist now, but one day we shall cease to be. Death will come, and there is no escape from it. It is a terrible truth, and we respond to it with mortal terror. "Everything," in Spinoza's words, "endeavors to persist in its own being";3 and a core existential conflict is the tension between the awareness of the inevitability of death and the wish to continue to be. Freedom. Another ultimate concern, a far less accessible one, is freedom. Ordinarily we think of freedom as an unequivocally positive concept. Throughout recorded history has not the human being yearned and striven for freedom? Yet freedom viewed from the perspective of ultimate ground is riveted to dread. In its existential sense "freedom" refers to the absence of external structure. Contrary to everyday experience, the human being does not enter (and leave) a well-structured universe that has an inherent design. Rather, the individual is entirely responsible for-that is, is the author of-his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions. "Freedom" in this sense, has a terrifying implication: it means that beneath us there is no ground-nothing, a void, an abyss. A key existential dynamic, then, is the clash between' our confrontation with groundlessness and our wish for ground and structure. Existential Isolation. A third ultimate concern is isolation-not interpersonal isolation with its attendant loneliness, or intrapersonal isolation (isolation from parts of oneself), but a fundamental isolation-an isolation both from creatures and from world-which cuts beneath other isolation. No matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, unbridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone. The existential conflict is thus the tension between our awareness of our absolute isolation and our wish for contact, for protection, our wish to be part of a larger whole. Meaninglessness. A fourth ultimate concern or given of existence is meaninglessness. If we must die, if we constitute our own world, if each is ultimately alone in an indifferent universe, then what meaning does life have? Why do we live? How shall we live? If there is no preordained design for us, then each of us must construct' our own meanings in life. Yet can a meaning of one's own creation be sturdy enough to bear one's life? This existential dynamic conflict stems from the dilemma of a meaning-seeking creature who is thrown into a universe that has no meaning.

The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly. The same convictions can make us reluctant to take advice from others who cannot know our private thoughts, feelings, interpretations of events, or motives, but all too willing to give advice to others based on our views of their past behavior, without adequate attention to their thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and motives. Indeed, the biases documented here may create a barrier to the type of exchanges of information, and especially to the type of careful and respectful listening, that can go a long way to attenuating the feelings of frustration and resentment that accompany interpersonal and intergroup conflict. Those are wise words.

while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social structures, the nature of their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a decade or two. Consider a resident o Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of Wilhelm II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same. This was the key to Sapiens' success. In a one-on-one brawl, a Neanderthal would probably have beaten a Sapiens. But in a conflict of hundreds, Neanderthals wouldn't stand a chance. Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell - and revise - stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behaviour to rapidly changing challenging. (p. 38)

Adolescent Warning Signs Lack of peer relationships outside the family Anxiety in social situations Difficulty with social skills such as keeping a conversation going Depression, withdrawal Confusion Sexual identity problems Interpersonal problems—trouble interacting with people Sleep problems, including excessive sleeping Stress-related physical symptoms Feelings of persecution Family conflicts Antisocial attitudes Overdependence on TV, computer, or video games Using subjective symptoms as a way of avoiding responsibilities Procrastination Fear of groups Lack of planning or organization Difficulty with self-expression Feelings of loneliness Physical complaints Difficulty making and keeping friends; stormy relationships with peers Fear of new situations Rationalization about lack of social life Learning disabilities

of frustration and resentment that accompany interpersonal and intergroup conflict.

a consensus has emerged that the vast majority of ritual ceremonies are concerned primarily with healing in a general sense. They exert influence on physical well-being, heighten identity, enhance interpersonal cohesion, reintegrate community into the environment, and mitigate perceived conflicts with supernatural powers. In spite of the cultural diversity of therapeutic institutions and practices, the fundamental healing principles show a good deal of cross-cultural uniformity.

theory led to Horney’s hypothesis of 10 neurotic needs, which she saw as so overwhelming and all-encompassing as to define a person. She classified the neurotic needs into three categories: those that compel us to comply (the need for affection, the need for a partner, and the need for simplifying life), those that lead us to withdraw (the need for independence and the need for perfection), and those that make us aggressive and turn us against other people (the need for power, the need to exploit, the need for prestige, and the need for personal achievement). These needs become neurotic only when they exist at dysfunctional levels or come into play too indiscriminately and too extremely in daily life. Most of us, Horney believed, can navigate these needs in healthy ways and reduce our interpersonal conflicts. And the more secure, tolerant, loving, and respectful our family life has been, the greater our chances of doing so. On the other hand, for a person who has developed neurotic needs, dysfunctional behavior can beget still more dysfunctional behavior and lead to the creation of vicious circles (or cycles). Moreover, Horney felt that healthy people see themselves as they are, while a neurotic person’s identity is split into a despised self and an ideal self. It’s the gap between these two concepts of self that continues to perpetuate anxiety and neurosis. Horney

The truth is, in every interpersonal conflict in your life – business, romantic or platonic – communication is both the problem and the solution.

administration lead to interpersonal problems and spiritual bondage.

Stable husbanding of the land requires community-wide language and norms for resolving interpersonal conflict, facilitating barter and trade, determining shares of work and output and maintaining organizational hierarchies. Although such social functions are the requisites of community life everywhere, the ways of performing them evolve differently from place to place. Each society develops its practices and sets of myths, symbols and rational justifications, which usually are held to be superior to those of other societies. .... ... And just as material reasons for self-sufficiency can turn communities towards economic imperialism, so the ideational justifications for autonomy can turn them into presumptuous civilizers of other peoples.

An inclusive narrative structure provides the executive brain with the best template and strategy for the oversight and coordination of the functions of mind. A story well told, containing conflicts and resolutions, gestures and expressions, and thoughts flavored with emotion, connects people ad integrates neural networks

is magic in being in the present in your life. I’m always amazed at the power of clear observation simply about what’s going on, what’s true. Finding out the exact details of your personal finances, clarifying the historical data about the company you’re buying, or getting the facts about who really said what to whom in an interpersonal conflict can be constructive, if not downright healing.

[W]e wouldn't want to read a book about a perfect character who never struggles with character flaws, a difficult past, or interpersonal conflict. Writers can powerfully connect with readers when they venture to these thin places of pain and brokenness because readers can see themselves in the pain and want to journey from pain and struggle toward redemption or some kind of resolution.

Why does interpersonal conflict so often coincide with innovation?

Axiomatic to my view of therapy is that one cannot not interact: one cannot not influence. The major instrument of mystification is language; language being not merely speech, but the sum of all its semi-otic cues: non-verbal—that is, tonal, prosodic—and nuances of irony, sarcasm, and humour. The child learns, as Laing put it, to not know what it knows it knows; that is, the child is essentially talked out of her perceptions. But language, unfortunately, is less about communication of information than about deception and control—power. This “anxiety of influence”, as every therapist is aware, may keep the patient from accepting insights from the therapist who may well be right but experienced as intrusive (Bloom 1973). So, again from the interpersonal view, resolving neurotic conflict means getting a better grasp of what’s going on around you and to you; that is, mastering the semiotic world of experience.

Daniel Siegel, a neuroscientist who has extensively studied interpersonal bonds, emotion, and self-regulation, writes of attunement (Siegel 2007, 290): “[S]uch resonant states feel good as we feel ‘felt’ by another, no longer alone but in connection. This is the heart of empathic relationship, as we sense a clear image of our mind in the mind of another.

Hobbes and Spinoza, in contrast, found the grounds of much interpersonal conflict in the emotions, and even diagnosed specific emotions as inherently disruptive to social order, e.g., glory for Hobbes. But by the same token, there are many passions that Hobbes stated “incline us to peace,” and Spinoza allowed that insofar as people agree in affects, they agree in nature. Eighteenth-century philosophers tended to evaluate the social effects of the emotions in terms of whether they were self- or other-directed, with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson arguing against Mandeville that our most natural emotions were other-directed. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759), Edmund Burke distinguished between the passions directed at self-preservation and those belonging to society, but spends the lion's share of his time on the latter. The issue is somewhat more complicated in Hume, but he does seem to take the development of our emotions and their susceptibility to a standard of appropriateness to be indispensable to many of the “artifices” that make social life possible.

I wish there wasn't such a division between people who believe certain things and people who don't. It seems vastly hypocritical on both ends, these two groups of people both claiming to believe in good things and yet willing to do bad things to each other for disagreeing.

What distinguishes leaders in medicine goes far beyond that knowledge, into interpersonal skills like empathy, conflict resolution, and people development.

To brainstorm challenges or problems you have faced, consider if you’ve encountered any of the following issues at work: Ethical dilemmas. Conflicting incentives. Insufficient resources (time, money, expertise). Incomplete or inaccurate information. Low morale, interpersonal issues, or other emotional problems (with teammates or the team as a whole). Cultural or workstyle conflicts. Changing demands. Inability to accomplish a task or meet expectations.

Traumatized people are afraid of conflict. They fear losing control and ending up on the losing side once again. Conflict is central to theater—inner conflicts, interpersonal conflicts, family conflicts, social conflicts, and their consequences. Trauma is about trying to forget, hiding how scared, enraged, or helpless you are. Theater is about finding ways of telling the truth and conveying deep truths to your audience. This requires pushing through blockages to discover your own truth, exploring and examining your own internal experience so that it can emerge in your voice and body on stage.

If science were to make enlightenment massively available to humanity, we should expect to see numerous and stunning positive improvements in the human situation: dramatic reduction in conflict and violence from the interpersonal level to the international level, reduction in crime and substance addiction, vast improvement in the global baseline of physical and mental health, and probably even a general elevation of human intelligence.

Low trust is the greatest cost in life and in organizations, including families. Low trust creates hidden agendas, politics, interpersonal conflict, interdepartmental rivalries, win-lose thinking, defensive and protective communication.

For all its benefits, empathy disappears quickly during most conflicts, and fades away slowly in many long-term relationships. Unfortunately, inadequate empathy erodes trust and makes it harder to solve interpersonal problems.

Without intervention, these patterns (or scripts) form a prism that allows in signals of interpersonal threat while filtering out more benign information. As a result, the child feels, paradoxically, both confirmed in his or her view of the interpersonal world as dangerous and yet safe, because he or she can scan for and control the threat. As these patterns consolidate, they mitigate against the child’s capacity to trust others and to tolerate intimacy with others. The prism therefore becomes a prison as children’s opportunities for cognitive and emotional growth are limited to the confines of the script. The result, to varying degrees, is emotional constriction, avoidance of feelings and genuine interpersonal contact, difficulty experiencing empathy with others, and distortions in moral reasoning and conduct.

...to understand and explore interpersonal relationships, we must do so in the context of our relationship with God. We were made by Him and for Him. The root of all conflict is our departure from God, and the resolution of all conflict must build from peace with God.

The truth is, we'll never live entirely without fear and anxiety. We'll never be able to fix our economic, social, and political climates to entirely eliminate conflict and uncertainty, not to mention our everyday interpersonal challenges. And that's okay, because fear isn't bad; it's simply a warning flag - your mind saying "This doesn't look good! Something might go wrong!" It's what we do with that signal that matters.

Climate tugs at the individual threads of conflict too; personal irritability, interpersonal conflict, domestive violence. Heat frays everything. It increases violent crime rates, swearing on social media, and the liklihood that a major league pitcher, coming to the mound after his team mate has been hit by a pitch will hit an opposing batter in retaliation. The hotter it gets, the longer drivers will honk their horns in frustration. And even in simulations police officers are more likely to fire on intruders when the exercises are conducted in hotter weather. By 2099, one speculative paper tabulated, climate change in the United States would bring about an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 rapes, 3.5 million assaults, and 3.76 million robberies, burglaries and acts of larceny.

The thought of creating an artificial creature for the sole purpose of carrying out a murder made Riffan shrivel inside. He was an anthropologist, well acquainted with humanity’s history of violence, whether one-on-one or between tribes and nations, or against the Earth itself. But those had been ancient conflicts, an aspect of history seldom repeated on the frontier, where time and distance and the need for cooperation had filtered the genome and shaped the culture so that interpersonal violence was rarely encountered.

People with dissociative disorders encounter a number of problems that interfere with being present. When you are under stress or faced with a painful conflict or intense emotion, you may have a variety of ways to retreat from the present in order to avoid it.

An eighteen-year-old must be able to handle interpersonal problems. The crutch: We step in to solve misunderstandings and soothe hurt feelings for them; thus, kids don’t know how to cope with and resolve conflicts without our intervention.

You get healthy by learning healthy habits. You get wealthy by learning valuable skills. You build a great interpersonal life by learning people skills. Most misery comes from not learning these things.

According to Finnish psychologist Kaj Björkqvist, there is no logical reason to assume “that females should be less hostile and less prone to get into conflicts than males.” Depending on age, economic class, stress, and tribal custom, girls and women will physically and verbally assault each other. In fact, according to Björkqvist, “with respect to interpersonal aggression, same-sex encounters are more frequent than between-sex encounters.” We may remember that anthropologist Victoria Burbank found female “acts of physical aggression, [which ranged] from slaps to murder, in sixty-one percent of the societies.

Pronin had them fill in the blank spaces: Emily Pronin et al., “You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 4 (2001): 639–56, APA PsychNET. I quoted part of Pronin’s conclusion. But the whole paragraph is worth considering: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly. The same convictions can make us reluctant to take advice from others who cannot know our private thoughts, feelings, interpretations of events, or motives, but all too willing to give advice to others based on our views of their past behavior, without adequate attention to their thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and motives. Indeed, the biases documented here may create a barrier to the type of exchanges of information, and especially to the type of careful and respectful listening, that can go a long way to attenuating the feelings of frustration and resentment that accompany interpersonal and intergroup conflict.

By the early 1980s, the view that most any conflict—domestic or international, intergroup or interpersonal—could be reframed and negotiated to a satisfying conclusion if only the right technical skills were brought to bear on it had become part of the popular imagination. Books championing such technical approaches regularly appeared on bestseller lists.

The bottom line is that when members of iGen arrived on campus, beginning in the fall of 2013, they had accumulated less unsupervised time and fewer offline life experiences than had any previous generation. As Twenge puts it, “18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.”9 Most of these trends are showing up across social classes, races, and ethnicities.10 Members of iGen, therefore, may not (on average) be as ready for college as were eighteen-year-olds of previous generations. This might explain why college students are suddenly asking for more protection and adult intervention in their affairs and interpersonal conflicts. The second major generational change is a rapid rise in rates of anxiety and depression.11 We created three graphs below using the same data that Twenge reports in iGen.

DDO leaders understand that we make the greatest progress on the toughest business issues if we can overcome ways of thinking and acting that serve only to protect us from conflict and embarrassment. Leaders create the conditions, conversational routines, and leadership support for their members to gain immediate access to the core business issues, and to work through the understandable pain that can arise from breaking silences, confronting one’s weaknesses directly, or openly experiencing interpersonal disagreement.

Self-Awareness Assessing our feelings, interests, values, and strengths; maintaining self-confidence. Self-Management Regulating emotions to handle stress, control impulses, and persevere in overcoming obstacles Social Awareness Understanding different perspectives and empathizing with others; recognizing and appreciating similarities and differences; using family, school, and community resources effectively Relationship Skills Maintaining healthy relationships based on cooperation; resisting inappropriate social pressure; preventing, managing, and resolving interpersonal conflicts; seeking help when needed Responsible Decision Making Using a variety of considerations, including ethical, academic, and community-related standards to make choices and decisions

Task conflict has a positive relationship with creativity, whereas interpersonal conflict reduces creativity because it shuts down the neocortex where higher order thinking occurs.

Page 126: [The greater capacity of blacks to express themselves forcefully and to receive and manipulate the forceful assertions of others] applies not only to classroom debate but to argument generally. One black woman remarked that she was always surprised at the difficulty her white college roommate had in contending with her when they had a difference of opinion. This observation has often been made by blacks, who consider whites as a result interpersonally weak as well as seeming to be “forever demanding an apology over nothing.” The basis for the last remark has already been established: whites consider an assault on the sensibilities of others a social offense.

When we consider our rich inner communities, we will find it is quite possible that more than one pattern of attachment can arise at the same time, sometimes in support of the others and sometimes in conflict.

What might happen when this ancient-modern integration becomes a reality? On the beneficial side we can anticipate improved health care through a vastly better understanding of the mind-body relationship. We may see development of technologies that treat aspects of the mind-body system that are well understood in the wisdom traditions but are ignored by Western medicine (for the most part). This includes phenomena such as “subtle energies.” We may see a substantial reduction in interpersonal conflict through a broader recognition of the interconnectedness of all life. As the boundaries between subjective and objective realities are better understood, the communications and energy industries may be radically altered. On the other hand, we are likely to find that some aspects of the wisdom traditions are seriously distorted and in some cases are dangerously wrong. We may find growing societal resistance at the prospect of being “absorbed” into an increasingly powerful collective mind. And we may pass through a time when horrifically powerful weapons are created that reshape space-time and possibly even alter history. As science and society begin to appreciate that some of the siddhis are real, and that other aspects of yogic lore also provide legitimate road maps of reality, we can anticipate that some scientists and scholars, especially those who have bet their careers on past theories, will become increasingly marginalized and resentful. But the teeth grinding will eventually settle down as younger investigators, who were not so entrenched in passé prejudices, reach their prime.

a fascination with violence, a sense of grievance, open hostility, conflicts in interpersonal interactions—are also seen in a sea of other Americans