In The Art of Fighting, Priya Parker explains that we can’t form and grow effective relationships without a fight. She rejects the idea that conflict is abnormal or that good groups don’t fight. All groups change and evolve; indeed, it’s because people disagree that good groups flourish.
Chapter One: Why Is This Happening?
When people in conflict first call me, they tend to say some version of: “Make this go away.”
I get it. Conflict is not fun. They are concerned, worried. A group of people they care about, or rely on, or live among, is in crisis. Make this go away.
What I have learned from years of fielding these calls is that most people, including people very savvy in other areas of life, have an unhelpful mental model of what group conflict is. Perhaps they think of it as a court case, and they’re calling me, their lawyer. Make this go away. Or they think of their fight as a story about to break in the media, and they’re calling me, their crisis communications whiz. Make this go away. Perhaps they think their conflict is just troublemaking by some members or employees or parishioners, and they’re calling me, a heavy, a tough guy who is going to find the complainers and ask ominously if they’ve got a problem. Make this go away.
I try not to judge this impulse. I get it. But I also inform my callers: I don’t make things go away.
I have a different perspective. To me, “How can I make this go away?” is the wrong question to ask, because trying to stave off a fight is not always what best serves a group. Thinking of conflict as something to bury or put back in the bottle or disappear is common among group amateurs. The artful fighter knows better. Some tears in group life should indeed be quickly sewn up and forgotten about. But others are the beginning of a big, revealing, and necessary reckoning, of a struggle that will force a group to face fundamental, half-buried questions about who they are, what they are for, and how they operate. These conflicts are unlikely to go away and will keep coming up again and again if left unaddressed.
So when people ask me to make a fight go away, I tell them it’s time to stop being afraid and start becoming curious. Why is this happening? Why is this happening to us? Why is this happening now? Why am I feeling so bad?
Why does this feel so bad?
Rebekah called me when she realized her family Passover ritual was broken. Her extended family had been gathering for the seder for some thirty years. Her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor and the family matriarch, always insisted that the family stick together. They were, as Rebekah put it, “desperate to cling to each other” and Passover Seder was the “big central thing for the whole family.” The ritual is a more-than-two-thousand-year-old tradition of remembering and telling the story of the Jews leaving Egypt and finding their freedom. For Rebekah’s family, “there was a lot of symbolism about slavery and redemption that for the Holocaust survivors was a really important way to express their grief,” she explained. It was often the only moment when family stories of survival were brought up at all. When she was young, Rebekah cherished the ritual and the gathering. It shaped her and so much of her family deeply.
Year after year, the whole family would witness the youngest among them ask the famous four questions of the seder. It was where family members shared important news-like a cousin who one year came out at the table. (During one hymn, the family would always joke and rhyme and make up new passages. That year, during the refrain “El bneh, el bneh,” Rebekah’s cousin Alex blurted out, “I am gay!” and without missing a beat, another family member retorted, “El bneh, el bneh, and that’s OK!”) It was where all the cousins would introduce their partners to the rest of the clan. When a niece’s chair broke under her and her new fiancé didn’t instinctively rush to catch her, the family knew the relationship was over. It was where Rebekah herself announced a pregnancy, one that she later lost.
But Passover was also where she started feeling the suffocating pressure and judgment around having kids. It was where she got stuck in the role of cooking for weeks ahead of time and throughout the festivities. And then once she finally had kids, she started to notice how sick they would all become after the late nights and frenzied days of family time. She started to feel the consequences of taking off days of work to prepare for the holiday, and then more precious days off to stay home with sick kids after the fact. It was becoming unsustainable. Like at many family holiday tables, ideological differences were also becoming more apparent. An uncle would regularly hit “reply all” to the family welcome email thread and send “long political right-wing rants,” which he would then bring to the dinner table. Then COVID-19 hit, and the family couldn’t gather at all.
Until that moment on our Zoom call, Rebekah had been very matter-of-fact-almost clinical-in describing the situation. And then she got quiet. I saw that she was softly crying. When she heard the clacking of my typing stop, she looked up. “I’m so sorry,” she said. I said gently what I say on many calls: “Please don’t apologize.” And she just cried. “I don’t want to feel like this. I wish I didn’t care so much,” she said. She was articulating an unspoken assumption shared by so many people on these calls: If only she could just sidestep this part of the process. If she wasn’t bogged down by feeling so sad, she could act!
“Feelings aren’t just OK here,” I told her. “They’re crucial. They’re not an inconvenience. They’re information. They’re a natural resource. They’re energy.” As Rebekah was rationally plotting her exit from her family’s celebrations, she viscerally remembered how deeply she cared for these people.
Feelings, no matter how painful, are not bad. They are grist. You may not be able to solve what’s in front of you if you can’t be bothered to cry. Tears are the lubricant of group conflict resolution. “No More Tears” may be a great formula for kids’ shampoo, but it’s a disastrous approach to adult fights.
Rebekah was experiencing anticipatory grief trying to figure out what she should do with this messy group that she loved but where the formation was no longer working for her (and, she suspected, for others as well). In a study conducted for the National Institutes of Health, researchers found that our brains process turmoil in relationships and perceived isolation with the same pain receptors as physical attack. Often, people don’t know what to do with these feelings.
Your feelings about a group conflict are valid and normal. But they’re more than that. They’re useful and informative. In fact, when a group feels really stuck, feelings are a signal of possibility.
When you find yourself feeling fragile or hurt in the aftermath of some kind of rupture, it may be that you are experiencing something that the conflict resolution specialist Sethu Nair calls “relational longing.” It is one of the most important superpowers you can tap into when seeking to resolve and transform a conflict.
Nair is a veteran group dialogue facilitator who works at the Center for Creative Conflict Resolution in New York City. She’s the kind of facilitator who gets a call when a “flag war” breaks out in the offices of a local government agency-Black Lives Matter signs on some desks, American flags or Blue Lives Matter ones on others. Would she be willing to come in and help the staff confront the divisions within?
Nair is not intimidated by garden-variety conflict. She’s a founding member of Hidden Water, an organization that developed trauma-informed circles for individuals and families impacted by child sexual abuse who wanted to heal with others.
In explaining how she begins to approach a conflict, Nair says that she must find the “relational longing” at the center of the fight. This relational longing, she says, is “the only avenue of possibility” through the fight, and she believes it exists everywhere. Relational longing is the residual desire within us to connect to someone or something, even when we’re hurt or mad. “We wouldn’t even have conflict if we weren’t trying so hard to be heard,” Nair told me. “I love finding that, and it’s not so hard to find if you really listen for what people are longing for.”
We don’t fight within our groups because we hate each other and want nothing to do with each other anymore. We fight because we are yearning to be in relationship with each other still, perhaps just not in the form of relationship we are currently in. (When that’s no longer true, we don’t fight; we leave.)
Where there are strong feelings, there is energy, and energy is easier to work with than apathy. There’s a there there. Where there is some beating pulse of relationship left, even a badly arrhythmic one, there remains a possibility of transforming the bond.
The inverse is also true. If a rupture stirs no feelings in you, that is useful to know. You may have a problem in the group, but no longing to solve it.
The seniority caveat
There is one important caveat: The artful fighter has an awareness of power dynamics and knows that it’s not always appropriate to share your feelings with the rest of the group-particularly if you’re a leader.
When I find myself talking to a senior manager, a church leader, or a club president, I often say to them: Feel your feelings with me. Don’t feel them in front of everybody. Your feelings are not strawberry jam. They shouldn’t be spread in all directions.
When people have institutional power in a group (particularly when the heat is directed their way), they may, despite their influence, be experiencing confusion, resentment, and hurt. As one head of an advocacy organization said to me, “How can they be unionizing against me? I’m an activist! This entire organization is designed to shift power out there. We exist to fight the Man. When did I become the Man?”
A big problem I see in organizational reckonings, especially in start-ups or organizations where the founders started as friends, is that powerful individuals are often oblivious of their power. In trying to connect with staff, they inappropriately share unprocessed emotions or divulge how an event negatively affects them, without acknowledging the disproportionate effect it may have on subordinates. Think of the boss who says to the person they are firing, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” (It’s not that it doesn’t hurt them. It’s that it’s not acknowledging the structural effect of the action on the people getting fired. Their feelings aren’t equal.) A leader absolutely needs time and space to locate, connect to, and experience their feelings as an individual. The group will be worse off if they don’t. But as a leader, it can be complicated (and even manipulative) to air your own sentiments in front of people you can fire.
Leaders sometimes confuse what needs to be felt with what needs to be said. When they dump their feelings on everyone, the conflict often ends up becoming less resolvable than before. Leaders who have mastered the art of fighting know that they must find proper space to process their feelings without having their tears become everyone’s rainstorm.
Why is this happening to good people?
“How could this be happening here?” people often ask me on an opening call. “To us?”
Why are we fighting? We like each other.
We’re a nonprofit doing noble things in the world!
We are nice and friendly folks. What is going on?!
As I listen, I hear another dimension of the prevailing mental model of conflict that is badly misinformed. Not only are people ashamed to be in conflict and embarrassed that it is making them feel things. They also seem to harbor, consciously or not, a deep belief that “good” people and “good” groups don’t fight. They seem to imagine that somewhere out there exists an imaginary “good group” immune to this kind of conflict. If only they had had their act together, they would have avoided this mess. They think of their conflict as proof of their dysfunction. All along, they thought they belonged to something good, but now they know “the truth.”
Just as we have these notions that conflict doesn’t happen to “good people,” too many of us have a sense that conflict doesn’t happen in “good places.” But it happens everywhere. Yuko Uchikawa, a seasoned restorative justice practitioner, told me that community gardens in New York City and other cities are rife with tension. While the aim may be to build community and share resources, particularly in neighborhoods with people from all walks of life, deciding what to plant and how far apart to set those seeds can become a bed of conflict. “They end up being places in which all of our assumptions about race and class and worth get manifested in how and what we plant and who decides,” she said.
Similarly, playgrounds, those bastions of freedom and joy, quickly become sites of discord. Because playgrounds are one of the few accessible public spaces in neighborhoods, people have different mental models of what they are for and what their rules should be. Sometimes these assumptions and needs clash-as they did in one local playground on the East Coast, where a group of parents were OK with their boys physically wrestling with each other, as long as the parents were watching. They jokingly dubbed it their “fight club.” Other parents passing by were horrified. An argument erupted on a local parenting Facebook group: If parents are OK with their sons engaging in physical fighting on the playground, is that OK for everyone? And what if it scares some of the other kids (or parents)? And even if it’s legally within their rights, is this what this playground is for? And who gets to decide?
In some contexts, this allergy goes beyond people simply feeling conflict is bad form or out of place. Some think it immoral. This is a big problem in churches, where a real impediment to artful fighting is the wrongheaded belief that conflict is sin. In his book When Church Conflict Happens, Michael Hare, a Colorado pastor who specializes in helping religious bodies in crisis, writes: “They either feel as though they shouldn’t be having a conflict because they are Christians or that it would be sinful to allow or participate in any kind of disagreement, especially in the church.” To help churches move through conflict, Hare works to dismantle this belief. Conflict is not sin. It is in fact helpful, natural, and normal.
Whether or not you are religious, this sense that conflict is inherently wrong is pervasive. We like each other. We’re on the same team. The world is tough enough out there. Why are we battling in here?
When we think conflict is wrong, we limit our ability to face it. In her book Conflict Is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman argues that when we conflate disagreement with mistreatment, we then also outsource our solutions to the state (by calling the police or going to court). “At many levels
of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve,” Schulman writes. “Conflict, after all, is rooted in difference and people are and always will be different,” she adds. When we are so allergic to disagreement and discomfort, Schulman argues, we
run the risk of overstating harm.
The artful fighter, instead, reframes conflict. It’s not sinful; it’s worthy. An executive I know was dreading a meeting with a leader at another company amid a contentious business negotiation. As she entered the conference room braced for conflict, she was surprised to see a long piece of butcher paper stretched across the middle of the table, with dozens of smooth black stones on it, and a few tiny glass messenger bottles. She saw these words scrawled on the paper in black Sharpie: “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. — Franklin D. Roosevelt.” She was taken aback. “It changed the whole room. In an instant, my counterpart completely reframed what we were doing from messed up to worthy of us,” the executive told me later. “And she didn’t even acknowledge the centerpiece. She didn’t have to.” The leader reframed conflict as an aspirational skill.
Photo © Fernando Palafox
PRIYA PARKER is a facilitator, strategic advisor, and acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. Trained in the field of conflict resolution, Parker has worked on race relations on American college campuses and on peace processes in the Arab world, southern Africa, and India. She studied organizational design at MIT, public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.
