How to Stop Internalizing Other People's Conflict

At some point, almost everyone has the experience of being in conflict with a romantic partner or family member. These conflicts can start innocently enough but soon you find yourself in a verbal sparring match with bad feelings and on the wrong side of someone you would much rather care for and trust. Sometimes, these conflicts result in lost trust, hurt feelings, resentments, and longer-term relationship problems.

But you do have a choice. The first thing to ask yourself is, “Whose problem is this?” Let’s say that a loved one expresses dissatisfaction with their weight. They complain to you and reveal their struggle with knowing when they are hungry or not and avoiding sugary foods. Being the helpful person you are, you start sometimes questioning their food choices and them reaching for seconds at dinner. This results in them getting annoyed with you, perceiving you as critical, and thinking that you are judging their physical appearance. You now feel attacked and angry… and also irritated that your person makes such poor health choices.

Stop.

This is where you ask yourself how you got into this mess and whose conflict it is anyway.

The truth is that this conflict is internal to your relationship partner. They have simply (and probably not consciously) taken their own internal struggle and handed half of it to you to play out for them. The internal struggle contains a contradiction between two opposing perspectives (in this case the desire to lose weight vs. the desire to gratify and indulge their taste for high-calorie foods). This apparent contradiction is called a dialectic.

Dialectics give rise to internal tension within the individual. The tension is made more manageable by splitting the conflict into two parts and handing off one part to a relationship partner. This happens all the time in therapy, where a client is ambivalent about getting better. They might tell the therapist about the pain they are in and ask for help. After listening, the therapist offers various strategies and interventions to make things better. But the client then spends most of the session pushing back on the therapist, exasperated that the therapist does not understand them and that the offered interventions will not work. The unwitting therapist might then find themselves in conflict with the client they are trying to care for.

In this case, the conflict is the client’s dialectic ambivalence between the desire to change and grow and the fear of the unknown, the difficulty of the work, and not knowing what their new reality will look like when all is said and done. But this conflict actually resides within the client… not between the client and the therapist. If you need another example, just think about the last time your child got mad and frustrated at you because they asked for help with their homework and you are doing it wrong (you don’t understand, you‘re mean, etc.). In the end, it’s your child’s homework and related rewards or consequences, not yours.

The examples are infinite; see how many you can list for yourself. Try these seven steps to (a) see if the conflict involves a dialectic in yourself or your relationship partner and (b) if you can lower the conflict or hand it back to the person who really owns it.

1. Realize sooner when a conflict is present. The more you can sense your own frustration/irritation and those of your relationship partners, the better.
2. Ask yourself if this is your conflict and who should care more about the outcome… you or the other person. Ask yourself if you are pushing back or acting out one half of the conflict for them.
3. If the other person feels in conflict with you, ask out loud what they think your motive is for engaging in the conflict… and why they think you would want to have this negative experience or push back on them when they are the ones who have the biggest interest in the outcome.
4. Verbalize for yourself and the other person what the two parts of the contradiction/dialectic are and what part you have been playing; e.g., to do the homework (your part) or avoid the homework and related frustration stress (your child’s part).
5. Ask yourself, and the other person, if they want you to act out one half of their conflict for them and consider the rewards and consequences of doing so (for you and them).
6. Learn to manage your own emotions and bring calmness into your body so that you are not impelled back into the conflict by your own sense of anxiety and worry (maybe about the relationship).
7. Re-evaluate and discuss the conflict with your relationship partner and see if you remaining part of it is working for you and them.

Once you get a handle on identifying basic dialectical conflicts, you can look in more depth at the common themes discussed in dialectical relationship theory: openness-closedness (which relates to a desire to communicate openly and be vulnerable with a partner vs. to be more contained and guarded); autonomy-connection (the desire to be independent vs. to mesh and be inseparable); and stability-change (the desire to have consistence and safety in the environment vs. to explore and have adventure). If you look closely, you will probably find that these themes underlay many of conflicts that typically arise in close interpersonal relationships.