Do you recognize when the arguments you have turn into abuse? Do they start with an insult or an order and quickly escalate? Does no amount of yelling quell them? Is there never an apology or any hint that a prior statement might have been inappropriate (e.g., wrong, biased, or manipulative)? Is almost every comment that a statement was not up to snuff in truth-telling met with a counter “that is what you always do”? Do you participate in a barrage by escalating either the decibels and gestures or blame, belittlement, and manipulation? Do you find yourself alienating family and work peers sometimes at your partners’ subtle instigations or sometimes of your own making?
Regardless of whether you use or are a victim of those strategies, they can increase anxiety, disrupt work and creativity, impair hearing, lead to dangerous driving, ruin relationships, and decrease lifespans.
Stages of Conflict
Alienation is not the worst outcome of conflict. It is more complicated than that. You can remember the complications by seeing them as reverse developments, called “regressions.” A half century ago, upon exploring Erikson’s Childhood and Society with my college students in a laboratory nursery school, I formulated a reverse developmental view or “regression theory” of conflict. Wikipedia gives an accessible summary of Erikson’s theory (see Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development) and includes its elaboration by Erikson’s wife only two decades ago. She created a regression theory of decline in old age, called the “Ninth Stage.” But decline applies to conflicting relationships at any age, not just those generated by physical deterioration.
Ages have been removed from the following Eriksonian developmental crises.
Hope: trust vs. mistrust
Will: autonomy vs. shame/doubt
Purpose: initiative vs. guilt
Competence: industry vs. inferiority
Fidelity: identity vs. role confusion
Love: intimacy vs. isolation
Care: generativity vs. stagnation
Wisdom: integrity vs. despair
In the regression theory of conflict, the entire regression can happen over minutes as well as years or decades, but the sequence is similar in all cases. In mature adults, the first threat is to integrity, which fosters despair. Has my life been useless? Next, continued conflict threatens generativity leading to stagnation. Why should I bother? If the conflict endures, a threat to intimacy leads to isolation. Why should I partner with anyone?
Continued conflict results in the failure of any prior more advanced strategy. Failure of isolation leads to a threat to identity resulting in role diffusion. Who am I anymore? If the conflict still endures, even work itself suffers. As Erikson termed it, a threat to “industry” occurs that leads to feelings of “inferiority.” Is there nothing I can do for others? Really deep outcomes follow on the failure of inferiority. Thwarted initiatives to do anything positive lead to guilt. Is everything I do bad? If this is followed by blockage of any attempts to act autonomously by oneself, doubt and shame creep in. Where can I hide? Ultimately, the bottom line is the breaking of trust – you can’t trust someone who is not there – getting out of the situation or relationship is the only alternative. I feel alienated from everything I have cared about.
Physical abuse is never an option, as it should not be. Even alienation is better than physical abuse. But in the regression of stages, the seeds of emotional abuse become clear. Sometimes in rapid succession, arguments foster despair, disrupt creativity, deny intimacy, disrupt social roles, instill feelings of inferiority, engender guilt, prevent autonomy, and ultimately just end the relationship. On the internet, this last is one of the most frequently advocated solutions.
If you start reading about abuse on the internet, you may recognize as never before that one of your relationships often lapses into abuse. Failure to recognize it, even over decades, is fairly common for verbal abuse, especially of men but also of women, who are more often victims of physical abuse. If you are a perpetrator or victim, the internet’s list of examples will make it clear to you that abuse, whether physical, emotional, or verbal, has happened. The internet will also connect abuse to needs for control. Beyond that, the psychological advice found there, including that from the American Psychological Association or Psychology Today, emphasizes only two aspects of abuse: identifying it and protecting oneself from it. None of the sources even hints at the relationship between control and collaboration or their connection with development or regression. Perhaps such oversimplification is the reason why those internet sources often assert that abusers cannot change.
Tying Conflict to Collaboration
Abuse, whether verbal, emotional, or worse, is a naïve, easy, and burn-out strategy for control. The internet sources do not tie abuse to the development of collaboration. A clue to the connection was provided by my very first developmental interviewee, a singer song-writer named Elizabeth Egan Everett (elizabethegan.com/). Ensemble relationships in music, she observed, begin with “feels unworthy.” That is soon replaced by the “cat fight.” With development, cat fighting ultimately gives way to “delight in exchange; comfortable competition” which in turn gives way to “union into a whole ensemble; no ego.”
Elizabeth’s insightful, but incomplete understanding was enriched a few years later by faculty of the Savannah College of Art and Design, especially those in Interactive Design and Game Development. Adding a little Piagetian theory into the mix connects their findings to developmental psychology (see Wikipedia Piaget’s theory of cognitive development). Development begins with accommodation (giving in to other points of view), progresses to assimilation (imposing our own point of view on the situation), but it takes time to reach equilibration (doing both at once). Because the designers focused more on groups than Piaget, they could make it clearer than he did how one gets beyond assimilation. In game design, there is often one person who is best at telling a story, another at creating environments, another at creating characters, and still another who is better even at creating hair than everyone else. Other careers have similar collaboration needs. Architects are seldom good engineers while engineers too often overlook the human element in the design of buildings. Numerous design faculty observed a general principle that students escape imposing their own view (e.g., the cat fight) only by realizing what others in a group know or can do that they do not know or cannot do themselves. The result is more than individuals can do by themselves. We can connect abuse with collaboration, when we realize that this principle works as much for control strategies as it does for the design of games or buildings.
Learn Collaboration to Live More Beautifully
Back home, most partners can put these ideas to good use (except that serious drug, alcohol abuse, or a mental health diagnoses need professional consultation). The table below lists fifteen categories of home life. Each category (row) has two different and often diverging types of activity within it. Use only one X per row. If you do a lot more cooking than your partner, put an X in the Me+ space next to Cooking. If just a little more, put the X under the Me. If you do less Cooking than partner, put an X under Partner; if a lot less, put it under Partner+; and if about the same, under Even. Healthy responses have about the same number of X’s under You as under Partner. Make two copies of the table so that you and your partner can put one X in each row without consulting each other.
Your collaboration begins by agreeing not to “cat fight” but to discuss discrepancies until both of your X’s mirror each other for each row. Agree on one interpretation. Stick to the facts—especially those involving how much time either of you has spent both on each activity in their life and in the last week. After you agree on one X for each row, make a copy and put it on the fridge. When life presents a challenge in one of the categories, take a look at the table and ask yourself “Is this a good activity to get my partner’s input on?” Trade soul-deadening abuse for consultation that spawns affirming and fun collaboration. Learning the collaborative approach to conflict will not occur overnight. Think of it like you would a musical skill. It takes practice and passion to make good music happen. Practice is not a simple solution, however, especially when you practice the wrong thing. If at first, you try playing a new piece too quickly, you will make mistakes. Practicing those mistakes makes it far more difficult to learn the piece correctly than if you started slowly enough to play everything well. A similar process happens with abuse but at a much more horrific scale. Often, people who abuse grew up with an abusive parent or sibling. The habits they learned, when too young to reflect or slow down in order to interact appropriately, compete with the more complex strategies that they hope to learn. Like playing the wrong note or tying your shoes, they often become so good at abuse that they don’t even recognize when they are doing it. Unlike some of the internet advisers, I have never been an advocate of any physically healthy human’s incapacity to learn. There will always be lapses into more primitive behaviors, especially in stressful times. During such times, victims need to heed the internet advice to protect themselves, especially by setting limits or removing themselves from the situation. But I have too often observed or read that a student with mediocre grades has changed the world through brilliance. Collaborating with a partner during normal times can bring similar blessings. Believe in the process. Slow down to practice it often. Discover, remember, acknowledge, and enjoy what other people know and can do that you do not. Give up the ego to create a collaborative result. Collaboration has made humanity great. Use it and beautiful living will result.
