Handling Conflict Right with Amanda Ripley 57:57

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Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. I think that by the end of this hour, we will all know how to do life a little bit better because life is about, if nothing else,

Life seems to me to be about conflict and all different kinds of conflict. You guys are laughing. Is it not? I think it is. No, it's been my experience, but I just didn't know about that. Yeah, it's not like conflict. I mean, in all different ways. I don't mean it in like it's about progress through life.

the meeting of two different ideas, even when it's your own self, a new idea and an old idea inside of yourself. I think conflict is how we grow in a trillion different ways. And nobody teaches us how to do it better. I think maybe what we're going to try to do here is redefine conflict. OK, because conflict for me is negative. It's like I want to stay away from conflict. I'm conflict avoidant. Right. So I think we're going to talk about

I don't know. Okay. Yeah. How conflict is good and not bad, but the right kind of conflict is good. Yeah. And then the bad kind of conflict, very bad. Let's stay away from that. Here's how to spot it. Here's how to get out of it. But good conflict, that's our lane, y'all. That's where things get done. So today we are going to have a conflict expert who blew my mind with something she said six months ago, which I will tell you when we

Greet her. Her name is Amanda Ripley. She's an investigative journalist and author. Her most recent book is High Conflict, which chronicles how people get trapped by conflicts of all kinds and how they get out. Her previous books include The Unthinkable and The Smartest Kids in the World, a New York Times bestseller, which was also turned into a documentary film. Welcome, Amanda Ripley. Amanda, I want to tell you,

Maybe six months ago, I was listening to a podcast and which is unusual. I don't listen to podcasts ever, including this one. I've never listened to this one. And you were on it. And after it, I wrote my whole team and said, please, for the love of God, get us this woman. Okay. And it was because of one, you said a bunch of brilliant things that were blowing my mind, but there was one thing that you said that forever changed your

my approach to engaging with people who think very differently than I do. Okay. Now, to put it in context, I think about that a lot, how to engage with people who think very differently than I do and what is my responsibility in that and how, you know, I have times in my life where I was only doing that. I felt like it was my mission to, like, enter spaces where people felt so differently than I did and, like, somehow...

Then I had times where I was like, absolutely fuck it. This is not like actually the smartest people I know are not doing it

at all. Let me carry on with my little life and let everybody think whatever the hell they want to think. And honestly, Amanda, that was a joyful time for me. Okay. It is a nice, but you do you part of your experience. I told myself, oh, that was just codependency. I don't have to do that. Let them have their beliefs. I will have my beliefs. Now I'm listening to you talk. You say, someone asks you, why do we even have to engage with people who have

opinions that might be dehumanizing to us as human beings or to other people as human beings. Like, why do we even need to have that kind of conflict? And you said something like this. The reason that we have to continue to engage with people that think differently than we do is because we have children together. Oof.

Okay. Damn it. I know, such a bummer, right? And then she went on to say, when we disengage to protect ourselves from people who think differently than we do, the people who suffer in nations, in families, in communities are the children. Yep. That is in divorces, when we just give up on each other because it's too effing hard.

That is true in war. That is true in religion. And that, well, Amanda, it ruined my life again. Thank you for that. You're welcome. Yeah. This is a central bummer of the last 10 years of my work. It's like you can't give up on people. I mean, you can. You can and you do and I do. But, you know, there's a cost. Mm-hmm.

And I think when it was framed as the cost is always the most vulnerable, the people who don't get to decide whether they're going to give up or not is what reframed everything for me. What do you want people to know about conflict? How would you start this conversation? Let's say you were on a podcast. It was only going to be an hour long. Okay. How would you frame the importance of understanding conflict differently? Why do we have to care besides what we just said?

You know, I'm going to answer that differently than I have before, because I think there's an objection in people's heads and I would rather just address it directly. Right. And one of the objections I hear is how does this have anything to do with power and racism and sexism? And, you know, there are these huge injustices that we are trying to fight. And like, how does this help? I mean, maybe I need to be severed from different groups and protected from different groups. Right. And so, yeah.

That objection, I think it's better to just talk about it, I'm starting to think, as opposed to wait for someone to raise it. And the first answer to that is, you're right. There are times for sure, and people with whom you should not engage. Absolutely, right? The second answer, I think, and the one I'm trying to articulate better each day, is that we fight our fights individually.

On two levels, right? We fight them out in public or in our interactions, interpersonal dramas, right? But also internally. And so what I'm starting to come to is that there's a certain amount of suffering and sadness and anger that we just, we need to go through. If I let myself fall into high conflict in my own head, regardless of what else is going on out here, no matter how atrocious it is,

If I let that happen in my own head, then I suffer twice as much. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so even, you know, people will say to me, well, what about, you know, it's fine for you, but what about when there's a real power imbalance? And I say, you know, I was talking to a former guerrilla member in Columbia. So she was a member of the FARC, which is the biggest guerrilla group in Columbia in their 50 year civil war.

She did not have a lot of power living in the jungle. I mean, she had weapons, but she did not have a lot of institutional power. And what she told me was, once I got out of that high conflict, because she voluntarily, for a bunch of reasons, voluntarily left the conflict and disarmed, she kept fighting the fight she was on, which was a fight for fairness and a fight on behalf of poor people in Colombia. It's not like she stopped fighting that fight. What changed is she could sleep at night. Mm-hmm.

So even though she was wildly outgunned, literally, and those are big problems that need to get fixed at a system level, there was a way in which she was fighting that fight more effectively. And also, it's just better for your soul, you know? God, I love that. What is high conflict? Because my understanding is conflict is better than no conflict, right?

Yes. Right. That's important. Ding, ding, ding. Yes. Okay. People who just are having no conflict. No good. Are not necessary. No good. Not even trying. Not even trying. Yeah.

Can I read this quote about no conflict? Because I think it applies in relationships and marriage and politics and everything. You said, people who try to live without any conflict, who never argue or mourn, tend to implode sooner or later, as any psychologist will tell you. Living without conflict is like living without love, cold and eventually unbearable. That is the same kind of can't sleep at night as

as high conflict when you're so empty and disconnected and you haven't done that work with anyone that will keep you up at night just like high conflict takes residence in your brain and keeps you up at night so yeah I love you making that

I actually hadn't made that connection, but you're right, Amanda. There's a loneliness to both because you're not showing yourself and you're not seeing the other person. In high conflict, the other person is a caricature, right? So you're not seeing the complexity. And in no conflict, no one's seeing you, right? And so there's a way in which you're very much alone with no conflict. So

Yeah, to define high conflict, basically it comes from the research into conflict. There's something called intractable conflict or malignant conflict or high conflict. They're all roughly the same idea. And basically it's conflict that becomes conflict for conflict's sake, where it escalates to a point where it takes on a life of its own. It's usually an us versus them conflict. And the main thing is we make a ton of mistakes. So all our normal cognitive biases get much, much worse.

So we miss opportunities. We literally lose our peripheral vision and figuratively, right? We make a bunch of mistakes and our life is smaller. Mm-hmm.

So high conflict comes from high conflict divorces. So in the 80s, lawyers noticed that about a quarter of American divorces were what they would term high conflict, that they were stuck in perpetual cycles of blame and discord. And this was costing everyone a lot of money and it would go on for years and years. And of course, as you mentioned, Glennon, who suffers the most? It's kids, right? But you can have high conflict politics.

high conflict leaders, high conflict bosses. There's no end to the way in which we can get bewitched by high conflict. And it truly is like being under a spell. And I think we've all probably felt that, right? To some degree. Yes, I'm here to affirm. Yeah. Is the spell trauma? I wonder about, okay, let me give you an example. Abby's very good at conflict when she allows it, okay? Because she...

has the right intention. My question to you is, I've recently figured out that I'm pretty sure most of the wars are just by dudes who are like in a ego fight. It actually isn't anything about the thing. It's about their own. My relationship with Abby, I realized after years that

that when we went into a conflict together, Abby's intention was to grow from this moment, to do better together, to take care of each other, to learn something about each other that made our future better. Wow. My intention was to prove that I wasn't crazy. Truly, really after years of, oh, the reason why we're not

settling anything or moving forward is because we actually have different intentions. Yeah. And also different traumas, right? Like I'm more conflict avoidant. So it took me a long time to get to it. And also I think that because of my attachment issues, conflict is so hard for me because I am so afraid to lose that love. Right. And I think for you,

One of your traumas is thinking that you're crazy. And so you are trying to always prove through conflict that you, in fact, are very not crazy. So fucking sane, Amanda. So fucking sane. So is that something we have to start with is my question. Like, how do you know if you're even in conflict with someone who you could go in thinking were in divorce therapy or mediation? The intention is to figure out who gets this couch. Hmm.

When in fact, the other person's intention is to protect themselves from childhood trauma, to punish you, to whatever. Like, do we have to start with intention? Hmm.

Yeah. Man, this has got deep really fast. How do we know it's about the couch? How do we even know it's about the couch or about the country? Or is it about our own personal issues or relationships with conflict? This is the fun stuff. Like this is the best part. This is where we can kind of try to switch from being a combatant in conflict. Ideal. This is ideal, right? From being a combatant to being like a detective, like an investigator. Yeah.

What is it really about? So when we do workshops with folks, we talk about the understory of the conflict. What is this conflict really about? Is it about the couch? Almost never, right?

Money, arguments about money. John and Julie Gottman, who study marital conflict, they were listing all the things money is really about in when couples fight. And they got to 100 and just stopped because it was just too much. So there's an understory of the conflict. And yes, we've got to figure out what that is much more quickly as a country, right? As a civilization. This is our fundamental problem is we are so bad at fighting. Right.

And one way to get better at it is to investigate the understory very quickly and really develop a muscle memory for that. And the way that I know to do that best is to do a tactical listening technique called looping. There's different ones out there, but that's where I'm really trying to listen for clues. So when you're talking to me, I'm trying to figure out, okay, you're talking about the couch.

But there's something used, maybe a slightly stronger word than I expected, or maybe used a metaphor. That's usually a sign of an understory. She's laughing because that's all I did. Okay, go ahead.

Is that making you think of something, Abby? Gladden is the queen of metaphor, so it just may be hilarious. Well, it's right, right? Because the thing represents something else to you. So the metaphor is perfect. If it's the couch, my mother-in-law is a divorce attorney, and she'll talk about this all the time, how there will be a $500 couch, and both of the parties have spent $6,000 in legal fees fighting over the $500 couch. It's like there's no more perfect metaphor for high conflict. You're actually hurting yourself emotionally.

Because it's not about the couch. The couch represents you being humiliated by that person leaving. It represents that they never gave you anything you deserved emotionally, so you deserve the fucking couch. Yes. Nothing is about the thing. Everyone's just fighting for their lives. Totally. Yeah, and it is actually really fun to ask divorce attorneys for examples like this because they all have incredible stories. Yeah. I was talking to a divorce attorney in California, and she said that she had a couple just go to war over who was going to get the Legos. Oh.

Oh my God. Like the kids Legos. It was just to make any sense. But ultimately, of course, it came out that

there was one child and they felt like wherever the Legos went, so too with the child's affection. Even though that wasn't conscious, it was like subconscious, right? Because they know they could buy new Legos, but the Legos represented something much more important. But until we start chipping away at that understory, right, we're going to fight forever. And that's what the kind of mood that we're in right now, I think, as a country is it's, you know, one day it's

fights over books and libraries. And the next day it's, you know, Drake and Kendrick Lamar. I mean, it's like there's a never ending fuel for this because that's the nature of high conflict. It's not really about what it seems to be about. You know, those big games that happen in the summer, the ones that happen every four years. I've been lucky enough to compete in those a couple of times. As an athlete, I was with the team so much that when I had some downtime, I

I would plan some of these big trips for me and my friends. And this one time I got to this Airbnb in Seattle. We went to Seattle Seahawks game. There was like 15 of us staying in this Airbnb. So it's a great way to get a lot of people and not have to get 15,000 hotel rooms, a lot less expensive.

I also think it's really important because now that Emma is traveling for her soccer team to do her stinky laundry, it's just so much nicer in an Airbnb. And then for me and my sports science perspective, I think just making food for Emma gives her that added benefit. Glennon loves that there's coffee when she first rolls out of bed. And we both love having multiple rooms for when we have different bedtimes. If you're like us,

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So the technique that you're talking about is looping. Yeah, I want to know about that. Yeah. Can you walk us through that? Because that's fascinating. And I also love the overarching theme of when we're talking about high conflict in your book is like, it's not because it's morally correct.

I mean, the morality is irrelevant. You may think it's morally correct to try to like understand your adversary or your partner or whatever, but you're just saying this works better. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. It's actually practically the only thing that works. Yeah. You're not just, yeah. Could you just go everywhere I go and say that? I would love to. Because I feel like one of the worst parts about talking about this book is that I am kind of by nature a fighter. I'm not like a

a kumbaya person. Do you know what I mean? And so I hate that people assume sometimes that that's what I'm saying is that why can't we just have bipartisan unity? That is not what I'm saying. I'm just saying like, I want this to actually work. Let's not just keep having nonsense fights forever. And by the way, I don't, you know, I don't always succeed. We just had an argument with my husband last night in the car about whether we should get a handyman because he

He's been really busy and so have I, and things aren't getting fixed. And it got really heated because we weren't talking about the understory, which was, for me, it was about care and concern. So this is the good news. I have good news. And then we'll get to looping. The good news is there's only like four understories out there. So you don't have to spend all day on it. Like you kind of can figure out pretty quickly what combination you're dealing with. And it's care and concern, respect and recognition, power and control,

and stress and overwhelm. Yeah, that sounds right. Which is like, you know, when you just get enraged and it's actually because you're just like really tired or hungry. So anyway, in the handyman argument, for me, it was about care and concern. Because really what I was saying is you're working too much and I feel like you're not here and you don't love us. Do you know what I mean? In so many words. Which too bad I couldn't just say that. Wouldn't that have been nice? It's impossible. Still, after all the training, still wrote a book.

Still can't always get there, especially with people who are very close to me. You know, with a stranger, I can go. I mean, I've gotten a lot better with strangers. Like I handle like sudden public conflict much, much better than I used to. But.

with a loved one. I think, Glennon, to your point about trauma, it's like, because it feels threatening to me. My husband, thank God, is a little more like Abby, where he actually does not want to burn down the house that we live in. So like, he's trying most of the time. But for him, there's an understory too, right? Like, I think for him, it's more about

respect and recognition. He felt like it's kind of his job. Usually he's fixing these things. We're not that gendered and everything, but in this one case, it was things that he normally is, and he feels bad that he hasn't done it, right? He knows he's been kind of negligent and he doesn't like being called out on it. He doesn't want me to hire someone, but I'm also like, I'm not going to sit here forever with no dryer or working bathtub. That's not...

So you know what I mean? Yes, I do. But like too bad we couldn't have just gone there right away. And it's interesting. One of the things that I've noticed with Glennon is that it's too vulnerable to say the actual understory, to admit to it for her. And that's one thing that I try to cut into conflict to try to shorten it quickly is I get as vulnerable as I possibly can. I don't know. One day I'll say my feelings are really hurt.

Period. What do you do with that? I'm like, fuck. She's given you nothing to fight. It's hard to fight. Yeah. I feel abandoned or I'm feeling or part of me, whatever it is. And it's like that really cuts through and it takes Glennon a little bit longer, sometimes a day.

Usually it's only a day for you to circle back and say, I think my feeling, whatever it is, but it's a vulnerability, especially for folks who actually accept more conflict into their life or seek it. I think it's harder, at least in the case with Glennon. You're definitely more conflict positive, I would say. Yeah, I like conflict. Prone. I feel like it settles things. It makes progress and it helps you know each other. And it's like, what's the point if you're not

But what I do wonder about because of my own suspicion of myself is when you say, Amanda, like it works, what that suggests is that both people are trying to work toward the same fit. So I am entering a political conversation with somebody who has, for me, the biggest conflict would be somebody who has like, you know.

conservative quote values or, you know. But sometimes you can enter a conflict where your intention is, let's find middle ground. Let's work together to like find a way forward, you know. Yeah. But the other person is actually not trying to do that. Right. They're trying to like sow discord. They're trying to get their ego met. So it's a completely two people playing different games. If we were both entering a room,

where we were trying to find common ground on how to save the planet. We were really trying to save the planet together. Right. But that's not often what the other person is doing. No. Agreed. Right. And you don't want to be vulnerable. Like Abby, you know what her intentions are. But like with someone else, you don't want to make yourself vulnerable for someone who actually is a bad faith actor. Yes. Right. Who has ill intentions. It's funny. You know where I hear this a lot is from members of Congress. Mm-hmm.

Because there are conflict entrepreneurs who keep getting now elected. And like they literally want to sow discord. Tell us what a conflict entrepreneur is. And PodSquad, just think about everyone you know. Yeah. So conflict entrepreneurs are people or companies or platforms that exploit and inflame conflict for their own ends. Right. Who do it over and over again, who seem to delight in conflict. Sometimes it's for profit.

But I actually think even more it's for attention, for a sense of power and belonging, right? A belief that you matter. So you hear this a lot among members of Congress and their staff that, look, I'm here to make a deal to make things better for the country. But these yahoos over there, I mean, that's not what they're about. And you also hear it from gang members, right? It's like, I would love to make peace and have this block be less violent.

But these guys are not about that. And that's true. Like, I'm not saying it's not true. I think part of it is shifting what the goal is. So the goal...

This, I was taught by Gary Friedman. So for my book, I followed people who were stuck in high conflict and shifted into good conflict or healthy conflict. And one of them is Gary Friedman, who is a really renowned conflict expert who ran for office in California. And it was, as he said, took about an eighth of a second for him to fall into high conflict because we are all susceptible, right?

And what he taught me about his mediations, he's mediated like 2000 different cases and trained thousands of judges and lawyers and journalists like me. And he said, the goal is not to agree or to even solve the problem. Like you'll never hear him say the word compromise or middle ground. The goal is it's a successful mediation. If people leave the room and one of three things has happened, they either understand the other person,

themselves or the problem better. That's good. Right. So if you go into an encounter with someone who is a conflict entrepreneur, just understanding that about them will be helpful to you. Ah, okay. Does that make sense? That's so important. That reminds me so much of the time that I spent playing on the national team

that we spent so much time sitting around dining room tables just talking about everything. And we didn't agree on everything. And we never came to an agreeance on stuff. There wasn't like, oh, well, let's meet in the middle somewhere, right? Whether it was politically or religiously or whatever.

We would stand up from the table and we would leave. And then we would still somehow figure out how to find our way on the field, playing hard as hell for each other, even though we might have disagreed on, you know, four or five of these really important things to me, right? Like my right to marry whoever I wanted to or who I was voting for at the polls. We would talk about it.

And I do think that what you're saying is really important. There was nothing wrapped up in a little bow that made us go, kumbaya, we're all besties here. It was like actually just saying of the thing out loud because so much of the discontent in these relationships is like the unsaid. Oh, I know they're conservative or I know that they're this and I don't believe or agree with that, but you don't say it. So it makes you dislike them. But as soon as you say this stuff and you're like, oh, well,

yeah, that's not something I'm going to change about them, but I can still play with them. So this is a side. That's so interesting, Abby. And do you think that that was that true on every team you're on? Or was there something about that team? Every single team I was on, you had people who

thought differently about the way that the world works, thought differently about it's not just politics and religion. It's just like how you deal with a friend or how you are in a space full of type A people. Like there were so many different

relational things always ever happening that it was very fruitful to talk about everything that was going on in our lives. And I would handle a certain situation differently. But I think one of the things that I have found the most value in all of the teams that I played on being in close proximity to so many different kinds of people that we were able to agree on one thing,

And it was playing soccer, whether it was for our nation or our club team. And that was one thing we could agree on. And so it gave us the ability to go out. And even though that there was these other things, we were able to actually go and do the thing. However. Here we go. Okay. And I have a question for you, Amanda, because, and this is something Abby and I talked about, and it's sensitive. That was a different time.

I believe that Abby's ability to work side by side with people who may or may not have believed that she had the same rights as them out in the world had something to do with the time she was in where she was conditioned just to be grateful to be there, just to accept her own marginalization in a way that the same queer players didn't.

in this day and age, might feel more agency to not feel comfortable alongside people who don't believe in their full humanity. What do you think about that, Abby? I think two things. One, I knew because this was happening in like the early 2000s, you know, middle 2000s, 2010s.

Where the world hadn't really gotten on board with gay rights yet, our country, you know, the world was still kind of new around this. And you had to be very progressive minded to be in the position that I was in, especially even for some straight folks. Right. It was kind of like a real big bridge that some people crossed to become allies with the queer community.

community. So for me, it was really important to be a voice for the folks that possibly one day could straddle and walk across the bridge to become an ally of the queer community that they needed to see, talk and hear my story.

that they needed to be in communion with me in some ways, that they needed to see that I wasn't growing weird things off of my head. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that is the kind of position I knew that I was in, that I was going to create allies just by opening up myself and being vulnerable to like,

hey, this is really hard for me that I legally can't marry or and at the time will never be able to marry somebody and have the same legal protections and rights as you all do. And that conversation starts to change the mind. So, yes, I do know we were in a different time. And that is just what my experience was. No, it's beautiful. It's very I want to get to Amanda's like things on conflict. But

It also mirrors our individual conflict. You actually had a very honorable, universal intention, whereas I would be more fighting for my life in that situation. It feels more like a long-term play versus a short-term play, the difference there. So there's something called intergroup contact theory, which is this

idea that the only way we can reduce prejudice between groups is through interactions like that, through relationships under certain conditions where you're roughly on equal footing in the room, if not in the world, ideally where you're, you have a transcendent common identity, like you did with the national team, right? Something else you care about. And, um,

some kind of container for those conversations to happen. And this has been tested, contact theory, in like 500 experiments all around the world. It is the only known thing to reduce prejudice. We don't have another answer. So it's at once true that this is the only way and also not fair and not always your job, right? Like it shouldn't be everybody's job.

If you're the only black person in the room or the only gay person in the room. I guess I see what both of you are saying, that those conversations would be harder today because there would be less tolerance for intolerance, right? Depending on who's in the room. But the stronger those relationships are, the more they can hold, right? You have to set up the container. But the bad news is there's not another cure for prejudice that is actually proven.

It's those encounters. It's those seeing someone and knowing them as a complicated human who you like. And then they also are gay. Like that's what deep canvassing did and all these things that we know were helpful with gay marriage. But it is very difficult. And the more inflamed things are and the more threatened people feel and the more frightened they are, you know, it gets almost impossible. Right. But not impossible, but almost impossible. Yeah.

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Besides examining the understory, I mean, it makes me rethink. We get calls from the soccer world often and somebody will say, this person is homophobic. Can you talk to them? I'm like, are you kidding me? But it makes me rethink that. If that's the only way.

Anyway, moving along. I don't agree. It's the only proven way because it's the only thing we've tried. Because the people who are most marginalized have to pay the price for it, which is why we've tried it. That's right. So that's why we can study it because it exists because the marginalized people are doing the work. So like, I don't think it's the only way. It's the only way that's been documented because we've tried it effectively. That's a good point. I just feel like if we thought more broadly...

and tried to say, imagine a world in which the not marginalized people had to do the work and really committed to it. Would it work? We don't know because we'd never have the audacity to ask them to do that. That's a really good point. And I should add, there is a way in which the not marginalized people can do this work and it is proven to work, which is vicarious contact theory. So in other words, if I go out and do a story about people

who are different than I am and different than my audience, or you, Glennon, have someone on the show who's different than your audience. You don't literally have to yourself. Your audience gets vicarious benefits from that interaction. So you don't literally have to be in the room because not everybody should have to be in the room, right? Or can be in the room.

But if there's storytelling around it, then you get this broadcast effect where you get vicarious immunity to that prejudice. So that's really cool and something that, you know, you all are already doing because people are experiencing your relationship and your encounters secondhand. Right. That makes me feel good. That makes me feel good. So next time they call, you can just say, send them a podcast and say, tell them to listen to this. Mm.

Yeah. Or depending on the person, you know, if you have a relationship with them already, maybe you do have them on the show. And then your whole audience gets to hear that encounter and you set it up in such a way, right, that it's more likely to succeed. And then you do have that effect because people trust you who are listening to the show. Maybe they don't trust that person. Anyway, so that's just something to think about. It's like not every conversation needs to be the person who's most in jeopardy.

in that dynamic. Whether we're in conflict with a neighbor or our partner or our kid or another political party or someone at work. First of all, I want to know, how do we know we're in high conflict instead of good conflict? And then I want you to tell us if we are in high conflict, how do we become better? Looping is one, but what are the things we avoid and go towards?

Yeah. So I have a little on my Instagram page, a little quiz you can take. Are you in high conflict? So it's like, do you lose sleep about this conflict? Do you have imaginary conversations with the other person? I definitely do this. I've had long conversations with politicians I've never met. Right. Same. I'm in a feud right now with the National Zoo, but they don't know. They don't know. They don't know me. They don't know. But it's near where I live in D.C. and I...

Used to go running there all the time. And they just, in my opinion, really did not step up in the pandemic. Now you need tickets. Anyway, you can see how I'm like...

it's as if we're in a relationship, but we're not. Right. But that's, that's not a healthy conflict. So like, those are signs. If you start, it's like all you can talk about and you keep repeating the same story. Like all my friends have heard that zoo story. It's like, Oh my God, really? She's still talking about this. People are going to listen to this and be like, Oh my God, Amanda's talking about. So yeah, those are some of the signs where the other person's behavior or the other side's behavior is different.

just baffling. Like it makes zero sense and it feels very threatening. And sometimes it is very threatening, but sometimes it also just feels that way, right? So those are some of the signs that you might be slipping into high conflict. And to avoid it, you want to, first of all, the most basic thing you can do is avoid the four tripwires that lead to high conflict, which we call a good conflict, we call fire starters. And so that's humiliation. Do not humiliate your enemy.

Which means don't do anything on social media. Don't do anything where there's an audience. Right. If possible, have a private conversation or don't say anything at all. It's just not worth it. Because as Nelson Mandela once said, there is no one more dangerous than one who's been humiliated. Even when you humiliate him rightly, which I love that he added that on there.

Second one is conflict entrepreneurs. That's another tripwire into high conflict, right? So if you have them in your life, you want to maybe distance them. If you have them on your feed, your social media feed, you want to maybe stop that. And the number one rule is every day in our current climate, you just don't want to be a conflict entrepreneur because it's very easy. There's a lot of rewards. There's a lot of incentives right now to be a conflict entrepreneur, right? So humiliation, conflict entrepreneur, right?

false binaries. Like notice when you are slipping into us versus them thinking, or when you're lumping like 74 million people who voted a certain way into one camp. Because the truth is we just can't do that. I mean, it's not, you can't do it. So like it's madness, right? But anytime I'm kind of slipping into two groups, because usually that means you're missing like Israelis, Palestinians. What about the people who are both?

You're missing really important. So when we train journalists, what we focus on is like having go-to sources for your stories that are about conflict who are in between or crossover, who don't fit. Because that's a lot of people, it turns out. Like if you take the United States and you try to break it into groups about their deepest values on politics, right? Which More in Common did, great research company on polarization. And really the smallest they could get was seven groups, like not two. Mm-hmm.

It's seven. And even then you're making huge generalizations, right? So avoiding false binaries. And then the last one is corruption, real or perceived. So the more we can sort of bolster our institutions, our neighborhoods, our families, our police departments, our schools, everything we can do.

to bolster the integrity of those institutions, the less likely we are to fall into high conflict. Because when you can't trust institutions to do what they're supposed to do, when you can't trust the referees, right, you will eventually take matters into your own hands and you will start trusting people who really shouldn't be trusted. Because we need trust. You can't actually get through the day with zero trust. So you'll just trust the wrong things. Because when those institutions are not fully

full of integrity, that is an opening for conflict entrepreneurs. So there's Steve Bannon, right? Exactly. That is the window for people who don't have the good intentions to come in and say, see, this is messed up and follow me instead. And that's how we get these

Yes, that's what leaves us so vulnerable to conflict entrepreneurs. And they interact, to your point. So all those four fire starters interact. So conflict entrepreneurs will often frame everything as a humiliation. That's one sign of a conflict entrepreneur. If you listen to Putin's speech before the invasion of Ukraine, the whole thing is about the humiliation of Russia.

So that's one sign. And so, yeah, these things interact. And any entry point you can get in your particular conflict to try to turn down the volume on one of them, right, will destabilize the whole conflict system, even though it won't make it go away. But because they interact like that. God, it's such a, I mean, thinking about the idea of our instinct when someone hurts us is to embarrass them.

And when we embarrass people, we create an enemy for life. Like Amanda's not saying don't embarrass people because that's sad and it will hurt their feelings and do unto others as they will do unto you. No, Amanda is saying that is the most dangerous thing you can do for yourself in the long run. And I'm just saying this, I've experienced this. Once you embarrass somebody publicly,

You better just wait. You could be waiting 28 years. It's coming back. Yep. People don't forget that in their body. And they usually pass it on to their children.

who then doubled, then it's in the name of their parent, which is. In their country. Yeah. Yeah. And often victims of humiliation become perpetrators of humiliation, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I love about this. It's all evidence-based. It's all just like, again, practical. Let's not even worry about what's right or wrong. Let's talk about what actually works. And when you humiliate people, it doesn't work. It makes you feel good for one hot second.

And it's not effective and it's counter effective. So what I love about everything that you do is you just name at the top, everything that you are going to want to do in a conflict that's intuitive is exactly and precisely wrong. Like you need to throw all of that away and do the opposite of what's intuitive. And I have been thinking and working with this even in my own

marriage, the idea of when I am clearly right and we're talking about something, everyone would agree I'm right. Okay? Everyone. And he has a different opinion, which obviously is wrong. Obviously. Then I would need to show him how his everything is wrong about what he's saying so that he can get to the right side of things and understand the correct position. What you're saying, hear this, good people of America. Yes.

We know you're right and that other person is wrong. Nonetheless, it is not effective for you to just continue to tell them you're right. You need to say to them what you hear them saying. Because people who do not feel heard do two things. They either shut down or they shout louder.

People who do not feel heard shut down or shout louder. So you need to get them to understand that they are heard in their ridiculous opinion.

in order for them to see another thing. And you say it that way. This is what I hear your ridiculous opinion is. Is this looping? Amanda, is this looping? Yes, this is looping. You got it. We've come full circle. But the average person only feels understood, this blew my mind, the average person feels understood 5% of their daily life.

So of course you are meeting people who already in every circumstance who already feel misunderstood. So if you can do the magic work of being part of that 5%, what I hear you saying is, let me make sure I totally understand what you're saying. It's not validating what they say. It's not giving more airtime to what they believe. That is clearly wrong. It is just

being in that 5% that makes them feel understood, which allows them to do a different thing other than shutting down or shouting louder. Exactly. Yeah. So looping is exactly just described. It's basically these steps. Listen to what the person's saying. Listen to what's most important to them, right? Like you're really trying to get out of your own head and listen. What are they really trying to tell me here? What do they care about here? Then you take into your most elegant language you can come up with and play it back for them. So you kind of paraphrase

I feel like you're saying that the sky is purple and that the reason the sky is purple is something that none of us can ever understand because it's holy. Is that right? Then that's the third step. And this is the one I used to forget the most when I started doing this is check if you got it right. And you have to check like you're really wondering, like you're actually curious.

So it's like, is that right? And just like Amanda said, what will happen is people will right away, their shoulders will lower. They will sense that you're trying to understand them, which almost never happens, even as you disagree. And then they will add to what usually they'll say something more revealing. And you're starting to glimpse the understory now, slowly, slowly, slowly. Or they'll be like, no, actually, it's more like X, Y, Z.

And then you're like, oh, okay, let me try again. Let me do this paraphrase check for understanding again until you get to a point where they say exactly. Oh, that's beautiful. You just keep going. And then in people's bodies, when they've done studies, they have found that you actually are more open to nuance. Your brain is wider to nuance after you have been looped and heard.

than if you weren't looped and heard. That like you can get a wider bit of information into you from the other side. Exactly. So it's like a game of chicken. Like who's going to listen first, right? Like nobody's going to listen until they feel heard. So like the least I can do is make them feel heard. And then they might listen to me. Amanda, it's not just though so that the other person feels heard. I think the way this is being presented is like, well, that just makes the other person

feel like so that they will be more open to nuance. It feels like a manipulation. But what you're, what I've heard you say over and over again is that you learned about yourself that you weren't as good of a listener as you thought. So when you are, what we know is we don't see people how they are. We see people how we are. So,

What you're doing also is checking for your own filters, your own bias, your own story, your own trauma. Because when I say to someone, what I hear you saying is this, and they say, no, that's not what I'm saying at all. I know that I am bringing something to that.

That changes me. So looping is changes both people. Yeah. Yes, it does. And it keeps you humble and it keeps you present. And the third thing it does is it dethrones the entrepreneurs, the conflict entrepreneurs, because what the conflict entrepreneurs need is for us to never listen to each other because then they own the entire kingdom below them and they are telling the people what to believe and they are telling the people what we believe.

But if we take them out of the middle and talk to each other, that is where there's possibility. And that is where you can potentially dethrone the conflict entrepreneurs because you realize what they're telling you is horseshit. Exactly. Right now we are being played. We are being turned against each other as Americans for other people's benefit. Yes. And it is like,

I don't know. I mean, but most people don't like to be played. Most people don't like to be chumps. So I feel like the more we can use the vocabulary and understand how we're being manipulated, the more immune we will be to each new conflict entrepreneur. It feels a lot like so much of... Because this is more like communication. This is where I want to destigmatize the word conflict in a way. Because...

honestly, I feel like conflict is all about how we are actually communicating with each other. And so much of the miscommunication or the loss in translation is kind of cut through with this looping technique where you're like, here's what I'm hearing you say. It makes it less opinionated and it brings more fact into it. Like you, there might be a, an opinion about a fact, but to me it makes it less judgmental. It's like, here's what I heard you just say. Yeah.

And it allows there to be more like you're missing all of the morality. Like you bypass the morality and you're getting to the actual thing, which I think is helpful. I have to stop us here, sadly. Oh, I know. Amanda, would you come back sometime soon? I love that. Because I just feel like we just got started. It's the highlight of my month.

I, me too. And I just feel like it's just the most important thing in the world. And we just got started and I just love talking to you about this. So I mean, we have seven more pages of questions. So if we could just come back together soon, that would be amazing. I love that. I mean, I feel like y'all are telling me things I didn't know about my own book. So it's been really fun. So thank you. A really good book. Yes. And also like so fun to read. I was like, he did what now? Oh my God.

It was fun. Oh, good. Good. Has to be or else we can't ask people to read books. You know, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Books unless there's some characters and some fun. That's right. That's right. OK, so Pod Squad, go off and we're going to work on looping and understories. And then when Amanda comes back, we're going to get. Oh, yeah. Homework. OK, that's our favorite looping and discovering the understories, which the looping is what gets us to the understory, which I enjoy patterns. And the understories for you as you're in your fights this week.

care and concern, respect and recognition, power and control, stress and overwhelm. You got it. Nailed it. Which ones are you actually fighting about when you're fighting about dinner? Okay. Amanda, thank you so much. We're going to put your book in the show links and wow, we can do hard things. So let's see you next time.

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We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren LaGrasso, Alison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz. I give you Tish Melton and Brandi Carlile. ♪ Through a fire I came out the other side ♪

I chased desire, I made sure I got what's mine And I continue to, I'm the one for me And because I'm, cause we're adventurers and heartbreak's on the map A final destiny, they stopped asking

Some places they've never been to be loved. We need to be known. We'll finally find back home through the joy that our lives bring. We can do a hard thing. I hit bottom. It felt.

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We need to be finally find our way back home. And through the joy of spring, we can do hard things. Yeah, we can do hard things.