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Hi, everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. I wanna talk today about what to do in situations of conflict with other people. This can be something that can be really agonizing, can cause a lot, a lot of anxiety as well as a lot of other difficult emotions. But there's some good news. There's a good reason why this is an appropriate episode to have at this point in our podcast. This is episode number 96. We've talked about a lot of different ways to understand your own emotions and your own emotion generation system. The good thing is that all this work that you've done on trying to understand your own emotions gives you a really big head start in trying to understand other people. Because we all have the same type of emotion generation system.

I have a son who is really good at connecting with dogs. He can meet a dog out in a public place or in someone's yard or a stray dog, and the dog can be acting aggressively or not, but within minutes, this son of mine is a friend of the dog. He seems to know how to give the right body language, how to make the right noises that, that helps the dog to know that he's safe, that he can trust him. I think there was only one time when my son met a dog that, that it really wasn't possible to connect with, and he could tell from his emotional state and his body language that it wasn't gonna work, and the only way to respond to that dog was with aggression in return and getting away from the dog. But I'd say 99% of the time he's able to connect with dogs and make friends with them very quickly. Compare that to me, when I get around dogs, I, I feel uncomfortable. I feel nervous. It doesn't matter if they're big or if they're small, I, I end up communicating to the dog that I'm afraid of them and that I'm nervous, and I'm always worried the dog's gonna bite me and, And often they start to show some kind of aggressive behavior. My son, on the other hand, just feels so, so totally at, at ease and comfortable with dogs because he's able to understand what they need, understand how to communicate with them, and connect with them very quickly. So my son's ability to do conflict resolution with dogs seems to really stem from his ability to understand dogs, understand how their brains work, what they want, what they need, and how to communicate with them. So the good news is you can do the same thing with people. Because as I said from the beginning of this podcast, we've been talking about understanding our own emotion generation system and the humans that you're around and that you work with, they also have this emotion generation system.

Okay, so what are some of the principles that we've learned that can really help you to understand someone else and be able to resolve conflict in a situation of conflict? Well, I think one of the big foundational ones is that emotions are generated by our brains to help us to adapt to a changing environment. We've talked about this a lot, how our brain is always assessing our environment for its impact on your wellbeing. This is something that organisms are constantly, constantly doing. We've talked about what it is that our brain cares about in each situation, right? What it bases that appraisal on. We've talked about how our brains are constantly asking and answering these questions about how good or bad is this, whose fault is it, and how is this going to develop or what's my coping potential here? And depending on how our brains answer these questions in our situation, then they will organize an emotional response in our bodies, which has a physiological component, you know, hormones and autonomic responses, and it also has a motivational component. It makes us feel motivated to behave a certain way. Behavioral component, , it makes us tend to behave a certain way, and a feeling component. It makes us feel a certain way. And all of these things are calculated to help us to behave in ways that our brain thinks will be most adaptive for the particular situation that we're in.

For example, let's say that you are in a situation where your brain evaluates that your goals have been obstructed and that it's a very urgent situation and that you have very low power over the situation and low capability to adjust to the changes in this environment, then your brain is going to trigger the emotion of fear. And fear with its physiological and motivational components, behavioral components will make you feel like you need to run away from whatever it is that is threatening you, because that's what your brain determined would be most adaptive for you in this particular situation.

Take the emotion of sadness, for example. When your brain evaluates that your goals have been impeded, it's not a very urgent situation, but you also don't have-- you've got very low power and low control to influence any of this, then your brain will organize an emotion of sadness, which can help you to move away, let go of things that aren't possible for you to pursue anymore, because that's what your brain decided would be most adaptive for how it imagines the future is going to develop from here. What about in the case of anger? We're talking about conflict. How does anger come up? Well, when your brain decides that your goals have been impeded, and that it's an urgent situation, and that you've got a lot of power or control to influence the course of events, then your brain will trigger the emotion of anger, which can help make you more willing to confront a threat and help defend you- help you defend your resources or your boundaries. So it's all about our brains constantly evaluating our environment and trying to figure out what is the best, most adaptive behavior for us in this changing environment that'll help us to survive and succeed. So that's what's going on in your brain when you generate emotions, and that's also what's going on in other humans' brains when they generate emotions. Everyone's behavior and emotions have a perfectly understandable reason. It has to do with how that person is seeing the world right now, how their brain is evaluating the situation, and how it's going to affect their well-being. And their brain predicted that the situation was gonna develop in a certain way in the future, and it evaluated the situation as good or bad for the-- in, in relation to their goals and their needs. And so it triggered an emotion that their brain thought would help them to best adapt to these changing conditions in their environment. So being able to understand people, especially people in conflict, starts with being able to understand how they are viewing the world. Just the way that my son can go up to a dog even that looks aggressive and seem to understand how that dog is seeing things and how to communicate to that dog.

So let me tell you about an experience where I had conflict with someone I needed to work with closely and how I had sort of an aha when I realized how they were seeing the world. So as I said, I had to work really closely with this particular person on an, a project. This project was very important to me, and it was very important to the other person. The difficulty was that this person wanted to see this project develop in a certain way that was kind of opposite from the way that I wanted to see the, the project develop. And we both felt really strongly about this. And what's more, it w- it was not just me and this one other person working on this project. There were-- There was a group of us working on this project. A lot of the people working on this project together were very dear to me, good friends, and this person that I was in conflict with was treating these people very rudely. This person was insisting on getting things their way and basically refusing to compromise and really hurting deeply the, the people around me in our group in a way that really troubled me and really hurt-- I felt, I felt really hurt in response. And so it was a really difficult situation for me because I found myself not only really frustrated that I couldn't get the outcome that I wanted, but also frustrated because my relationship with this person was important to me and I wanted to keep it good, and I also wanted their relationship with the other people in the group to be good. That was also important to me, and I also cared a lot about the feelings of the other people in the group who were getting really hurt. And it seemed the more that we just went head-to-head, the worse all of these different aspects of the conflict got. And so I realized I had to take a different approach. I couldn't just convince the other person to see my way or to change their behavior. I needed to start to try and see how this person was seeing the world. I needed to try and understand this person. And so I sat down and really focused and tried to figure out how this person was seeing the situation. I tried to look for all the clues that I had about how the situation appeared to them. And as I was thinking through and writing down different ideas that I had about how this, the world looked to this person at this moment, I remembered that there was something that had happened in this person's life a couple years previous that had a lot of impact on what was happening now, and that had really changed the way that they were seeing what was happening now and had, and really influenced why it was that they wanted the outcome of this project to be a certain way that was so different than the way that I wanted it. And I also realized that because of this particular thing that had affected this person's perspective that had happened a couple years previous, that it really augmented their suffering in this situation. It made it so that it was a lot more agonizing for them. So it was a difficult situation for me, but I realized that for them it was a lot more difficult because of these personal things that had happened in their own life that contributed to their suffering. And so as I, as I started to really recognize how much they were suffering in this moment, it started to make sense, it started to make sense to me why they were, were behaving so immaturely, so rudely to people around them, why they were so unwilling to change their viewpoint. ' Cause I realized, you know, when I'm, when I'm suffering a lot physically or emotionally, I don't have a lot of bandwidth for thinking about how other people feel either. All I can think about is making the pain stop. And it helped me realize why it was so hard for this person to think about compromising because, you know, when you, when your suffering is taking up all of your energy and your attention, how can you possibly spend any attention or energy on thinking about changing your viewpoint? We've talked before about how changing your perspective and your expectations takes a lot of brain energy 'cause it involves rewiring and remapping in your brain. And when you're dealing with physical and emotional suffering, you're already spending all the energy that you have on dealing with that particular suffering. Anyway, I started to realize that this person was entirely, all of their energy and all of their attention was being consumed by this, the suffering that they were going through at that moment. And so for that reason, they weren't willing to consider any other changes that would be energy intensive for them. For that reason, they were not really able to conceptualize other people's suffering. As I started to understand how this situation looked from this other person's perspective, I realized that I was in a lot better position to compromise than they were because I had more leftover energy, 'cause I wasn't suffering as much as they were. And it helped me to not be so triggered by their rudeness or respond to their, to their rudeness with anger, which wasn't gonna help the situation and help me get the, the outcome that I essentially wanted. So the way it turned out was that I ended up compromising a lot more, uh, in this particular situation, but I didn't feel bad about it. I understood why the other person wasn't able to compromise, and I was able to connect and respect the other person in a way that validated them, in a way that strengthened our ties so that it didn't damage our relationship in the long run. And also, and I was also able to give support to other people in the group who were feeling hurt by this person's rudeness. Anyway, it was just a moment when I realized that because this other person is human, they are understandable because they have an emotion generation system like mine, and the emotions that they're feeling are stemming from the way that they are seeing their situation, and their brain is simply trying to help them behave in ways that it thinks are gonna be most adaptive to what is going to happen in the future.

What's really cool is that the world feels like a lot safer place when you feel like you can understand other people. Just in the same way that for my son, the world of dogs is a lot safer place than it is for me because he understands the dogs and he understands how to communicate with them. He understands their body language, and he understands how to connect and make friends and diffuse conflict. Same thing with people. When you can understand them, understand their emotions, understand why they're feeling the way that they are, then there's a lot less uncertainty and a lot, lot less anxiety. Because understanding the people helps you to understand how to work with them, what their needs and goals are, which is really always at the, at the base of everyone's appraisal is their needs, their needs, their goals, their concerns. Because the appraisal is about your brain evaluating the situation and how it is going to impact your well-being, or in other words, your concerns. If whatever's happening is conducive to your goals, then you're gonna have positive emotions like happiness. If it is obstructive to your goals, then you might have a negative emotion like fear or anger or sadness. But understanding people helps you to better understand what their goals are and how to work with them and how to predict how they're gonna behave. It's the difference between being in a world full of unpredictable enemies versus a world full of people like you that are understandable. Because when it comes down to it, we're all just trying to survive. That's what the equipment in our brain is built to do. It's built to help us to respond to changes in our environment in ways that are gonna be most likely to be adaptable.

And really this is the difference between someone who is immature and someone who is mature. Developmental psychologists talk about how we all go through a stage in our development where people around us are not really people. People are just objects. We don't really even notice people unless we think that they can further our goals or if they're getting in the way of our goals. But once our brains are able to fully mature, then we can see people as people, meaning these other people are not just objects, they're actually people like me with perspectives, different perspectives than the one that I have. And so maybe I can think about their perspective. And actually the world becomes a lot more richer and more interesting, kind of goes into 3D when we try to understand other people's perspectives. The world also becomes less scary, less anxiety-producing. We get less triggered when other people are upset. We have more clarity in conflict resolution. So essentially, we've talked about all of these concepts before, but I wanted to just bring it together in this way for you today to help you to understand how it can help you in your relationships with other people, particularly in times of conflict. And that if you can get to the point where you're better at trying to discover and be curious about other people's appraisals, then you can be the equivalent of my son who is a friend of dogs and can make friends with dogs in minutes, even ones that seem aggressive. You can be that person in the world of people.

So that's what I have for you today. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we'll see you next week.