Why We Fight (Because We Don’t Connect)

The origin of conflict in relationships and the importance of establishing resonance.

“When you find yourself stuck in an oversimplified polarized conflict,
a useful first step is to try to become more aware of the system as a whole.”
— Peter T. Coleman (2011), psychologist

Speaking From Here, Hearing From There

The emergence of psychedelic-assisted therapy is making the importance of understanding altered states clear to some people. We experience altered states frequently, but rarely pay any more attention to them than we do to the clouds. In spite of psychedelic states being obviously altered, those who work with psychedelics therapeutically are still not taking altered states seriously.

I speak to therapists and clients, and these are two distinct groups. Clients and prospects are more in touch with their emotions than most people. Perhaps I should say they’re in conflict with their emotions, but in either case they’re aware of conflict from a first-person point of view, and this makes them personally invested in their states of mind.

Therapists, psychologists, and people in general, are out of touch with their emotions. They are practitioners, not adepts, and their job is nine to five. There is both a personal preference for and a professional bias to being emotionally disconnected. Emotions are difficult to control voluntarily, and intentional control of emotions tends to be short-lived and incomplete.

In contrast, intellectualizing offers control, or the illusion of it. The intellect creates rules and boundaries. These are good for maintaining order, but bad for resolving chaos. The profession of therapy, and the institutions that fund and endorse therapy, are all about control. You won’t find an emotionally reactive therapist under normal circumstances, or an emotionally governed institution.

Speaking to intellectuals about emotions is like speaking to teachers about learning, physicists about reality, or priests about agnostics. You are only heard from the mindset of the person you’re speaking with.

If someone has a narrow view of reality, then that is how you’ll be heard. If you’re trying to communicate something outside another person's world view, then you’re probably wasting your time. Encourage a selfish person to be open-hearted, and they’ll listen to you with self-interest.

“A person can be reached only at his own level and only to the extent of his capacity. When there is no capacity to understand, you cannot force even the greatest and most wonderful treasures on a person.”
—Saint Germain, in Maria Szepes, The Red Lion (1997, p.272)

Fleeing, Freezing, and Fighting

We focus on the three modes of reaction: fighting, fleeing, and freezing. We could alternatively focus on various modes of engaging: intellectually, emotionally, and physically. There are other modes as well, such as instinct, spirit, and the subconscious.

Just as there are various ways to intellectualize—scientifically, therapeutically, and religiously—there are various ways to approach conflict. If we want to react more effectively, then we’ll have to consider these other modes and levels.

I want to focus on fighting, but I suspect fighting can’t be fully understood outside the other modes of action. The tricotomy of fight, fly, or freeze appears to be exclusive in other animals, but it is not in humans. These are alternatives on a pallet on which we create hybrid mixtures.

Animals that don’t intellectualize or dispute may react in one or the other of these three ways. But even in the case of other animals, these are more symbolic acts rather than committed states. The decision to fight, flee, or freeze is quickly reevaluated when the situation changes. We may only see these three reactions in the behavior of animals, but we should not assume that these other animals think as we do.

We react by mixing together our modes of action. While advance, retreat, and surrender are intellectual categories, our emotions do not reduce in this way. We normally engage in multifold strategies, fleeing from some issues, engaging in others, and refusing to react to certain circumstances. What we identify as a true fighting mode is an obdurate commitment to a combative state of mind regardless of circumstance.

People Don’t Play a Zero-Sum Game

When people reflect on conflict, they focus on the cause and overlook the purpose. People assume we fight in order to win a contest or prevail in a disagreement, but we fight for dominance. We need dominance because we’re insecure.

We hear this state of mind in the rationalizations of pugnacious generals who focus on complete destruction, rather than immediate goals. This is what wiser animals do not do, it is also what wiser investors do not do. The intellectual locked in an emotionally altered state, unable to extricate themselves from an emotional reaction, becomes obsessed.

“You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough, they stop fighting.”
— General Curtis LeMay (Rhode, 1986)

I’m not interested in what triggers a dispute, I’m interested in why we engage in it. Most fights between people start over incidental issues. The fights seem overblown when we only look at the trigger. Triggers don’t cause disagreements, they set them off. Disagreements are more about how a person thinks, and less about what a person thinks. They’re more about why you acted, and less about how you acted.

We fight over things that are unclear. When you witness a conflict, it may look like the sides are drawn and the rewards are clear, but they’re usually not. It’s more common that a conflict has been triggered by an insignificant issue. The argument develops for the purpose of clarifying larger issues, grievances, and goals.

We rarely fight battles over a single, simple, material possession or simple solutions. If we don’t know how to fight incremental battles, we can only aim for a one-sided victory. In this, we cannot achieve balance. If we don’t know what we’re fighting for, then we’re drawn into a conflict of emotions.

Emotions Don’t Reach Conclusions

This is a failure of emotional understanding, becoming captive to one emotion and locking out others. It is an inability of our intellect to play a balancing role in facilitating our shift between emotions. This is the origin of family violence and political abuse.

This failure to connect intellect with emotions results in one dominant emotion retaining control until it undermines itself or the situation, and this is what emotions tend to do. Emotions represent dominant points of view that are one-sided summaries. If you cannot engage an emotion intellectually, then it will control your thinking until it loses its reason to exist.

An emotional argument does not end when the objective is achieved because there is no objective. The only emotional conclusion is emotional exhaustion.

Intellectualizing Emotions is Not Engaging

Psychotherapy fails when it disengages from emotion. We see this in what’s offered as emotional or behavioral therapy, which combine sophistry and intellectual manipulation. We see this in psychedelic-assisted therapy, in which clients enter an entirely emotional state and therapists emotionally disengage from them. There is a useful place for manipulation—it’s called reframing—but it’s combined with emotional engagement.

In the current model of psychedelic-assisted therapy, emotions are addressed in the integration phase that occurs after the experience. This is sleight of hand that hides a practitioner's lack of knowing how to engage in the psychedelic space. But therapists who are no better at handling emotions during a psychedelic experience will not be any better at handling emotions afterward. Intellectualizing emotions does not work, it only seems better when you’re in an intellectual state of mind.

You engage emotions by being intellectually present in an emotional state. This is not the denial that we’ve been taught at home and in school. It means talking in tears, sorrow, shame, or anger, not talking over tears or repressing one’s feelings. Emotions have their own voice that is engaged and demonstrative. Emotions are not interested in intellectual projections. They are interested in immediate, perceptible results.

Awareness Leads to Self-Awareness

In order to manage grief, anger, or psychedelic states of mind, you must become self-aware while you are in those states. Attempts at recovering a “normal” state of mind, which is to say a nonemotional state of mind, will not lead to a balanced emotional state. It leads to a repressed emotional state.

Rather than leaving the emotion and retreating into a state of anesthesia and disconnection, go into emotion and gain connection. This is the aim of regression, somatic, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. In each of these, the approach is a balanced combination of intellectual and emotional engagement. Each of these therapies aims to help you learn a higher level of insight and control.

Learn to Navigate States of Mind

Learning to navigate states of mind requires going outside established psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry. Those practitioners are not trained to teach others or master their own altered states. Compare our academic training to a shamanic initiation in which one passes through states of horror, transfiguration, and psychic death.

Western health professionals are trained to enforce consensus reality, avoid professional burn-out, and continue to deliver measured doses of academic therapies. Western therapists are taught a simulated kind of empathy, which they’re instructed to use along with emotional disengagement.

True engagement happens when you share the same emotion. It’s only when you resonate with another person that you understand them, and you don’t understand them because you share similar concepts. You understand them because you share similar emotions. The reason we fight with each other is to get the other person to share our emotional state.

We make the mistake of thinking that by telling someone how we feel, they’ll share our feeling, but this only works if we are in touch with our own feeling. It does not work if we are detached from it.

To project our feeling onto who we imagine another person to be does not result in inclusion, it furthers separation. As long as you maintain a dichotomy between your thinking and feeling selves, you will not invite inclusion and you will not find a balance.

Balance occurs when the antagonism within yourself stops. This does not mean resolution, it means acceptance. It does not mean compromise, it means recognition.

This balance may not be stable—a new state of balance rarely is—but it can be explored and expanded. This is the time to engage your intellect. It happens when you can speak from your emotions without being overwhelmed by them.

In order to navigate your states of mind, you must be in those states both intellectually and emotionally. That means you must be able to speak, think, connect your thoughts, and act with clarity while you’re in an emotional or otherwise altered state of mind.

This is what we are not doing when we’re in conflict with another person. We are not yet doing in psychedelic-assisted therapy, and what we’re only starting to do with the regression, somatic, and EMDR therapies. If you’re interested in gaining emotional control, if you're interested in overcoming strife and struggle, then this is what you’ll need to do.

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References

Coleman, P. T. (2011). The five percent: Finding solutions to (seemingly) impossible conflicts. PublicAffairs.

Rhode, R. (1986). The making of the atomic bomb, Simon & Schuster.

Szepes, M. (1997). The red lion, The elixir of eternal life, Horus Publishing.