How to handle conflict with people you really really don't agree with

In which I introduce some new Rules of Engagement

May 12, 2025

Hoo boy! Now we’re getting into fraught territory. People we really really don’t agree with? In a polarized society like the one we live in nowadays, that number climbs into the millions. And the things we disagree on? Also countless.

So why bother? Haven’t we all basically settled into our political, racial, sexual, gendered, name-your-identity holes by now? Who even tries to talk to someone from the other side any more?

I actually don’t know. What I do know is that, if we are going to save the world, we have to start talking to assholes. That is, to each other. That is, asshole to asshole. (Bad image. Sorry.)

And how the hell, you might yell at me, do we do that?

The Third

The answer requires a tiny detour through a really cool concept from psychoanalytic theory and, as it happens, complexity theory: The Third.

Consider two people about to experience conflict. Person 1 has their perspective, their reality. Person 2 has their different perspective and reality. In a battle, no one actually cares about perspectives or reality. What they care about is winning.

But in engagement, perspectives and different realities are everything. They are the stuff of growth, of learning, of intellectual and emotional expansion. They are not threatening. They are interesting.

If Person 1 and Person 2 can talk to each other in ways that respect their individual perspectives and realities — if they can each stay grounded in their Gardens — then a third reality can emerge. A co-constructed reality. One that neither Person 1 nor Person 2 completely inhabits but that is a combination of their contributions, contributions that change and intertwine as Person 1 and Person 2 influence each other in unpredictable, creative ways.

What happens in these circumstances is what psychoanalysts call The Third. The third reality, which some complexity theorists call co-constructed and emergent. Something neither Person 1 nor Person 2 could have accomplished on their own. Something that enriches both participants.

That is, Person 1 and Person 2 both remain standing. With greater understanding. Win-win.

How to open the Third

I’m picturing the by now iconic Thanksgiving dinner with family members of different political persuasions sitting down to eat together. I mean, definitely avoid conflict in this situation! Who wants a family meal like the one in The Bear Season 2 Episode 6?

But let’s imagine a one-on-one with a family member or friend who has political or religious or other views that are diametrically opposed to yours. Here are the rules of engagement:

Get in your Garden — and stay there.
Be genuinely curious about their Garden.
Differentiate between content and emotional bedrock.
Address the emotional bedrock compassionately.

Get in your Garden

If you’re going to engage in the co-creation of The Third, you need to honor your perspectives and your reality. They are yours, and they have been honestly come by. That is, you have formed your perspectives and your reality through repeated interactions, hard lessons learned, data you don’t even notice anymore, inchoate feelings of safety and belonging, facts you embrace, and inconvenient truths you deny.

All of which means that, whether you like it or not, your perspectives and reality, your opinions and thoughts, while yours, are also necessarily partial, subjective, and biased. This is so because you are an organism that perceives selectively and forms opinions even more selectively.

And, not to get into the weeds here but: Your selective perceptions and interpretations are driven at least in part by your psychic structure, the ways you have contorted yourself to fit with other people and the world to ensure your survival. Those contortions, those psychic foldings, make it really easy for you to pick up on some data — appreciative glances, criticism, evidence that people think you’re stupid — and to miss other data — appreciative glances, criticism, evidence that people think you’re stupid. You get the picture? We all look for what we expect to find. And each of us expects to find different things.

Which renders all of us imperfect argumentative partners. First because we don’t actually know it all (even if we’re know-it-all assholes) (especially if we’re know-it-all assholes). And second because it’s quite likely that what we don’t know or believe threatens us. And the feeling of threat can set our Gardens on fire.

So, thanks to your selective perceptions and interpretations and your flame-suppressing tendencies, your thoughts and perspectives may not be wholly correct. And they may not be incorrect. And they may be correct enough but incomprehensible to your relational partner. Or something else. Getting in your Garden in preparation to engage means being (and staying) humble, familiar with your own reality and the possibility of its limitations, and open-minded. What are you going to learn over your Garden wall?

That’s getting in your Garden. Staying in your Garden means knowing where you end and the other person begins and refraining from either jumping into their Garden to fix it — their thinking, their opinions, their wrong-headedness, their damned entitlement — or taking on whatever’s in their Garden as your own. You don’t have to agree with them. You can just listen and feed back what you hear. That’s staying in your Garden, and it’s a super important skill.

Be genuinely curious

Being genuinely curious is another skill that I perceive is lacking in the vast majority of the American population. Now’s a good time to start cultivating it! Sure, you might be absolutely certain that you are totally right about whatever your conflict is about. But that attitude is the gladiator’s attitude. If you want to engage with conflict, you want to be able to hear your partner’s perspective. That means you have to listen. And listening is a whole lot easier if you can muster genuine curiosity.

The true desire to know what is going on inside another person. Without judgment or blame or ulterior motives. Without storing up evidence you can use against them later.

Genuine curiosity, if you can stick with it, is a wonderful antidote to the inchoate anxiety or the spike of fear we can feel when threatened by terrifying difference. Curiosity impels us to say “Hunh!” and “Interesting!” and “I’ve never thought of it that way before!” It allows us to keep the communication channels open rather than shutting them down and moving into the gladiator crouch. Where your survival seems to depend on outsmarting and chopping down the source of your anxiety and fear.

While we’re on it, applying your curiosity to your own anxiety and fear could be highly illuminating as well. Asking yourself why you’re so threatened by Muslims/Christians/Jews/intellectuals/union members/conservatives/liberals/Blacks/whites/what-the-hell-all and figuring out how to hold your fears at bay while engaging with someone you really really don’t agree with is a great way to get to know your Garden. And to practice self-acceptance. Which is a prelude to acceptance of others.

Whoops. We’re back at Getting in Your Garden. That’s often how steps work. Non-linearly.

Being genuinely curious leaves room for your relational partner to be themselves. They can bask in your interest and attention. If they perceive this freedom, this trustworthy kindness, if they perceive that you actually do want to see and hear them, they might be able to drop the bluster and be a little more open to you.

Content vs. emotional bedrock

This might be the crucial move conflict engagers can make. And it’s counter-intuitive for most of us.

Content = the words people say, the ideas they spout, the behaviors they enact

Emotional bedrock = the emotions underneath the words and ideas and behaviors

Of course, any red-blooded Enlightenment-influenced human being knows that

content = rational

and

emotion = irrational

Well, not necessarily.

Content can of course be quite rational. When what we say and do springs from well-thought-out underlying assumptions. Engaging with a rational partner means digging up those assumptions. With curiosity. When you and your relational partner realize you are forming opinions based on entirely different assumptions, then your disagreement will make complete sense. And then you can examine both the assumptions and, importantly, the experiences that led to them.

Which opens up The Third and often leads to a stronger relationship due to deeper mutual understanding (not necessarily agreement).

Content becomes conflictual — and irrational — when emotions enter the picture. (The emotions themselves are not irrational. They are some of the most accurate data we can collect about what’s going on inside and outside us. But emotions surely make words and actions seem irrational.) Conflict arises when content becomes a delivery system for deeper messages that are meant to discourage rational engagement. For example, statements or actions that

provoke
wound
dismiss
demean
defend
discharge

Aggression, whether through words or deeds, is a good sign that emotions bubbling up from emotional bedrock are at work. I call such emotions “magma.” When magma — white hot melted bits of fear, insecurity, biases, beliefs, memories, resistances — infuses someone’s thinking, it is useless to fight about content. Because the content just masks the truth. Which is that your relational partner is feeling something they don’t want to feel and probably don’t even sense consciously. And definitely don’t want to take responsibility for!

A sense of inferiority, perhaps. A feeling of powerlessness or lack of control. Vulnerability.

They’d rather burn you with their emotional steam and let you deal with the resulting emotions inside you. Because of course you get all hot and bothered about your partner’s unbelievably stupid or heartless or nonsensical declarations. Which makes your partner feel better: superior (not inferior), dominant (not powerless), in control (not out of control), not at all vulnerable. Never vulnerable.

I'll say it again: The content obscures the emotional bedrock. Which is the motherlode.

Address the emotional bedrock

So, when conflict looms or has descended, ignore the content.

Address the feelings.

Start by noticing the feelings inside you. Because provocative comments are meant to induce emotion in the listener, noticing those emotions can clue you in on your relational partner’s intent. More accurately, they clue you in on the emotions your relational partner is disowning by spewing them at you (through their aggressive content).

This is called projective identification for you psycho-nerds out there. Super common. Probably because it works so well. I project my feelings into you and you bite down on the content rather than the feelings. I rid myself of emotions I can’t abide and avoid dealing with them. You enact those emotions for me so I can taunt and accuse and blame you for having what I’ve given you.

Real mature.

So. What you get to do when you’re engaging rather than biting down on aggressive content is to

notice your feelings
label them
wonder why your relational partner might have them
address your guess about your partner’s internal state

From inside your (safe) Garden, you can bolster an insecure partner’s confidence by saying something like “I’m interested in your perspective. I haven’t heard it before. Can I ask some questions?”

You can offer containment, an invitation to shared safety, with something like “Hoo! I’m getting a little hot under the collar! I’m going to breathe for a few seconds to get myself back under control.”

You can embody vulnerability by saying, “I can feel really uncertain, even scared, about [insert issue here]. How do you deal with these feelings?”

What you say, how you address your partner’s emotional bedrock, is totally dependent on the situation. If you feel like sharing an example so I can make more specific suggestions, now’s your chance!

Wrap-up

It takes two people to battle. It takes only one person to engage. When that one person chooses to engage, the other person (due to the natural laws of relationship, of fitting together) often cannot help but to respond in kind — that is, more with kindness than with belligerence.

You gotta keep standing, though. Your presence is required for The Third. Curious, compassionate and not condescending or sarcastic presence. (You’ll know when condescension creeps in. Your relational partner will start being defensive for seemingly no reason. But there is a reason. They feel you.)

And you gotta remember that, with this type of conflict — ideological, intellectual — winning is not the point. In fact, not winning is the point. More accurately, winning through connecting is the point.

Because it is through healthy connection that change can happen. Sometimes instantaneously. Often over time, after repeated corrective experiences. (In this case, corrective experience is simply having a civilized conversation about polarizing beliefs that makes both parties feel seen and heard.) And change for the better is the ultimate end goal! That’s the bottom line reason why conflict aversion is a problem. It makes change for the better impossible. While conflict engagement facilitates change and strengthens relationships, which facilitates even more change.

And oh my god: Please! Let’s change!