When you feel like the stakes are high for you and you combine that with a feeling of threat from someone towards that which you care about, relationship can get impacted and damaged in a nanosecond. That’s often when someone like me gets called in to help, in the workplace.
Thank goodness mediators are available to at least some in workplaces. Mediators are not commonly used in many other contexts except workplaces or personal/family relationships.
We need more people knowing how to engage and transform conflict because we all have the capacity to have big reactions, because we all have, more or less, the same brains.
When a big reaction occurs, our capacity to think clearly stops. What happens in our brains is called an amygdala hijack.
The amygdala is the alarm centre of the brain, responsible for getting your body into action in emergency situations. The challenge is, our emotional selves often perceive physical threats when they are emotional ones – to us.
Our emotional brains react as if it’s life or death and that kind of emotional intensity is contagious.
So, the amygdala jumps into action. It’s time to shut down the prefrontal cortex’s normal reasoning in order to take over. You need to act quickly, which is why your amygdala takes over and activates your survival responses.
The tricky part is when your amygdala tries to take over in non-emergency situations. During an emotional hijack, our thinking brain gets paralyzed, which means our IQ drops, we lose the ability to make complex decisions, we no longer see other perspectives and our memory becomes compromised — not the most helpful scenario in social settings.
It’s common in conflict to have these big bodily reactions. We feel a lot. When we are in the grips of our survival personality, we descend into a judgmental frame of mind about others or about ourselves. We become unmotivated, sad or angry.
These are all variations of having gone into a high stress or survival state.
What do to?
Firstly, there is always a large dollop of compassion to be served up. Compassion for ourselves – we don’t usually have control over an instantaneous reaction.
Compassion for others. They may be descending themselves into a stressed brain state.
Then, if you can, just notice. If you can notice that you are having a physiological reaction and you can name it for yourself, that is a very powerful way to stop it.
To heighten our capacity to do that, we can adopt a practice of checking in with our own bodies throughout the day. We want to stay connected to our bodies or get connected to our bodies (as the need may be).
There are many ways to do that. The one I like these days is from Emotional Brain Training:
1) Notice your breathing – in and out. You can do that for one or two or three breaths
2) Adjust your body posture so you send yourself the message that you are good
3) Give yourself a compassionate message like: “All is well”. “I can handle this” “Good job!”
That is a check in. It will serve you well when the inevitable stresses come your way. It will help you know what is going on under the hood, as it were.
If you can notice yourself becoming increasingly agitated in some way, then you want to self-regulate.
Again, Emotional Brain Training has been such a help to me. You can tell yourself these key messages which help when we are in the grips of our survival personality. Tell yourself:
1) Do not judge
2) Minimize harm
3) Know it will pass
These messages soothe us in the moment. We tell ourselves to not judge ourselves or others, because when we are in that survival part of our brains (and personalities) – we are judging. We are thinking in black and white.
We are in the grips of our saboteurs and resistors.
So we want to send a command to ourselves that sets a limit on that behaviour. Do. Not. Judge.
Then we want to minimize harm. Why? Because in those lower brain states we are apt to say or do something that is not coming from our higher selves and we are likely to regret. We want to cut that behaviour off at the pass. Minimize. Harm.
Finally, knowing it will pass gives a sense of comfort. Brain states come and go and we feel and think differently in these different states.
What about the other person? What if they are in a triggered state?
Step one for you is the same – hold on to yourself. Emotions are contagious, so you want your higher, healthier emotions to predominant in such a situation and to not allow yourself to merge with their lower brain state.
That can be quite the feat. It requires the strength you will have built up by doing regular check ins.
This is the way forward.
For more on these kind of tools, check out the book I co-wrote with Master EBT trainer, Judy Zehr. It’s called Hold On To Yourself – How to Stay Cool in Hot Conversations.
“Most feelings of stress, anxiety, frustration, disappointment, regret, and guilt are the direct results of judging yourself, others, situations, or outcomes.” … Shirzad Chamine, Positive Intelligence