If you've already spent time with relatives this holiday season perhaps you've discovered things are not all fa-la-la at family gatherings. Getting together is great, but it can also bring conflict. All that cozy togetherness gives space for old issues to appear in new forms.
In a year when politics has polarized, more rancor than usual is likely to get served along with the turkey. Here’s what you can do about it.
Start with a resolution to be nimble at conflict avoidance. You can’t stop others from being pissants, but you can decline to be baited. Avoidance is a great conflict style for situations where you don't have any real goal other than staying out of difficulty.
You probably already know which people and circumstances can handle candor and which cannot. Prepare lines for conflict harmonizing and avoiding that you can easily pull out when needed. To that annoying relative who can’t resist a verbal poke about politics or some other dicey topic, come back with responses that re-direct or de-escalate.
- “You know, I promised myself I’d stay on safe topics this year. Tell me about your new job….”
When voices rise and conflict escalates, do you step forward and engage? Or step back and assess? This post is for people who favor the latter, and for those who live and work with them. I’ll give you another two-step for conflict resolution, a practical strategy when engagement is difficult.
Let’s start by honoring “step back and assess” as a response to conflict. Life brings endless friction. We are confronted, goaded, and obstructed from every corner. It’s hard to get through even a day without someone or something in our face.
In chronically contested space, engaging all challengers is impossible. When someone gives you the finger for your unexpected shift of lanes while driving, do you pull over to talk things through? Hardly. What would be the point? You shrug, mutter to yourself, ignore the jackal, and drive on.
So the arts of skillful avoidance are essential to survival: Silence, distance, non-involvement, non-responsiveness, impassiveness, circumspection, studied neutrality, inaccessibility, biding your time. All have a place as strategies to avoid battles not worth the cost of fighting or for which we are poorly prepared.
