The shadow once said to the body, “You will never find another friend as valuable as me. Whether in sunlight or in moonlight, I follow you wherever you go.”The gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world.
LAO TZU
7
Conscious Education
Plato’s Cave and the Expansion of Understanding
Listening with openness and compassion as you validate others’ experiences is the cornerstone of meeting people where they are, yielding to their energy, and connecting with them, but those two core actions are simply not enough to help you get all the way through anger. Exploring options is the critical third piece in handling anger, and it is in this core action that you can add to the insight and knowledge others have. On the other side of anger is understanding, and insight is the quickest way to move from emotion to reason in a blink.
Conscious education is how you get there. Conscious education means expanding awareness—both others’ and your own. It involves learning and then sharing the kind of practical information that helps you and others steer away from instinctive reactions to anger and down a different path. It is about the essential truths underlying the way we respond to anger and how understanding these essential truths leads to the personal development necessary for more effectively handling anger and conflict.
Resistance and narrow-mindedness are the vital organs of anger. That is why skeptical people are quick to assert that nothing can really be done for angry people who don’t want to change. “You can lead a horse to water,” they say, “but you cannot make him drink.” And that might be true; however, we can certainly put salt in his oats and make him pretty darn thirsty! Similarly, although you cannot make others have insight, you can present logical, useful information to them that entices them to want to learn more. Put another way, with conscious education directed at sparking insight in ways that resonate with people, you can capture others’ attention and draw them in like a moth to a flame.
Whether you’re putting salt in others’ oats or lighting a flame that draws them in, both metaphors suggest the same key to conscious education: Present information in a way that taps into the internal drive of others and leads them in the healthiest and most peaceful direction possible. In short, presenting valuable and pragmatic information to people that is immediately applicable to their lives and meaningful for them is the salt that will motivate them to drink from the waters of resolution and peace.
As you have seen already in this book, authenticity in interactions matters. That is why there are two crucial aspects to conscious education. The first involves applying the information in this chapter to your own life so that you practice what you preach. It involves you learning what’s presented in these pages, sitting with it, and then integrating this wisdom in ways that widen your perspective and help you navigate through anger and conflict. The second aspect to the fundamental component of conscious education is sharing this information with others at the right time and in the most effective way, especially when they are in the midst of their own difficult emotions.
Plato’s Cave
It can be challenging to set your own perspective aside and try to see what others see. It becomes even more challenging when your beliefs are steeped in the feeling of certainty. So it makes a lot of sense that inviting others to see the world differently is rarely easy; it is even more difficult in times of anger and conflict. Despite our actual capacity for expanded consciousness, we tend to remain locked in restricted world views. The clearest image I ever found to explain why this is so comes from the legendary philosopher Plato’s famous allegory of the cave. His allegory is an apt description for the ego.
In book 25 of his Republic, Plato poses a frightening hypothetical scenario of what might happen if prisoners were chained inside a cave from the time they were infants. In addition to this horrific confinement, he asks readers to imagine that the prisoners’ heads are positioned in such a way that they cannot see behind them. These prisoners face the back interior of the cave wall, while a perpetual fire burns outside of the cave, casting shadows of passersby on the wall in front of the captives. The prisoners would grow up their entire lives hearing the voices of humans but only ever seeing shadows corresponding with those voices. In time, Plato says, the prisoners would come to know the shadows as reality.
The key to this allegory lies in what Plato asks next: What would happen if we took one of those prisoners as an adult and freed him? After making his way out of the cave and struggling to see in the light, imagine the amount of fear he might encounter when he saw the immensity of wide open spaces or, worse, when he saw three-dimensional human beings talking instead of the shadows that he knew all his life. No doubt he would be so shocked by the outside world, he would want to retreat to the cave and the shadow world that he knew all his life.
Before we judge this prisoner for what would seem to us like foolishness—to reimpose a prison sentence on himself—we would do well to understand that we also live in our own psychological caves. When we are presented with information that contradicts what we believe we know, we often retreat behind defense mechanisms that keep us safely locked in our egos. Our egos, then, can be thought of as our own personal psychological caves, and the shadows we see cast on the cave walls are the certainties that we have about the world.
Conscious education centers on expanding the way we see the world. The word “conscious” comes from the Latin conscius, meaning “knowing, aware,” which in turn is derived from com, “with” or “thoroughly,” and scire, “to know”; essentially, consciousness equates awareness. The word “education” comes from the Latin root ducere, which means “to lead,” and ex, meaning “out.” So the heart of conscious education is to lead out by increasing awareness. In the context of Plato’s cave, we have a powerful visual for what conscious education looks like, as well as a reasonable understanding of why people are resistant to taking in new information—to leaving the cave.
From a biological evolutionary perspective, anger can lead to conflict, and conflict can lead to death; and although that might seem a bit extreme, from the vantage point of the brain’s instinct to survive, it’s really not that farfetched at all. When people are angry or in conflict, their vision narrows, and they tend to think impulsively and often irrationally. The goal of conscious education is to help them explore options that are alternatives to the impulsive ones their anger is driving them to consider.
In 2010, researchers Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler discovered and defined what they call the “backfire effect” to describe the phenomenon of people becoming more defensive of their beliefs when they’re presented with information that counters those beliefs. In other words, instead of changing our perspectives in the face of evidence, our beliefs only grow stronger (that is, we retreat to the inside of the cave). Presenting new information to people, especially information that contradicts what they believe, is difficult enough, but throw in the emotion of anger, and the walls of defensiveness rise higher than ever. Offering conscious education to others in conflict takes considerable finesse. That’s where listening and validating come into play, as well as creativity (which we will explore in the next chapter). Being able to circumvent others’ fight-or-flight response and avoid the backfire effect are enormously important for delivering conscious education in a way that can be heard.
Let’s say, for example, that I am faced with someone who has a problem with anger. If I come right out and tell her she has an anger problem, it will likely elicit defensiveness through rationalizations and justifications. Instead, I choose to merge with her, listen, validate, and then offer this insight: “I wonder what people are seeing in you that they would even suggest you struggle with anger. I mean, we could probably both agree that if multiple people are saying something to you, it’s not likely coming out of nowhere, so let’s honestly think together about what they could potentially be seeing.” By leading with authentic compassion and phrasing my observation in this nonattached way, I’m offering her the salt that can lead her to search her memory for the ways others have given her feedback about her anger in the past. Even if she just feels motivated to search for an answer, she is essentially drinking the water. For someone who had previously denied or was otherwise unaware that she had a problem with anger, being presented with conscious information in a nonattached way makes it easier to consider.
Remember, your cartoon-world view will demand that others “should” have the information you have (or you believe they should have), whereas your real-world view will help you assess what others actually do know, meet them where they are, and then share the information you hope for them to have in ways that actually work for them.
Insight is one of the most valuable gifts we have and can share, but helping to spark insight in those who are angry takes work. The more you know and the better you truly understand what you know, the more ways you have to teach it. Conscious education as a whole extends infinitely beyond what is shared here, as it entails any information outside of people’s psychological caves that can help them in their path of personal development. The following section, however, encapsulates the teachings that I see as most central to Yield Theory.
Essential Wisdom
I call this section “Essential Wisdom” because these are the core concepts and insights that can transform anger. When you understand the information presented in this section well enough that you can teach it to everyone—from small children to brilliant professionals who simply haven’t encountered this information in the same way that you have—you will have gained invaluable tools for handling conflict.
All turmoil has the potential to narrow vision and limit a person’s ability to see anything other than the immediate trouble at hand. When that happens, either people don’t have the kind of information that can help them handle the situation well, or they forget to apply what they do know. For example, imagine that you tell someone his shoe is untied, and he snaps back with, “I know how to tie my shoe!” He continues on his way without tying it and then a few steps later trips on the untied shoestring. In reality, he might very well know how to tie his shoe, but his actions demonstrate that he is not implementing his knowledge. Again, there could be many reasons why he’s choosing not to tie his shoe, but the point here is that knowing information and applying it are two separate matters.
When you handle anger and conflict, it’s essential for you to have insight regarding what might be happening on an individual psychological level, as well as what might be going on interpersonally in the potential dynamics of the situation. Your wider, outside-the-cave vision involves, at least in part, you keeping the following concepts in your foreground, as well as being able to apply them to your own life.
Expectations Versus Reality
The shadow once said to the body, “You will never find another friend as valuable as me. Whether in sunlight or in moonlight, I follow you wherever you go.”
And the body replied, “I do appreciate that you’re with me in the light of the sun and the moon, but where do you go in the darkness, when I need you most?” 
If the body expected the shadow to follow her into the darkness, she would be let down when the shadow didn’t show up; but if she aligned her expectations with the reality that her shadow either wasn’t able or wasn’t willing to be with her in times of darkness, then she would be less disappointed when her shadow didn’t show up. That is why an essential part of both handling conflict and teaching others how to get through conflict centers on understanding how to align your expectations with reality.
The more you expect others to act in ways that you want them to act, the more disappointed you’ll be. Remember, your cartoon-world view comprises what you think the world “should” be, not what the world actually is. Since you alone are in control of your expectations, the onus is on you to align your expectations with reality, rather than demanding that others be different from how they are. The more you can align your expectations with reality, the more prepared you’ll be to respond to what is happening, instead of what you believe “should” be happening.
Beginning, Middle, End
No matter how angry, scared, anxious, sad, overwhelmed, or even happy you ever feel, every emotional experience has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In terms of conflict, that means that no matter how bad things are, eventually they will change. Of course, the grip of anger often leads us to believe that the cause of what we’re feeling is, as Macbeth said, “the be-all and the end-all.” It’s essential, however, to know that every emotional experience will pass. And knowing that—not just intellectually but as a felt knowledge—is a profound gain, because when we are aware of the finiteness of our emotions, we can avoid making rash decisions in the beginning or middle of such emotions that will inevitably lead to worse endings.
In neurological terms, moments when you are cognitively aware that emotional experiences have a limited life-span center your brain in the higher-level thinking regions. Even if it’s only a brief shift, taking the edge off a tough emotional moment, this cognitive awareness moves you out of the reactive, protective survival centers triggered by the fight-or-flight response. In other words, when you acknowledge intellectually that anger will eventually end, you soften the intensity of it. The analogy I like to use is adding an ice cube to hot tea: A single ice cube might not instantly cool the liquid off, but it does make it less scorching, which makes taking the first sip more manageable. Taking any heat off conflict helps move you toward the goal of getting through the conflict and ultimately learning from it. Recognizing that anger and conflict will pass through a beginning, a middle, and an end will not in and of itself cool the entirety of the feelings, but it will certainly help infuse the situation with hope as you approach it with the bigger picture in mind.
Your Mind Always Wants to Match Your Body
Here is an awakening piece of wisdom that can radically transform both the way you handle your own anger and the way you shine light on others’ anger: Your mind always wants to match your body. In other words, however your body feels physically, your mind will race to create a narrative that makes sense out of why your body feels the way it does. For example, if you downed three energy drinks back to back, your body would mimic physiological anxiety. With a racing heart and body that feels physiologically anxious, your mind will search for the first possible reason it can find to explain why you might be feeling this way, and the rationale “I just had too much caffeine” would not likely be your mind’s answer. Instead, you might think, “Oh, no, I forgot to . . .” or “I can’t believe she said or did . . .” or something along those lines. Or perhaps you would think of a recent conflict that you didn’t feel entirely settled around, and you would start playing that conflict over and over in your mind. Your mind would literally create a story to match how your body was feeling.
Understanding this mind-body link will prevent you from creating conflict-producing narratives. If you become aware that your mind always wants to match your body, you will be able to avoid the kind of emotional pitfalls that attach themselves to your extreme internal stories.
People See Actions, Not Intentions
When you hurt others unintentionally, it’s natural for you to see your actions in light of your good intentions, but the reality is: People see only your actions, not your intentions. It’s natural, too, to judge others solely by their actions, whereas you judge yourself by your intentions. Because it’s natural for us to see our actions in light of our intentions and not to see others’ intentions behind their actions, we have a tendency to minimize the pain we cause others and maximize the pain they cause us.
Minimizing the pain we cause involves using language that frames actions in acceptable ways. We use words like “just” and “only” to soften the reality of our actions. “I just raised my voice a little” sounds more tolerable than “I was screaming out of control.” Regardless of how we choose to describe what we do, however, our actions speak for themselves.
An inmate in a maximum-security prison, whom I’ll call “Dave,” approached me to complain about his “unfair” prison sentence. I had just run a group he’d participated in, and he came up to me to talk one-on-one afterward.
Dave: “Man, Doc, they got me up in here for not making a truck payment.”
Me: “Wait. Please say that again, because I really want to understand.”
Dave: “I’m telling you, they got me in here for not making a truck payment.”
Me (in a lighthearted way): “That’s messed up. Honestly, I feel like I should pause this conversation and go call my wife; because if it’s true that they can give you a state bid for missing a single payment, that’s just scary . . .”
After we talked for a bit and he truly saw that I would never judge him for his actions, he felt safe enough to open up to me. That’s when his defensiveness broke way into a smile and then a laugh. Checking to see that no one else was around, he then disclosed a more complete version of his story (that is, he showed me another side of the box): He’d gotten high on crystal meth and stolen a big rig. So technically they did arrest him for “not making a truck payment.” He never made a payment because he’d hot-wired the truck and made off with it.
As comical as this true story is—and even Dave was able to laugh about the way he minimized what he did—it really exemplifies the concept of minimizing. Regardless of how any of us might attempt to soften our harsh actions with our descriptions, at the end of the day, what we did, we did, and the same is true of everyone else.
Extreme Language Produces Extreme Emotions
Think about a lemon. Don’t go grab one for real, but just imagine it. Really picture it. See the yellow color it has. Feel its texture in your mind. Visualize holding that lemon in your hands and see yourself ripping that lemon apart. See the juices fly out of it. Now bring that lemon up to your mouth and take a big bite out of it. Can you imagine it? Did your mouth pucker at all? If it did, then consider how powerful this is: Words that you said in your mind produced an actual physiological response in your body.
Understanding that abstract words have a physical effect is crucial, especially when it comes to anger. Acknowledging that words have an impact is especially important when we realize that we all talk to ourselves, and our self-talk is ongoing throughout the day. In fact, the default-mode network is our running internal dialogue, which is estimated to consist of anywhere between 50,000 and 70,000 thoughts a day.
Research from the field of cognitive behavioral psychology has long demonstrated that what we tell ourselves significantly affects how we feel. When it comes to self-talk, extreme language is the biggest instigator of anger and conflict. If you run into an unexpected traffic jam and you say to yourself, “This is terrible! This shouldn’t be happening! I can’t stand this!” then you are likely going to feel pretty upset. The problem with using extreme words, or catastrophizing, is that it elicits a stronger reaction from us than the situation warrants. (Catastrophizing, or creating a catastrophe where one doesn’t exist, is essentially making a mountain out of a molehill.) Perhaps more eye-opening, however, is the reality that extreme language is simply not accurate. Here’s what actually occurs when we use extreme language: An event happens, we lie to ourselves, and then we make ourselves unnecessarily angry or upset. What if we were to look at the unexpected traffic jam above through the lens of accurate language? You might say to yourself something like, “This is unfortunate. I wish this wasn’t happening right now, but it’s not the end of the world, and I can handle it.” The event stays the same, but how you feel about it and, ultimately, how you handle it shift.
The basic rule of language is that words mean something. The word “terrible,” for instance, means “extremely bad or severe.” Whereas it’s true that an unexpected traffic jam is unfortunate, it is less true that it is extremely bad or severe. By telling yourself something that’s not true, you respond much more intensely than the situation warrants. Conversely, it is true that the situation is unfortunate, but unfortunate situations do not require an extreme response or action from you.
Let’s break down the second sentence, “This shouldn’t be happening!” As we have seen, anytime we rely on the word “should,” we are talking about the cartoon world, because in the real world the traffic jam is actually happening. Again, the world is not letting you down or deliberately angering you in that instance; only your perspective is doing that. When, by using extreme language, you back yourself into a psychological corner in your cartoon world, the only way out of it is through more extremes. So if you tell yourself something “shouldn’t be happening” and it is, it makes sense that you feel you “can’t stand it!” But that cartoon-world reality is simply is not true, either—in the real world you are standing it.
The more accurate statement “I wish this wasn’t happening right now” is not only true, but it helps you set a healthy mental framework. From the time you were very young, you learned that wishes rarely come true. You might indeed wish that the traffic jam wasn’t happening in that moment, but you might also wish for a billion dollars. You are getting neither of those wishes in the moment. But it is also true that it’s not the end of the world, and you most certainly can handle it (as evidenced by the fact that you actually are).
When people rely on extreme language to describe their experience of the world, they also elicit extreme reactions from others. Be mindful of the hyperbole you use. In fact, be mindful of all your speech, because even if no one else is listening, you are. That is: You are listening to your own self-talk.
Here is a list of a few extreme words that can elicit extreme emotions:
• Always
• Never
• Everybody
• Nobody
• Can’t stand it
Each of those words is rarely literally true, yet they have the power to flood your body with more cortisol and adrenaline than most situations typically warrant. Instead of using extreme language to describe your world or the conflicts you encounter, do your best to use more balanced, accurate adjectives. Remember, the cartoon world is filled with “shoulds” and extremes and magical thinking; the real world is the reality that is right at hand. The more accurate your language, the more you are grounded in the real world, and the less unnecessary intensity you add to situations.
Try this: Without censoring yourself in any way, write down a description of a recent conflict you experienced. Use as many adjectives as come to mind, including extreme words if they are a natural part of your vernacular in such situations. After you’re finished, step away for a few minutes. Then, repeat the exercise, except this time describe the same situation without using any adjectives. Finally, take some time to read both descriptions of the conflict that you wrote down and observe your emotional reactions to each.
We Can Get Angry Without Knowing Why
Sometimes anger arises without us understanding where it comes from or why it’s there. Sometimes we get angry to avoid feeling shame, depression, or anxiety. I’ve found that it can be incredibly freeing for people to begin to understand why they might be feeling the way that they are. In his book Power vs. Force, Dr. David Hawkins discusses what he calls a “map of consciousness,” which can be used as a tool to show people how their thoughts contribute to how they feel. The map he created is one of my favorite mechanisms for helping people understand unconscious anger. I shortened it to five parts to create a scale of consciousness, as follows:
Knowledge/Compassion/Love
Anger
Anxiety
Depression
Shame
I call it a “scale” because it shows a general outline of basic levels of consciousness, or awareness. As you can see, at the bottom of the scale is shame. Shame is the lowest form of consciousness because it essentially amounts to people being aware enough to understand themselves as conscious beings but believing they are not worth anything. (Sometimes shame is conflated with guilt, but there is a distinction: With guilt, you might feel bad about what you do, whereas with shame, you feel bad about who you are.) As my own research and clinical experience has taught me over the last twenty years, people who live in shame act out of shame. In other words, if people feel worthless, there is very little to stop them from harming others. When people feel they are of little to no value, they tend to be unable to see or care about the value of others.
Right above shame on the scale is depression. When people are living in depression, they tend to live focused on the past and on their losses. Of course, clinical depression is also the result of chemical reactions in the brain, such as a lack of dopamine and serotonin, but just as the mind always wants to match the body, when the body feels physiologically sad, the mind tends to create a story to match it. In the case of depression, that story usually tends to center on the past.
Next up on the scale is anxiety. Neurologically, anxiety looks like fear. When you’re anxious, your brain is sending excess cortisol throughout your body to keep you in a state of constant alertness. Cognitively, people experiencing anxiety tend to focus on the future. The fear is usually centered on what “might happen.” Regardless of where a person’s thoughts go with physiological anxiety, just like in depression, there is also a physical, neurological component to what they are experiencing. At a minimum, that feeling is uncomfortable. At a maximum, as with shame and depression, it can lead to extreme self-harm and even death.
The fascinating part of the scale of consciousness comes next. You will notice on the scale that anger is above shame, depression, and anxiety. Now, to be clear, knowledge and all the positive emotions, like compassion and love, are above anger, but the startling reality is that anger is a higher form of consciousness than shame, depression, or anxiety. There is neurological evidence for this. The chemical makeup of shame, depression, and anxiety involves a shortage of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and an excess of cortisol, none of which feels good. Interestingly, though, when we lash out in anger, our body releases endorphins, the so-called feel-good chemicals that are typically released anytime we engage in physical activity. Endorphin release is the reason that if you get hurt, you yell. When you’re angry and lash out, you release endorphins, and you temporarily experience relief. Neurologically, we would rather be releasing endorphins than sitting in excess cortisol or suffering with a deficiency of serotonin or dopamine. This scale helps us make sense of why we sometimes get angry without knowing the reason. Anger carries us away from shame, depression, and anxiety.
Of course, that fact comes with a caveat. Just because it might make us temporarily feel better to escape shame, depression, or anxiety by lashing out in anger, that doesn’t mean we should lash out. In fact, when we do, we often find ourselves feeling bad about it, which increases our sense of shame, which begins or perpetuates what I call “the cycle of shame.” Without conscious education about this unhealthy cycle, people can continuously live out this behavioral pattern for a long time. The key to breaking free from the cycle of shame is to utilize the states of consciousness that exist above those first four. Knowledge provides the awareness of what’s happening. Compassion allows people to be easy on themselves when they are feeling shame, depression, or anxiety, which ultimately can lead to them talking about what’s occurring inside them in a healthy way. And love is the pinnacle: At our best, we are kind, caring, and compassionate.
The Transactional Dynamics of Conflict
Conscious education isn’t just about you understanding what’s occurring on an individual psychological level. It also involves you having a sense of how basic interpersonal dynamics tend to play out. To understand the dynamics of conflict, it’s important to develop a bird’s-eye view of the impact you have on others and how they, in turn, impact you.
You play a role in every interaction you have. Your every action elicits a reaction in others. Although we are all responsible solely for what we do in life, it would be unrealistic to deny that our actions influence others and vice versa. In other words, you don’t cause others to act in a specific way (or they, you), but your actions do influence others’ reactions, just as theirs influence yours. Since you experience your role through a first-person perspective, it’s difficult to see how you’re affecting others in the moment. The more skilled you become at identifying people’s behavioral patterns while they’re occurring, the more effectively you will be able to alter what you’re doing to affect what others do right then and there. Knowing this pattern will radically shift the way you handle conflict.
In the late 1950s, a psychiatrist named Eric Berne conceived a model of human interactions that he called “transactional analysis.” Transactional analysis (TA) might sound intimidating, but “trans” just means “across,” and “actions” are behaviors, and “analysis” is to evaluate something, so transactional analysis is simply a method of evaluating the way people interact.
TA is centered on the idea that communication can almost be seen as a game. (In fact, in 1964 Berne wrote a book called Games People Play, which became a major best seller.) That is, you learned long ago that when you act one way, others respond accordingly, and when you act a different way, their responses change. We play games to get what we want, not because we’re wrong or bad or inherently manipulative, but because we’ve learned somewhere along the way that people respond to each other in fairly predictable patterns. Furthermore, according to Berne, everyone lives out of what he calls three “ego states”: Parent, Adult, and Child.
The Parent ego state is split into the Nurturing Parent and the Critical Parent. As its name implies, the Nurturing Parent is the part of you that’s loving, kind, and compassionate; it’s the caretaker in you. The Critical Parent, on the other hand, is, as its name indicates, the critical, demanding part of you that insists others be how you deem they “should” be (that is, according to your cartoon-world view).
The Child ego state is split into two parts as well. The Fun Child is the part of you that wants to be carefree, laugh, joke, play around, and have fun. The Hurt Child is the “poor me” aspect of you that is ever the victim and for whom nothing is ever enough.
The Adult ego state is the rational, logical part of you. Your Adult regulates all the other ego states, and when the Adult does not check the other states, we tend to suffer. For example, if your Nurturing Parent state is too active, without the Adult to regulate it, you will likely find yourself being taken advantage of by or enabling others. If you have too much Critical Parent without the Adult to balance it, you’re just mean and toxic to be around. Too much Fun Child without enough Adult, and you are highly irresponsible. Too much Hurt Child without the Adult, and you become the insufferably helpless victim who is draining to others. You need the Adult to anchor and balance you, and when you have it, you can effectively share the best aspects of your Nurturing Parent and Fun Child with others.
The Critical Parent ego state tends to play the biggest role in conflict. The Critical Parent brings out either the Hurt Child or the Critical Parent in others. If it elicits the Hurt Child, the result can be a seemingly endless drama of blame and victimhood. The Critical Parent might say something to the effect of, “You shouldn’t have done . . . ,” to which the Hurt Child replies, “You don’t understand how hard it is for me . . .” and the two of them struggle to be able to listen to each other, much less reach consensus. But some of the highest levels of conflict arise when one person’s Critical Parent brings out the Critical Parent in others. A Critical Parent to Critical Parent interaction often consists of two people going back and forth in a manner that escalates: I fire at you, and you fire back at me, in an ever-intensifying spiral. Critical Parent to Critical Parent is a content-to-content interaction, in which I say, “You are a . . . ,” and you say, “Well, you are a . . . ” From a position of Critical Parent, neither of us makes the effort to genuinely listen to or validate the other.
I include TA in this “Essential Wisdom” section not only to give you an easily understandable model of human dynamics but also to help you see that one of the best ways you can ever handle anger and conflict is by staying in your Adult ego state, regardless of what ego state others are in. Staying in the Adult means maintaining control of yourself and not being reactive. It’s not going up with other people’s anger highs or down with their self-pity lows. When you learn to stay in your Adult consistently, you will find yourself remaining clear and effective regardless of how out of control others might be.
Imagine there’s a couch against a wall, and you throw a rubber ball into the couch. It stays there, right? So if you want to throw the ball again, you have to walk all the way over, pick it up, walk all the way back, and then throw it again. Eventually, you’d get tired and stop throwing the ball.
Essentially, I teach people to “be the couch” when handling conflict. When you’re the couch (or when you’re in your Adult ego state), you don’t fire back at others, and eventually they lose steam and stop sending negative energy your way. Quite literally what this looks like is you responding to others’ process by validating them rather than getting caught up in the content of what they say. As others lose the energy of their anger, you are able to help them pull out their Adult.
The most effective way to be the couch and stay in your Adult is to listen and validate others. Once others feel validated, they are able to move into their own Adult ego state. In an Adult to Adult interaction, the focus is more on exploring options than on expressing emotions. The more you are able to stay in your Adult ego state, the more you will be able to bring out the Adult in others.
Imagine your coworker accuses you of doing something you haven’t done. Imagine this person accosts you and is visibly enraged. The more defensive you become, the more you make yourself the solid wall against which the person can keep firing, which only escalates the conflict. If, instead, you can validate the person’s anger (using language like “Sounds like you’re really angry” or “It seems like you’re pretty convinced it was me who did that”) without being attached or defensive, the more you are the couch, and the less that person has to react against. Your ego will likely want you to rise to the Critical Parent level and defend yourself (“I didn’t say that!”), or your Hurt Child might want to sulk (“It’s not fair that you’re accusing me”)—both perspectives are from a cartoon-world belief that the person “shouldn’t” be accusing you, but the reality is that they are, and all you can do is work from this moment forward. Transactional analysis can be an incredibly empowering tool to help you identify both how others affect you and how you affect others, so that you can operate from your Adult. The more focused you stay on process, from your Adult, the faster the other person in the conflict will de-escalate and be able find their own Adult.
In addition to your cartoon-world mind inundating you with all the “shoulds” that you believe “need” to be happening, there is another, even deeper way that your mind attempts to convince you that you have control over reality. Counterfactual thinking is comprised of the “If . . . then” statements we use to give ourselves the illusion that we have more control than we do. Counterfactuals help people mentally undo events or create an alternative reality. Sometimes we use counterfactuals to imagine a better outcome than the one that occurred: “If I had insisted that my son not play football, then he wouldn’t have gotten into that car accident on his way to practice.” We also use counterfactuals to consider how things might have been worse: “If I had taken that higher paying job, then I might have been on that plane that was in an accident, so it’s a good thing I didn’t take the job.” Counterfactuals either help us feel like we have more control than we actually do or help us confirm what we cannot change.
Understanding counterfactual thinking is important because doing so helps us see how we create fictitious realities and then base actual emotions on them. When it comes to anger and conflict management, all too often people attempt to attribute control where control doesn’t exist. Understanding counterfactuals allows you to meet people where they are, discern their logic, and lead them in a way that helps them direct themselves down the path that’s best for them. It also helps you walk through your own anger in the most conscious way possible. In addition, counterfactual thinking can skew the way you explore options with others, so it’s vital to be aware of the way it impacts decision-making, both when you’re exploring options that have already been made and when you’re looking at future options.
Doubt Your Assumptions
Whereas counterfactuals take what’s already happened and create an “If . . . then” consequential perspective, assumptions are essentially proactive “If . . . then” ideas: “If we work together, we can bring down this mammoth,” or “If we try this, we might get this result.” Every risk, small or large, is predicated on an assumption, even if that assumption occurs below our conscious awareness.
My guess is that it was evolutionarily advantageous for us to make assumptions. The human intellect has made it possible for us to succeed on a planet where we are not the strongest, fastest, biggest, or most physically capable. We succeeded as a species in many ways thanks not just to our ability to evaluate completed actions and see what happened (that is, learning through stimulus response), but also because of our ability to make assumptions about what might happen.
Risks predicated on assumptions helped us survive; but the dark underside of risk is failure, and the reality is that assumptions do not always work out. When it comes to conflict, making assumptions often gets you into more trouble than not. The key factor to avoiding unnecessary, assumption-driven anger is doubt, which gives you the ability to say, “Maybe I don’t see the whole picture.” Doubting your assumptions does two important things. First, it grants you a moment to pause and rein in impulsive reactions. Second, it adds an element of uncertainty that can soften your anger. But it’s important to avoid confusing doubting your assumptions with any other kind of doubt (such as doubting your abilities). Doubting your assumptions applies only to you taking a moment to realize that you might not be seeing all the sides of the proverbial box. The more you can do that up front, the less likely you’ll be to react angrily
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu wrote, “The ancient Masters didn’t try to educate the people, but kindly taught them to not-know.” This statement might seem contradictory, but in Taoism “not-knowing” is a sign of wisdom, much different from the confident “knowing” assumptions of the ego. Lao Tzu also wrote, “When they think that they know the answers, people are difficult to guide. When they know that they don’t know, people can find their own way.” Doubting your own certainty, as well as helping people doubt theirs, is one of the most useful ways to de-escalate conflict and walk directly through anger.
Understanding Crisis-Prone People
Imagine a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being the baseline of a normal-functioning brain and 10 being the brain experiencing a high crisis. Crisis-prone people’s brains regularly operate at a high point in the scale, and they often resort to conflict because they don’t know a better way to deal with what is happening inside of them. As you’ve seen, it’s natural for your mind to want to match your body, so if your body feels chemically off or physically anxious, for example, your mind will race to make up a story to match how you feel. When you look at the baseline of a normal-functioning brain, you see that it doesn’t operate as if it’s in a crisis.
Notice that my description is a “normal-functioning brain” and makes no reference to a person being “normal” or not. This is only a descriptor of the way the human brain normally develops. Although we are hard-wired to take in and ultimately handle crises, the normal development of the human brain takes longer than brain development in many other species. Infants and toddlers, for example, are naturally dependent on others to handle their safety. When people experience a trauma, however, their brain circuitry rewires to be ready for any kind of crisis at any time. This is what I would call a crisis-prone individual: a person whose brain already feels as if it’s in crisis and who is ready to see a crisis in any situation.
Because crisis-prone people’s amygdalae tend to be on higher alert than normal-functioning brains (usually because they have endured trauma), they tend to feel as if they are in crisis more frequently. Feeling physiologically in crisis (from excess cortisol and adrenaline), crisis-prone people have a tendency to create crises around them to make sense of how they feel. It’s not that crisis-prone people enjoy being in crisis situations; rather, it’s that being in an actual crisis makes the most sense for them (because their minds are racing to match their body). Until, of course, they learn a more conscious way of handling their physiological emotions (for example, through mindfulness, emotion regulation, or other techniques).
If you find that you have a tendency to “create problems” where none exist, you might be struggling with crisis-prone tendencies. Learning to avoid creating a story is paramount to dealing with the kind of anxiety that your brain vibrating at a 4 or a 5 can bring. If, conversely, you find yourself encountering crisis-prone individuals, then it’s extremely important to be mindful of what might be occurring with them. The more you recognize that the person feels in crisis, the less you have to take that crisis personally, and the more you can focus on being the couch, for example, and reflecting process far more than content. In either case, knowledge is power—or, perhaps more accurately, knowledge is a pathway to peace.
Summary
Conscious education is about moving people from emotion to reason at the speed of insight. There is a difference between intellectually recognizing psychological concepts and practicing them in your everyday life. The more you practice living in accord with the wisdom that you understand intellectually, the easier it will be to share information with others in ways that inspire them to want to listen to what you have to offer. Conscious education helps widen people’s perspective on life by adding meaningful insight. Since anger and conflict tend to narrow our vision, conscious education—widening what we see—is especially important in times of conflict and difficult emotional experiences.