Reality TV is generally not the first place one should turn to find models of effective communication. That’s why it was shocking to watch a scene in the latest season of Love Island US, in which Chris, a basketball player, asks the woman he’s seeing – Huda, a fitness influencer – if there’s anything he does that bothers her.
It affects his mood “when something goes wrong, but I’m confused about what happened”, he says.
What happened was that Chris taught a yoga class to the islanders (as Love Island contestants are called) and had asked everyone except Huda if they had anything to share.
Huda, sounding sad, says he had skipped over her.
“I did forget you, you’re right,” Chris says.
It was a surprisingly mature conversation for Love Island, a show where attractive singles in skimpy swimsuits get locked in a villa for several weeks and try to find love. It can be difficult to approach conflict in a healthy way in such a high-pressure environment: on-air conflict tends to involve contestants shouting over each other and hurling insults.
So what does healthy conflict actually look like, and how do you practice it? We asked experts about how to approach conflict with romantic partners, family members and co-workers. Spoiler: the advice applies in basically any situation. It might even work on Love Island.
Is conflict actually good for us?
The first thing to know about conflict is that it should not be avoided.
“Conflict is normal and healthy,” says Rachel Moheban Wachtel, a licensed clinical social worker in New York who has worked extensively with couples. Conflict can be essential to deepening intimacy, understanding and connection, she says.
If she gets mad at her husband, and he notices her reaction is disproportionate to the situation – which happens all the time with couples – “it’s an opportunity for him to learn what’s going on with me”, she explains. “It’s learning what each other’s triggers are.”
Perhaps counterintuitively, if you don’t have any conflicts in your relationship, “then you have to worry”, she says.
Disagreements can also teach us about ourselves, says Dr Sara Corse, chief clinical officer at the Council for Relationships in Philadelphia.
“We think we know what we think and feel, and we think we know what other people think and feel, but we’re often wrong,” she says. Having a difficult conversation can help us clarify or evolve our own views on a topic. (In my own relationship, for example, conflict has taught me a great deal about how to properly load a dishwasher. Apparently you don’t just toss in dishes at random and hope for the best.)
Dr Amy Gallo, the author of Getting Along: How to Work With Anyone (Even Difficult People) and contributing editor to the Harvard Business Review, says conflict is her “favorite topic”.
“People assume that, as a conflict expert, I get brought into organizations to help them deal with too much conflict. It’s the exact opposite,” she says. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, what I’m helping leaders and organizations do is have more conflict.”
Conflict leads to better work outcomes and stronger relationships within an organization, Gallo says, because it leads to “a more inclusive environment where people feel like there’s psychological safety. They can say what’s on their minds and disagree with the people around them because that’s a normal thing.”
Why do we find conflict so challenging?
If conflict is so great, why are so many people uncomfortable with it?
Many of us are socialized to avoid conflict, Gallo says. As a result, people can fear that disagreement is a sign that something has gone wrong, or that it signals to others that they are a difficult person.
“We are taught over and over again that conflict is incredibly difficult, negative and destructive,” Gallo says. “Very rarely are we given the message that it’s normal to disagree, and differences of opinion make a team stronger.”
Still, it’s important to not go overboard in our confrontations.
“There are dysfunctional patterns in some families where they do most of life in a conflictual way,” says Corse. Conflict can strengthen intimacy, but it should not be the primary tool for building closeness, she argues. Sometimes, it’s best to just let things go.
“It’s an internal balance of: I don’t need to pick every fight, I don’t need to always be right,” Corse says.
How can we deal with conflict better?
Although conflict is normal, many of us have never learned how to do it well. Here are some techniques experts use.
Listen: “One of the tools I use in therapy a lot is empathic reflecting,” says Corse. This involves actively listening to someone and then repeating back in your own words what you heard them say.
Often, people get empathic reflecting wrong, Corse says. “Someone tells us something, and in order to be empathic, we start telling our story, and we miss acknowledging and validating what the other person said,” she explains. In conflict, this can devolve into a verbal tennis match with each side volleying grievances at the other without truly hearing what the other person has to say.
When both parties feel heard, healing can happen without each side needing to agree with the other. “Processing helps you resolve it,” says Moheban Wachtel. “As long as each person has expressed their position and feels heard, they can move on.”
Balance the positive and the negative: When you have an issue with someone, “you don’t only want to talk about the negative”, says Moheban Wachtel. Ideally, one offers four positives for every negative.
“It’s saying: ‘I love this, this, this and this about you, but when you do this, it really hurts me,’” she explains.
Doing this not only makes it easier for the listener to take criticism, it also forces the speaker to communicate their position in a healthy, loving way, Moheban Wachtel says.
Pause if things get too heated: Even when everyone involved has an open mind and the best intentions, conflict is challenging, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. If this happens to one or both parties, it’s a good idea to take a break.
“When I think about what is healthy conflict resolution, it starts with being able to calm yourself emotionally,” Corse says.
If you start to feel yourself getting overwhelmed – maybe your heart’s racing, or your breath is shallow – ask for a timeout. And when you do, make sure to signal to the other person that you’re still invested in the conversation. Corse suggests saying something like: “Can we take a break to calm ourselves down? I want to be able to hear what you’re thinking, and I want to be able to share what I’m thinking, but right now we’re too emotional to have a productive conversation.”
You don’t have to be perfect: “The challenge with healthy conflict is that it often veers between healthy and unhealthy the entire time,” says Gallo. Someone may slip in a snide comment or raise their voice. “We’re humans, we’re messy,” she says.
Gallo says that when she evaluates whether a conflict is healthy or not, she evaluates whether it helped the team reach its goals in some way. Did your disagreement bring you closer to your partner? Did it help your team at work make a decision about a project? That is more important than whether both parties remained even-keeled during the whole discussion.
Repair, repair, repair: For Moheban Wachtel, the benefits of conflict come from how you repair after it happens.
“It’s processing the conflict, and understanding why it happened, and what’s going on in each person’s subjective reality,” she says. “That processing helps you resolve it.”
