How Your Conflict Style Can Seriously Affect Your Relationships and Your Children

How do you feel about conflict?

Do you remember your parents arguing?

Nobody learns how to deal with conflict or arguments at school. It’s something that we just pick up along the journey into adulthood.

Usually we learn about arguing and conflict from our carers or siblings, starting at a very young age. And if you don’t enjoy conflict now, there’s a good chance it is because of those experiences at a younger age.

What you learned about conflict influences how we behave in arguments and conflict today.

You might prefer to avoid conflict. Maybe you feel you have to win every argument. Or you end up feeling defensive and made to feel like every argument is your fault.

Crucially, your argument style will not just affect your happiness in your current relationship, but also can have a serious impact on even the long term emotional, mental and physical health of your children (if or when you have them).

Research shows how poorly handled conflict in front of children can have an extremely damaging impact on them. For example, research by E. Mark Cummings revealed how children repeatedly exposed to hostile strategies used by parents when they argue become anxious, distraught and hopeless. However, it is not only in the short term that there are negative effects. In the long term it can affect children’s ability to form healthy relationships in the future, lead to negative emotional health and also even influence physical health, leading to increased sickness.

So what is negatively handled conflict?

First of all, everyone argues from time to time. Even the happiest relationships sometimes experience arguments. In fact, research has also shown that children who are exposed to parents managing conflict in a healthy way actually grow up to be more emotionally balanced and resilient.

When handled well, arguing can be a part of developing a closer relationship with your partner.

When talking about negatively handled conflict, this includes:

Physical aggression — like pushing, restraining or hitting.
Verbal aggression — this could include swearing, naming calling, insults and threatening to abandon your partner. This can also include shouting.
Stone walling — for example, giving the silent treatment, walking out, sulking or other forms of avoidance.
Giving in — where you may pay lip service to what is being said, but you basically are hiding your true feelings away.

Of course, you can imagine that any form of regular aggressive behaviour between parents would negatively impact children. If your parents used to have arguments that were out of control, just reflect on how it impacts your current life and relationships.

I have frequently worked with clients of all ages who still have nightmares about their parents’ arguments. They often would rather avoid any conflict, feeling their fight or flight response kicking in at the slightest sign of a raised voice. When there is conflict, the fear response kicks in and they are completely unable to deal with conflict in a resourceful way.

Stonewalling, or giving the silent treatment can have even worse effects on children. Avoiding conflict can lead to long term negative emotional health with children, as well as giving them no education in a healthy way to manage conflict.

The same goes with giving in to your partner just to try to end the conflict. When you just go along with what is said, you might think avoiding hostile arguments would be less damaging to kids, however children pick up on subtle emotional cues from their parents and they sense that something is wrong. This can infer that something is wrong, but left unsaid and can be one of the most damaging relationship strategies. Gottman terms stonewalling as one of the 4 Horsemen.

Even though you may currently engage in a negative argument style, you can change it.

The first thing is to become aware of your current arguing style. You can take this relationship quiz to help find out your current style.

Some people are very aware of their current arguing style. However, some people are surprised to find out that they may engage in a more negative way of handling conflict than they realised.

Once you are aware of your current conflict management style, you can start to work on changing it.

Most arguments are not about the topic that they superficially seem to be about. That disagreement about taking out the trash is often more about a feeling of lack of respect, consideration or caring, or something else.

Our experiences from the past influence how we experience our arguments now, as well as how we experience our partner’s behaviour.

Therefore, some steps to help improve your conflict style include:

Become aware of where your current reaction and behaviours in arguing developed.
Separate your response from what the other person is saying.
Be more aware of your partner’s feelings.
Try to understand where their response is coming from, and reflect back to then what they are saying.
Develop more empathy for your partner. Even if you don’t agree with what is being said, developing your empathy can help lead to a healthier conflict style.

Whatever your current arguing style, developing healthier ways of managing conflict will improve your own level of happiness, have a positive impact in your relationships and also lead to better emotional, mental and physical health in your children.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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