The War Inside
“If you avoid conflict to keep the peace, you start a war inside yourself.” - Cheryl Richardson
”If you avoid conflict to keep the peace, you start a war inside yourself.” – Cheryl Richardson.
One of the insights that stayed with me after our latest corporate retreat is this: Just because you avoid conflict doesn’t mean its causes disappear.
What I saw clearly in a moment of conflict between two participants (though I already ”knew” it intellectually) was this:
When two or more people are caught up in their heads: feeling attacked, misunderstood, or ashamed of how they expressed themselves, no gold can emerge. Quite the opposite. They drift further apart, each lost in their own version of reality.
Clarity only returns once one or both fall out of that tornado of fearful, fast thinking. And that can‘t happen until each person realises they‘re in it, and stops being hypnotised by the story their mind is spinning.
The shift tends to come more quickly when they allow their experience to move through them, rather than resisting it. Because what you resist, persists.
At that moment of seeing, something softens. They realise: a) it‘s not personal, and/or b) they‘re not responsible for the other person‘s reaction.
Even when connection returns, it doesn‘t mean everyone will see eye to eye, or that the relationship will go back to how it was.
But like a good storm, something always shifts.
And that is marvellous.
Emma x
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