Some conflicts must be managed, meaning they continue between people but they are not allowed to dominate the relationship. We “agree to disagree,” we say. A more or less palatable outcome at times that — in theory anyway — ends the contest and interrupts darker feelings. I bet you’ve been there. So have I.
However, it may still be worthwhile to ask about the impacts of this agreement with disagreement. Some intentions are clearly good — to avoid rancor, for instance. But the agreement to disagree also largely means that vulnerability and learning are both curtailed. There probably won’t be any big new insight into the workings of another person or the workings of ourselves, no acknowledgement, for example, where we might have been wrong, no new or refined perspective or change to our behavior, no lesson. We may have worn out the conflict but we have not resolved it.
Suppose — and I think this is quite common — that under all that non-change I continue to operate on the basis of ongoing negative beliefs or assumptions about another person’s style and motives. Applying this mindset as a filter wherever the other person shows up, these assumptions subtly, even unconsciously, continue to color my views even if they are — by “agreement” — unspoken. Things seem okay, but are they? Part of the problem is that through the practice of agreeing to disagree I may learn to suppress my full feelings from my awareness — they only leak when I have a chance to complain behind the scenes.
An example. I happened to be talking with one of my clients, a very hard working manager, and he confessed that every time a certain employee of his asks about my client’s new baby, he hears an attempt to manipulate. They get along well enough, he says, but an undertone is there. “He’s a family guy,” my client explains, “and he’s asking me about my new baby — our first child — because he doesn’t want to work past five. He’s trying to convince me family should be so important. If I buy it he’ll be less on the hook for the hard work past five that his job requires. Obviously he doesn’t want me to work as hard as I do because then he might have to work hard, too.” (This is a true story. I’m not making it up.)
I’m sure you can sense the nature of the conflict between these two managers, but there’s also an internal conflict for my client that may not be as evident, one he generally hides but is willing to share on this occasion. It’s clear he’s being hit by his employee in a spot that’s a little tender. He acknowledges to me he’s working out what it means to be a father. He acknowledges (and his wife has already provided this feedback to him) that whenever he picks up the baby it’s to a solve a problem, not just to enjoy and love and cuddle this new little person in his arms, his son. He’s picking up the baby because the baby needs to be changed, because he’s crying, because he’s hungry. Otherwise, let him bond with Mom.
To treat a baby as an object in this way is tragic. And he can see an obvious parallel to his own management style, a pattern that makes his issues more global. He tells me that he’s at work to solve problems, critique others’ performance and correct mistakes — that’s his purpose. He fills in the technical depth when others don’t know what to do. He’s there to do the work himself if it becomes necessary. He’s not there to relate to other people, he says — and therein lies the not so hidden conflict. When asked about his baby what he hears is that negative assumption about his report’s motives. If he relates, he tells me, meaning he takes the question about his baby at face value and as sincere, then he risks being used. And that’s an intolerable thought.
So he silently “agrees to disagree” about how much work a manager should put in, complaining about it in the background even before any overt conflict between the two of them emerges. He clings to a private and undiscussed negative assumption — which is to say he clings to his own avoidance by wrapping it in an unspoken insult he shares behind the scenes. In this way he stays out of the dark place that is core to the conflict inside himself. If the conflict were out in the open, he might have to go through that most difficult part of the journey, the tight, personally vulnerable space of seeing something about himself as a person, a kind of tunnel — which can truly be quite a mysterious passage for people, one often imagined to be more difficult and painful than it actually is.
Ironically, something can happen on that journey — if it is truly embraced rather than avoided or refused — something that is as much about about forgetfulness as about insight, as much about nepenthe, the mythic drug that alleviates sorrow as about understanding. This is because part of working through conflict means ultimately surrendering some aspect of what we are so sure of in our negative thoughts about other people. At some point, maybe without really being aware of it, some part of the feedback coming our way gets through and we begin to sacrifice — even for just a moment — the self-protective negative assumptions we’ve made about another person.
I think this is often a more or less natural reflex that enables human growth, almost a faculty, one we are lucky to have. Losing focus on our negative beliefs enables us to come closer to ourselves and the discovery that it’s no longer about other people and their motivations. It’s about us and our responsibilities, who we are in truth, not who they are in our fantasies. The faculty helps us stop pretending. We stop believing that we’re being gaslit or victimized and accept some kernal of a truth that has been hard to see. Some would call this recovering a projection, but I’m not sure it’s always about Shadow so much as confronting scattered pieces of old conditioning and fears that simply haven’t yet been understood.
Who knows exactly what real transcendence is and when it will come. It seems to me the best thing is to make all the feelings and worries and negative beliefs about self and others supremely conscious in order to look at them plainly and to pick through them carefully — and then — and this is critical — to give it a rest, maybe even to sleep. Because it’s just insane to hold onto all that nonsense. It doesn’t help to cling and with a little letting go there’s a shift to a simpler heart.
Following the example above, someday I hope my client will be able to say to his report exactly what he said to me:
Ah, my son. He is incredible and when he smiles he lights up the whole world!”
And let it go at that, rather than focusing on some story of how he’s being maneuvered.
All those negative, dark and darker beliefs we store up. All those assumptions. All those fears of what could be done to us. It’s like recognizing that the complicated pre-Copernican algorithms we have used to define how our universe operates are actually incorrect. I find I have been living an illusion. I realize I travel around the sun, not the sun travels around me.
Every conflict I’ve ever known is filled with such overly complex calculations, false paradigms, negative beliefs that in the end are discovered to hardly have substance at all. If my work fails it’s because those in conflict maintain their place and status — and their stories about one another — not risking the true journey but instead agreeing to disagree.
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