Conflict is an opportunity for growth and for coming together. It can be, at least. I know a lot of us think that conflict is bad and that we should avoid having fights with people. But what I have found in my life is that my best relationships have often grown through conflict. I want to talk about my own experience this morning, but first let me look at this question: who do I have some of the best relationships in my life with? My mother, my brother, my wife, my kids. And who have I had the most fights with in my life? My mother, my brother, my wife, my kids.
So what I see is that conflict is kind of like friction. If you think of friction in woodworking, in sanding, you are making the surface of something smoother by sanding off the rough edges. Conflict in relationships is an opportunity, if we allow it to be, to sand off the rough edges, to grow together, to learn, to do character building. And yes, it is painful.
A hard morning at the Green Thumb Festival
This morning I went to the Green Thumb Festival in St. Petersburg, Florida with my family, which is my wife and my two kids. My daughter had what appeared to be an allergic reaction to something this morning. She had this yogurt pop. She had three of them yesterday, then she had one last night, and then she had one first thing in the morning today. And then she started sneezing, just constantly sneezing and sneezing. She spiraled and got frustrated with her body. She ended up just laying in the wagon the whole Green Thumb Festival and being pretty miserable.
I was trying to figure out what was going on with this. What is the cause of this? What can we learn out of this? My wife was being pretty defensive about it, thinking we should just treat the symptoms and see if we could comfort our daughter. And I said, no, we need to figure out what the cause is. Not what can we do to take the edge off the symptoms, but why this, and why now? Because to me, the body is sending us messages. What I have found is that my body is always trying to send me a message with what it is doing.
The message I believe my body sends
Take how I had a hemorrhoid last month. In my experience, it was self-manifested. I look at the symptoms that come up on my body as a message from my body. Dear Jerry, please adjust your thinking. Here is what your behavior or your thinking mentally has led to physically. I looked at it that way with the hemorrhoid I had last month. The way I had been thinking about a particular person in my life, feeding it and making this person out to be a big pain in my ass, even though they were not really that much a part of my life, well, I manifested a physical pain in my ass. It was like the physical manifestation of that pain was a sign of what it looked like in my head mentally. Do you want to continue doing this? It was a message from my body to stop making someone else a pain in my ass, because it is annoying. Fix this.
To me, the message from the body was: here is a pain in your ass to symbolize what you have been doing in your head. I hope you can use this as motivation to clean up your mind. And that is exactly what I did. I asked for lots of help. Yes, I did some physical practices, like I started taking some Epsom salt baths. But the main work I did was to talk through this issue I had with the person I thought was a big pain in my ass. I also thanked my body. I said, thank you for this hemorrhoid. Thank you, I see what you are saying, and I am going to fix this. And I did, and it is gone. I have talked to other people and heard them say they have struggled with these for years, and mine went away within a month, because I looked for what I did that led my body to send me this physical message. To me that experience was optional. I did not have to have it. And then I asked, what can I learn out of this so we get rid of it and do not have to have it happen again?
Treating the cause instead of the symptoms
So I was approaching my daughter's allergic reaction this morning with that mindset. Let's explore this. Was she upset at somebody? Was this something she ate? I just talked through it: what is the cause of this? My wife said, oh, maybe she can have some ice cream. And I said no, we do not want to take the edge off the symptoms. What caused this? We started to have some friction from there, because my wife was focusing on treating the symptoms. And I said, I grew up treating the symptoms, and what that leaves you is sicker and sicker. You do not learn anything. You do not build any character when all you do is treat symptoms. Now, I am not saying there is not a place and a time. I am obviously not a medical doctor. This is my experience in my life.
And this is how we got into conflict this morning. My wife started to attack, to get upset, to say nasty things. And I started to be defensive and criticize her back. We had a long, hurtful, annoying morning at the Green Thumb Festival today. My son was climbing a tree. He is six and he was doing this rope tree-climbing thing for the first time. I was standing on one side of the tree and she was standing on the other, so we could not see each other. She walked over near me with my daughter in the wagon and then pulled up several feet away, ten feet away, so we were not next to each other, that kind of thing.
I have found, for me personally, that being quiet does generally not help things. I have to talk things out to figure out what is going on. Some people can just sit there by themselves and think about something and figure it all out. But for me, it really helps me to talk about things, to process and work through the ideas, to keep things flowing. So I talked things through with my wife. I said, look, this is what I did. Yes, I was a bit pushy here. I owned up to where I was hurtful, where I was impatient.
Why I need the other person to own their part
And then she did not want to do the same. When we first met, our pattern was that I would be the problem and she would be the victim. I would cause all the problems and get all the attention in the relationship, and she would be the one there trying to save me. We had tons of conflicts earlier in our relationship over that, and it was hard to stop those, because in every situation I had to behave badly, she had to be the victim, and I had to apologize. That left us in a position where she never could learn or develop or build her character, because it was always all about me. And that is exactly what she wanted, until I got sober and started working on myself and got to a point where every problem we have in life is not me.
So I went after the issue this morning. I said, look, you bought these Go-Gurt pops, and there is a good chance the most logical thing I can see is that you bought something our daughter had an allergic reaction to, after we had agreed we would not buy crap like that, like ultra-processed foods. Why did you buy that? Well, we were going to have a long day and I just wanted a treat. I said, why is this how you are thinking? You need to change your thinking and not be thinking that junk is a treat. I do not think smoking a cigarette is a treat. Why is putting food in your body that is not nutritious a treat?
So I owned what I did. And I also said, you are going to own what you did here too. My wife seems to struggle to see what she contributed a lot of the time, because she is so focused on blaming. That is our conflict. For me, I struggle to feel better until the other person owns what they did, too, unless it is a lower-level relationship that does not matter as much. But if it is my wife, then that is a high-level relationship. You are not just going to sit there and do whatever you want without me taking your inventory, too.
Helping my daughter hear her own body
Then I talked to my daughter. I asked, what is the message from your body? What did you learn out of this? I told her, you can talk to your body. Tell your body that if the message was to think about what you eat, that the yogurt caused an allergic reaction and you should not do that again, then it can stop the symptoms. I have got the message. Her symptoms stopped almost immediately after that. She said, okay, I got the message. She said, I need to eat better. And I said, how? She said, I do not know how. I told her, you need to think, when you are eating food, about what the food is and how it is going to impact your body. How is it going to taste, but also how is this going to fuel my body and nourish my body? That should be your primary thing.
So my daughter suffered and struggled this morning, but I think she got a valuable learning lesson out of it. And I would like to think the conflict was productive, because my wife and I get along better than we ever have. We have been through a lot of conflicts and a lot of constructive criticism for each other, and a lot of not-so-constructive criticism, too.
Conflict as a healthy part of relationships
I have come to believe it helps to analyze these things in your life and look deeper into stuff beyond symptoms, and to not be so afraid of conflict. If your relationships cannot survive conflict, then you may need some better relationships. But also, getting through conflicts, learning and growing together, can help you understand the other person.
Laura was feeling a bit defensive because she grew up in a household of Christian Scientists, where they were not generally big into doctors and that sort of thing. She thinks she already knows the stuff I am saying, but I told her, you do not know the stuff I am saying. How you grew up is not what I am saying. What you are describing is actually how I grew up. I have a mother who is a veterinarian. We were a very medical, treat-the-symptoms household. So when you tell me to treat the symptoms, I grew up with that exact paradigm.
But I am not telling you to just do what you grew up with. I am sharing something I have learned. I told Laura she could be more open-minded and not attack and defend so much, but ask more questions. When I say something she does not agree with, she could ask questions instead of attacking me and trying to give me a different idea. But I also told her that I want to ask her more questions, too. I want to explore her more instead of trying to push my own viewpoints on her so much.
What I love about sharing online is that it is a lot about sharing my own viewpoints, but I find hearing a lot of other people's viewpoints helpful, too. If you want to see more of how I think through my marriage, my parenting, and my own growth, I share a lot of that in my Life playlist. So that is my viewpoint today on how conflict can be a productive, helpful part of relationships. It can be valuable for character building, whether it is conflict between people, countries, or groups. I do not think we need to look at all conflict as bad. Ideally, it should be verbal. Talk things out. Think about things. It should never be violent conflict when you can express yourself without that. I hope it added value to your life.