This reflection exercise can reduce post-conflict stress and increase relationship satisfaction.
You’ve just had an argument. It’s over for the moment, but you’re left sitting there, upset or angry or perhaps completely befuddled by what just happened. What did just happen?
What do you do, right now? What is your usual post-conflict action?
What you do in the immediate aftermath of a disagreement does make a difference. If you ruminate or vent, you’re likely to impair your decision-making and increase your aggression.
Make a better choice:
Do something that supports your view of yourself as someone who can resolve conflict and manage your emotions. This is important for both your personal wellbeing and your relationship with the other person.
When we believe we can resolve conflict and manage our emotions, this sense of agency and efficacy has been shown to increase our relationship satisfaction and reduce vexing behaviors during disagreement.
Reflection activities are excellent post-conflict interventions because they contribute to this kind of agency and efficacy. They help us regain command of ourselves, help us think clearly again, and give us something meaningful to do when we or they aren’t yet ready to talk things out.
Post-conflict reflection activities guide us through deliberate, thoughtful consideration of what happened and what to do.
They can be unstructured — no specific things to think about beyond the intention to understand and consider what to do — or structured. I find in my work that most people prefer a structured reflection to guide their thinking because structure helps prevent the rumination trap and gently guides us along a useful path.
I’ve been working recently with a reflection exercise proposed last year by social science researchers in Canada. The researchers found that their activity reduced the immediate stress caused by the conflict and increased participants’ sense of efficacy. Said the researchers,
Our findings suggest that when people take even 10 minutes to thoughtfully reflect on their relationship conflicts, it can lead to meaningful improvements in their readiness to handle future conflicts.
EMILY BRITTON, DENISE MARIGOLD AND IAN MCGREGOR
Six reflection questions
The researchers designed six questions to prompt reflection about why the conflict happened and how such conflicts should ideally be handled, aiming to encourage thoughtful consideration of the conflict and potential resolution.
- Reflect on why the conflict happened.
- Reflect on how the conflict should have been handled.
- Reflect on how conflicts should generally be dealt with.
- Reflect on how people should generally respond to conflicts in their relationship.
- Reflect on why this kind of response makes sense.
- Reflect on what would be most helpful for dealing with future conflicts.
The study focused on mitigating the immediate after-effects of a conflict and this is the way I recommend people use the exercise. The study authors note that they did not assess the long-term effects on behavior or relationship quality, and that this kind of exercise is probably ill-suited for severely or chronically distressed pairs.
Over to you
Here are some reflection / journaling / conversation / comment prompts to help you bridge the gap between reading and doing:
- In the immediate aftermath of an argument, what do you tend to do? Why?
- What are the upsides of what you usually do? The downsides?
- What would make you interested in a post-conflict reflection intervention like the one described above?
- If your work involves helping others in conflict, how might you use the six questions to help them disagree better?