7. Why Do Conflicts Escalate? How Can Conflict Become a Door to Connection?
Short Answer
For me, conflict is not a sign that something is wrong. Conflict is a natural part of being human, living in diversity, and caring deeply about life. In fact, some of the deepest trust, understanding, healing, and intimacy in my relationships emerged not despite conflict, but through it.
Conflicts escalate when two people are in pain and both long to be heard at the same time. When we express our pain through blame, criticism, demands, or defensiveness, we often create more pain rather than more understanding.
One of the biggest shifts Nonviolent Communication (NVC) brought into my life is understanding that conflicts happen on the level of strategies, not on the level of needs. While our preferred solutions may clash, our deeper human needs are much easier to connect with and care about together.
Today, I see conflict less as a problem to solve and more as an opportunity to understand what truly matters to each person, to heal, and to transform opposition into connection, creativity, and collaboration.
More Personal Answer
Most people I meet come to Nonviolent Communication because they want fewer conflicts in their lives.
Interestingly, since learning NVC, I actually have more conflicts.
Why?
Because I am more honest. It is actually very easy to create conflicts – just be honest, and you will likely encounter many of them.
The Costs of Avoiding Conflict
From a young age, I learned to avoid conflict as much as possible. I became highly skilled at walking on eggshells, adapting, pleasing, softening myself, avoiding difficult conversations, and trying to maintain harmony.
But over time, I began noticing the cost of this strategy: self-disconnection, accumulated frustration, resentment, emotional distance, disengagement, and a growing sense of loneliness within relationships.
So while part of me is still afraid of conflict, I also see something clearly: some of the most meaningful moments in my relationships came through conflict.
I have experienced conflicts becoming doors to: deeper honesty, emotional closeness, building deeper trust, understanding, healing, and intimacy.
This completely changed the way I relate to conflict.
Why Conflicts Escalate
One way I sometimes describe conflict is this:
Two human beings are in pain (or anger, frustration, fear, hurt – any unpleasant feeling), and both desperately want their pain to be heard, to matter, and to be taken into consideration.
When I am in pain, I naturally long: to be heard, understood, taken seriously, or cared for.
And when the other person is also in pain, they often long for exactly the same thing.
We are both full (of pain). Both wishing the other person were empty and available enough to receive us. Can you imagine the tragedy? That is conflict.
An image that describes conflict well for me is this:
Imagine two people each carrying a bucket completely full of water.
Both desperately want to empty their bucket into the other person’s bucket.
Can you imagine the mess on the floor? That is conflict.
This is how I see conflict. And two tragedies tend to happen very quickly.
1. The Way We Express Our Pain Create More Pain
Especially when we are in pain and in the heat of a conflict, most of us learned to express our pain through judgment, blame, criticism, demands, or accusations.
But the tragic thing is that this way of expressing usually increases pain in the other person. And the more pain the other person experiences, the less space they are likely to have available to actually hear us.
2. “Yes, But…”
In habitual conflicts, both people often try to express their pain at the same time, while neither of them is available to hear.
So the conversation quickly becomes reactive: “Yes, but…” “Yes, but…” “Yes, but…”
The word “but” is a negating word. Often, unconsciously, it means: “Everything you said so far is wrong – now I will tell you the truth.”
So with every additional “Yes but…”, the pain grows and the conflict escalates. Gradually, the nervous system stops experiencing the other person as a partner and begins experiencing them as a threat—an enemy.
Slowing Down the Dialogue
One of the most important things I try to practice in conflict is slowing down. Especially slowing down the shifting of focus between you and me.
By shifting focus, I mean: Who is expressing right now, and who is listening?
When the person who is listening responds with “Yes, but…”, the focus shifts. The listener becomes the one expressing, and the person who was expressing becomes the listener.
In most conflicts I observe, people shift the focus extremely quickly. For example:
one person says: “I want to go to sleep now”. And the other immediately shifts the focus to their own pain: “But you didn’t wash the dishes. Are you seriously going to leave them for me?”.
The person who expressed, “I want to go to sleep now,” has not yet been understood. Nobody has yet become curious about why they want to go to sleep now. As a result, they are unlikely to be ready to shift their attention to listening to the other person’s pain..
From that moment on, the two people begin reacting to each other: “Yes, but you didn’t… “ , “No, but I did…”. Back and forth.
A very simple principle that can immediately change a lot in conflict is to slow down and become clear about where the focus currently is:
On your experience?
or
On mine?
And to bring curiosity to a deeper understanding of the why behind the sentences—the needs, values, fears, hopes, and longings that are alive in the person speaking.
For me, shifting from listening to expressing is a huge movement inside a dialogue. The whole brain and nervous system need to reorganize themselves when we shift: from listening to the other person, to expressing ourselves. Or from: expressing ourselves, to listening again.
If we want to create togetherness in dialogue, slowing down becomes essential.
So that:
- when you speak, we are both together listening to your experience,
- and when I speak, we are together listening to mine.
In most conflicts, people move extremely quickly from hearing into: defending, explaining, justifying, or attacking back.
But I repeatedly notice that when someone is being fully heard, something in the body softens and becomes more available to hear the other person.
To help make this big movement of shifting focus together, I often use what we call: “dialogue requests”. For example:
“Are you available to hear me now?”
Or:
“Can I check if I understood you well so far?”
Or:
“Can you tell me back what you heard me say?”
These questions may sound very small, but for me they radically change the quality of dialogue, because they help ensure that we stay together — focusing on understanding one person at a time.
Instead of unconsciously fighting for space, both people consciously move together between: listening, expressing, hearing, and being heard.
Conflicts Happen on the Level of Strategies
One of the biggest shifts NVC brought into my life was understanding that conflicts happen on the level of strategies – not on the level of needs.
This distinction profoundly changed my perspective on how human beings might actually live together on this small planet peacefully.
For example:
I want us to go to the sea.
You want us to stay home.
On the strategy level (the what we would like to do), this can quickly seems threatening: “Either your wish wins or mine wins.”
But when I slow down enough to explore why each strategy matters, a completely different world often opens:
– Maybe I want to go to the sea because I feel sad, and being near water helps me process emotions.
– Maybe you want to stay home because you have been struggling with your energy levels for the past two months, and it scares you.
Suddenly, compassion for each other’s experience becomes possible – even if we do not yet know how to care for everyone. We are no longer enemies. Instead, we become a team trying to figure out how to care for both of us.
– I may actually feel touched by your need for rest.
– And you may feel touched by my longing for emotional cleansing and renewal.
And from there, creativity often begins to emerge naturally.
Perhaps:
- I drive while you rest in the passenger seat,
- we stay home and you support me to process my sadness,
- or we discover a completely different strategy neither of us had thought about before – such as going together to a spa.
I increasingly experience that once human beings truly connect with each other’s needs, creativity begins flowing naturally.
As Marshall used to say: “Once people can connect with each other’s needs, it doesn’t takes more than twenty minutes to resolve any conflict on the planet”. The real challenge is supporting both people in seeing each other’s needs as beautiful – rather than experiencing each other’s strategies as threats.
Connect Before Solving
One of the biggest mistakes I repeatedly see in conflicts is trying to solve them too quickly. I experience it as trying to put a Band-Aid on a broken leg.
People often rush toward: trying to solve, compromises, or practical agreements. Before truly understanding what the conflict is actually about.
I often think about an experience my girlfriend had with a dentist: She had a toothache, and the dentist “fixed” the tooth.
The next day, the pain returned.
So she went back to him, and he fixed it again.
Still, the pain remained.
Finally, she went to another dentist.
This second dentist took the time to truly understand what was happening before jumping into action.
Eventually, he discovered that the first dentist had accidentally left a tiny piece of metal deep inside the tooth.
I often wish human relationships worked more like this second dentist. Instead of rushing toward solutions, I like to first slow down and discover: “What is this really about?”
Because very often, the conflict is not about what it seems to be about. I like to call it: “it is never about the tie”:
I once mediated a couple who had an enormous conflict about the way she folded his tie.
The conflict escalated so intensely that they were considering separation.
But of course, the conflict was not actually about the tie.
For him, the way she folded it touched deep memories of his mother controlling every aspect of his life.
He longed to discover his own tastes and desires.
When she heard this, she became deeply touched.
Of course she wanted to support him in discovering himself.
For her, his rejection of her gestures reminded her of a deep childhood pain.
Her mother had been terminally ill, and many of the loving things she tried to offer were either not received or did not help her Mom.
Over time, she had developed the painful inner conclusion: “My love is not wanted.”
When he heard this, he became deeply touched too, and expressed how much he actually loved her caring and giving.
And suddenly, the conflict was gone.
Conflict as an Opportunity
I still do not find conflicts easy. Sometimes conflicts touch: fear, tension, hopelessness, anger, sadness, or old wounds inside me.
And yet, over the years, I increasingly experience conflict as an opportunity. Perhaps even as one of the most precious moments life offers us. An opportunity:
to understand myself more deeply,
to understand another human being,
to build deeper trust,
to allow honesty to surface,
and to create a kind of intimacy that would never have been possible through superficial harmony.
One sentence my mother said when I was around ten years old stayed with me for life: “If a couple never has conflicts, it probably means at least one person is giving in.”
At the time, I did not fully understand the depth of this sentence.
Today, I increasingly see how often avoiding conflict does not create peace, but instead quietly deepens the distance in connection.
From Winning to Connecting
I notice that many conflicts escalate because people unconsciously move into: defending, convincing, proving, attacking, or winning.
Winning can sometimes seem satisfying or fun, but winning usually means someone else is losing – and people rarely feel happy about losing…
I long for a much more sustainable way of living together – one in which everyone’s well-being matters.
We live in an interdependent world. Whether I want it or not, the well-being of others is part of my own well-being.
The moment I genuinely become curious about the human being behind the reaction, the entire atmosphere can begin to change.
Not always immediately. Not magically. Not perfectly.
But something softens. Something opens.
And from there, dialogue and new creativity can become possible again.
While conflicts still challenge me deeply, I increasingly experience gratitude for many of them.
Every conflict carries a precious gift to take. And if the gift is not taken the first time, the conflict often repeats itself again and again until something essential is finally seen, learned, understood, or healed.
Surely, some of the deepest trust, closeness, understanding, and healing in my life emerged not despite conflict – but through it.