We had been married for several weeks. As we finished dinner and I got up to put the extra food away, I noticed the look on my husband’s face and I could see that a storm was brewing. Since I’ve learned to not avoid a problem, I asked him what was wrong.

He gave me a long look, deciding whether to talk about it or not, and he decided to go for it. “I’m starving.”

Puzzled, I looked at the half-eaten dish on the table. “But… we have food left over. Why didn’t you eat it?” My mind was racing and I was a little hurt. Did he not like the food?

Exasperated, he gestured at the refrigerator. “We need that to last for the next two days for leftovers.”

Now I was really confused. “What are you talking about?”

After several more minutes of back and forth, it became clear that he had assumed that I was only going to make food once every three days and that whatever I made had to last as leftovers until the next day I was going to make food. Yet from my perspective I was making food whenever I saw that we needed more food.

Fortunately, we were both already well-versed in communicating across differences, so we were able to enter into this difference in our approach to leftovers well. At the end, we were able to clarify that he could eat as much as he wanted, and that I would make more food when it was needed.

The very same tool we drew from in our difference is the tool I will be sharing with you below.

Principles of Good Conflict Resolution

We’ve all been there.

Maybe you had a conflict because you used the same word, in this case, “leftovers”, and were thinking two different things – or you used two different words and meant the same thing.

Maybe you have friends but you all have different ideas of what it means to be a friend.

Perhaps you’re getting to know someone new and they say something that hits you the wrong way, and you’re not sure what to do about it.

Here’s a tool based out of love and grace that can help you see your own responsibility in conflict and differences with others. It’s called the “Approaching Differences” diagram, from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s International Student Ministries. Originally, it was developed to help International students handle cultural differences well when coming to America. That said, I have found that this is a helpful tool for whenever you’re interacting with anyone who isn’t you.

A few basics on entering into interactions with anyone ever, for any reason, before we get into this tool:

• Love: as a Christian, I must insist that every interaction we have with everyone is based first out of love, regardless of how they’ve treated you or how wrong they might possibly be. Not truth; love. To be clear; truth is good too and when you’re feeling misunderstood it makes sense that our first reaction is to try to get them to see our truth, but there’s a reason the greatest gift is love. (See 1 Corinthians 13)
• We are responsible for ourselves: how we act and how we react. Others are responsible for themselves: how they act and how they react. No one makes you do anything, and you don’t have to go with whatever options have been offered to you; God always offers a good option even if you can’t see it yet. Be responsible for yourself and keep your eyes on God for what He’s doing in the conflict. (See Exodus 14, Joshua 6, 2 Kings 6:1-23, and 2 Chronicles 20)
• Assume the best of others until they prove otherwise: you’d be surprised how often conflicts come out of a misunderstanding and not out of intentional infliction of pain. From my experience, 99% of the time, no one is trying to be a jerk, even when they hurt you. Usually, conflict with others comes from miscommunication or misplaced expectations:
  • Miscommunication: when you both say one thing but mean two different things, or when you both use one word but mean two different things.
  • Misplaced expectations: didn’t have realistic or honestly communicated expectations of the other person(s)
  • Wondering about that 1% of the time people are trying to be a jerk? Stick with me through our relational communication article series; we’ll address this as we build on these principles.

So what do you do when conflict happens?? (Because let’s be honest, we cannot avoid it.)

Approaching Differences:

There are two approaches you can come into a conflict or a different experience with, and there are two approaches you can come out of a conflict with.

The first approach is to ‘green-line’. This is the good response, the approach you’re working towards having in all situations. Green-lining is characterized by an assumption that a difference you come across isn’t necessarily good or bad, but it is at least different. You green-line when you enter in with curiosity and openness, asking questions to understand before making assumptions. Jesus is the perfect example of this, entering the world in human flesh and making himself known to us even as he experienced life as we do. He is the pinnacle of ‘leaning in’ to understand in love.

The second track you can be on is to ‘red-line’ (no, not the racist housing practice). You can ‘red-line’ in two different ways – neither of which are helpful. The first red-line approach is to go on the attack or to be aggressive – to assume you’re better and to assume they’re worse or wrong. The other red-line approach, and in my opinion, the more common approach, is to avoid or to disengage from the problem and to wall yourself off from the problem to protect yourself.

There is only one thing in this process that you cannot control – the fact that conflict, dissonance, or differences will make themselves known. You cannot avoid conflict, much as we wish we could. So, if you can’t control this, then what can you do? You can control how you come into the conflict and how you come out of it.

To be clear, you can come into a conflict red-lining and come out green-lining, and you can do the opposite – come in green-lining and come out red-lining.

In coming out of the dissonance, you can choose to lean in and ask questions to understand (green-line), you can choose to assume you’re right and the best and tell them how they’re wrong (red-line), or you can lean away and shut down the conversation (red-line). If you choose to criticize others or rationalize your actions, you have failed to listen to them and you haven’t given them a chance to be seen and loved. If you isolate yourself and withdraw from the conversation, you have missed a chance to get to know them better and love them despite your differences. Regardless, red-lining leads to a fracture or a break in your relationship with the person. But if you come out green-lining, you give them a chance to share their own heart and desires, and you hold space for them. In green-lining, you don’t have to come out agreeing on everything, but you can come out at least understanding where they’re coming from and showing them that their perspective is worthy of listening to.

In my experience, you can build a lot of trust even across differences when you love someone enough to listen and try to understand/empathize with their perspective.

Again, our primary posture is love, not truth. Truth has its place, but we first need to practice love. Practice love by leaning in and listening, even if you’re hurt or confused. Even if you are right.

Red-lining because of Trauma?

Common causes for red-lining come from our own negative experiences and feelings around a word or a concept. For example, if you come from an abusive family and you hear someone use the same phrase that your family used to abuse one another, it will make complete sense that you’ll naturally want to come into something red-lining, out of a desire to protect yourself. This is something that you can and should receive healing from in several ways – therapy, Jesus, and/or healthy experiences that rewrite that negative association. Regardless, therapists and Jesus are consistent in teaching that actively facing the trauma in healthy ways helps and so, practicing green-lining and not assuming everyone else is your abusive family will help you to grow and experience more health. This will both bring healing to you and it will lead to less secondary trauma – you reacting poorly to others and causing them unnecessary hurt. Your own trauma is never an excuse to hurt others. Again, our first and primary posture is one of self-sacrificial love.

(More on trauma and healing later on in our series.)

So, let’s use an example and walk through the Approaching Differences Diagram.

My husband and I know that we are for each other regardless and my husband knows inherently that my desire isn’t to starve him, yet the evidence he has in front of him, from his perspective, is that I am starving him. In the moment he decided how to respond, he came in with openness. I too, by asking what’s wrong, chose to lean into his need and not avoid it. (Avoidance is my go-to red-line move.) We came into the conflict green-lining.

He clearly named the problem: he was still hungry. But I didn’t understand because the evidence in front of me showed that he could have eaten more.

If I were to red-line in this moment, here’s what that might have looked like:

• Rationalizing: “I made you so much food. If you don’t like it then that’s your problem.”
• Criticize: “You’re crazy.”
• Avoidance: “Well then go and get your own food.”

If I avoid, then we don’t deal with the actual problem and we’ve instead made space for resentment to grow and fester, because now he’ll go and eat out, without me, frustrated that I don’t care enough about him to make enough food for him, and I’ll make food that he won’t eat much of, leaving me to wonder if he actually hates my cooking.

If I criticize, now I’ve just inflamed the problem and now he has to explain twice as many things – why he’s not crazy and why he’s still hungry. I just made it harder to deal with the problem.

If I rationalize, I throw us off course from the real problem. Similar to criticizing, now he has to navigate the hurt from my barb of ‘then that’s your problem’ and explain that it’s not that he dislikes the food on top of the original problem.

As you can see, doing anything other than leaning in and asking investigative questions just further complicates the problem.

So what did I do? I responded, “…we have food leftover” (state a provable fact if you have it); “why didn’t you eat it?” and then later, “what are you talking about?” In making this space, I kept the focus on the problem he issued and made space to truly listen to him. And as we worked through it, we came to a better understanding of how we each were approaching food and leftovers, and we were able to walk away with a solution. I won’t say we’ve never had issues around food since then, but we’ve never had to deal with this problem again.

What about you? When was the last time that you felt hurt, misunderstood, or unheard? How did you come into that conflict or area of dissonance? How did you respond to the conflict? If you could go back and do it again, what would you differently?

Loving others well, especially across our differences, is a biblical mandate!

This is part 1 of a series on relational communication, equipping people to enter into relationships in a more healthy and loving way.