Echoes From the Therapy Room: Engaging with Healthy Conflicts

Echo’s From the Therapy Room: Engaging with Healthy Conflicts

Before jumping in - can we build a habit of this check in from last week?

• How am I thinking

  what is the quality and content of your thoughts?

• How am I feeling

  what level of access do you have to sensation in the body?

•  How am I breathing

  how at ease or not do you feel as you inhale and exhale?

This week in therapy a topic that came up a lot was about conflict; the question of “how can I avoid it”, mostly.

 Many people come to therapy believing that conflict is a sign something is wrong. From a psychodynamic perspective, conflict is not only inevitable; it can be deeply meaningful. The way we argue, withdraw, rupture, or repair often reflects patterns shaped long before our current conflict.

Conflict as a Window into the Past

In psychodynamic thinking, present-day reactions are rarely just about the present moment. Disagreements can activate older emotional templates: fears of rejection, feelings of being unseen, etc. As an adult, you might notice that a seemingly small misunderstanding suddenly feels overwhelming or that you respond more intensely than the situation seems to require. These moments can be clues that something deeper has been stirred.

Healthy conflict allows space to become curious about these reactions rather than defending against them. Instead of asking, “Who is right?” we might wonder, “What does this moment remind me of?”. In session this week, the ladder was our focus. Asking a client to recall what this experience might remind them of is also a way to diffuse the shame and guilt that might have accompanied their present-day conflict – it might instead be an opportunity for empathy and self-compassion.

What Healthy Conflict Can Look Like

  To be clear: healthy conflict is not the absence of strong feelings — it is the presence of psychological safety. There is room for frustration, sadness, or anger without either person feeling erased or attacked. In session, I try to highlight that one can remain connected to their internal experience while also staying open to the other’s.

When engaging with healthy conflict there is a willingness to reflect rather than react immediately, moments of pause or repair. When conversations become heated, there is tenderness around language that speaks from personal experience e.g. (“I felt dismissed”) rather than global judgments (“You never listen”).

Psychodynamically, healthy conflict involves tolerating ambivalence — holding the truth that we can feel hurt by someone and still care deeply for them. Likewise, we can be disappointed in ourselves and still refrain from self-flagellation.

When Conflict Becomes Unhealthy

Unhealthy conflict is often experienced when our defensive mechanisms/patterns take over.

Remember here folks, our defences are not failures; they are protective strategies we learned in order to manage overwhelming feelings.

However, when they dominate, genuine communication becomes difficult. When they dominate, it might look like unconsciously repeating familiar relational roles. In psychodynamic work I am inviting you to consider that conflict often carries symbolic meaning via these familiar relational roles.

If we can put that in our pocket (that the reaction of the person we are in conflict with might be responding to something outside of this moment) – we can also then think about repair. Repair allows us to experience something new - something that differes from these previous roles. Repair after conflict tells us that relationships can survive tension without collapse.

Two little reflections for you:

 Consider how conflicts were experienced in the dynamics you witnessed growing up. We’re they something to be avoided, (like in my client work mentioned at the beginning) or interactions that lead to repair, or something else entirely?

Did this become your blueprint for how to handle conflict - a familiar role that you are now repeating?