Welcome to Conflict Confidential, a newsletter about people and problems, human (dis)connection, and conflict transformation.
The way I see it, there are two levels to knee-jerk reactions. There’s the surface kind of knee-jerk that we experience in conversation and our day-to-day activities. Then there’s the visceral and jarring knee-jerk reaction that can spur a whole cascading series of events. Both kinds of knee-jerk reactions could launch conflict. But it’s usually the deeper kind that really throws a wrench into life and makes things go haywire.
Giddy up y’all, we knee-jerkin’.
Little Knee-Jerk Reaction
I often give unsolicited advice. It’s irritating and it’s something I’m working on. (But also hi, please subscribe to my newsletter!) When in conversation I interject my opinions about what someone “should do,” I’m often on the receiving end of rejection. Even though I think my ideas are super smart, my friends usually have no problem politely declining. It doesn’t create any tension as I just shrug it off. I know I’m being annoying. I realize that in offering my input, instead of actively listening, I am basically asking for a negative knee-jerk reaction to whatever it is I am proposing.
Shrugging off negative responses is now second nature for me. It's the baseline for how I operate in the world. It’s also how I practice law. As a defense attorney I work in an adversarial system. I’m constantly having to ask for things from the opposing side, the prosecutors working for the District Attorney’s office that files criminal cases against my clients. Sometimes I’m asking about something I am owed, like evidence I am entitled to under the law. But I’m also often asking for more: a better offer for a client, for leniency, for consideration of other circumstances beyond what is written in a police report. In these encounters the knee-jerks go flying. Quite often I have a prosecutor on the phone who replies a little too quickly to what I’ve just said. Sometimes they’re not kind about it either, snorting at me or peppering in commentary about the absurdity of my request. It doesn’t bother me. I expect that part of the conversation. I know by putting it out there that I’ve planted a seed. Or at very least I’ve given them notice of my intentions. When I ask for things I always think what’s the worst that can happen? That they say no? So when I do hear that quick “no” I know it’s the knee-jerk reaction speaking. It’s also usually their tell. From their response I decide how to proceed- keep going with this person? Go over their head? Play hard; play nice? For me, these surface knee-jerk reactions are little communication gifts.
But I also catch myself discharging little knee-jerk reactions in other interactions in my life. Like when my mother calls me to ask if I want another piece of furniture from her house. “No thanks!” And then again. “No thanks!” And again. “No th-- wait, actually, let me see it.” Why do I always start with no? What is that? Knee-jerk reactions aren’t always negative either. I often hear myself agreeing to plans or offering to help with something that I definitely don’t really want to do. It’s like just by being asked my immediate response is to be nice and say “yeah, totally!” Then later regret it and try to figure out how to get out of the thing.
These little knee-jerk reactions are just part of our personal patterns. They’re unthinking, throwaway responses that we’ve conditioned ourselves to have. Sometimes it’s to deflect having to process information. Other times these responses are indications of our inherent fundamental attribution bias- judging people based on their actions while not considering other situational factors, yet perceiving ourselves based on our character and excusing our actions as situational. (Example: rolling eyes at a sibling for being “rude” but justifying our unkind comment because we didn’t sleep well the night before.) As we communicate with each other in contexts of relationships, work, or within our families, we get used to these mundane surface responses to one another. We all spout and receive little knee-jerk reactions. We simply learn to wade through the ebb and flow, like little waves in the ocean of our lives.
The Deeper Knee-Jerk Reaction
When real conflict hits it can feel like drowning. Everything else is muted when we’re fully submerged. Time feels different. We’re heavy yet buoyant and can’t quite find our way out. Our focus is zapped, magnetized instead toward so many unsettling thoughts. In the distance an alarm is sounding. It feels like an emergency.
Everyone hates this feeling yet, somehow, we all on occasion find ourselves in it. And how often is it because of an initial outsized response? We flipped our lid, lost our cool, or completely shut down. How do we get into these modes with each other where we later regret what we said, play over and over in our heads what we did, or what we would’ve done differently? How can we stop always just reacting to someone else’s actions, and instead focus on ourselves in the moment? Why do we feel such deep knee-jerk responses in the first place?
Conditioning is key. Strategic innovator and leadership coach Mallika Dutt explains on her podcast, Leadership Moves, that we humans have created a world that has us living in a constant state of anxiety and fear. We are also hardwired to keep instinctively responding to this fear. Our bodies naturally fire off physiological responses to stress triggers in order to keep ourselves safe. If something is barreling towards us we must respond quickly. It’s why we jump when we’re startled by a shadow. The ol’ fight or flight response.
CONFLICT 101 - The Four Fs.
Fight - Combative. Ready to take someone on.
Flight - Run away. Avoid.
Freeze - Get frozen in place. Disconnect.
Fawn - Try to appease. Take care of the other person.
Early humans were reacting to the urgent stress of physically surviving in the natural world. But today our stressors tend to be more nuanced and layered. Yet our bodies still respond in the exact same way as our ancestors. So as our stress is compounded by the amassing challenges of living contemporary life, managing work, family, relationships, (and, I dunno, addressing greater social discord amid an ongoing pandemic), we develop habitual responses. These repetitive physiological responses to stress get us stuck on high-alert as we move through our daily lives. We become hypervigilant, in a state of constantly scanning the world around us to make sure we can be safe. Continuously functioning this way eventually takes its toll.1 We become unable to self-regulate our bodies, our emotions, and our thoughts amid a sense of enormous anxiety. Thus, intense knee-jerk reactions seem to explode from within us as if completely out of our control.
Like a dashboard in a car, our bodies tell us when we might be reacting on overdrive. Some of us might then think speeding up, ignoring the warning lights, might get us where we need to go. But that’s just heading towards an eventual breakdown. We need to address the blinking lights and understand what they mean.
The good news is, if we grab the wheel, lay off the gas and actually start paying attention to our body’s signals, we can change course for a smoother ride.
Nkem Ndefo, creator of The Resilience Toolkit, explains that our bodies can’t lie to us like we can lie to ourselves in our thoughts. When we respond to stress it is an opportunity to lean into our bodies for some insight about what’s going on with us. We should tune into our body’s response and evaluate if it is helping us with the tense moment. We might recognize while in this heightened level of alertness that we are being very reactive to the situation (or conversation or challenge) rather than being responsive or proactive.
In this really heady and fascinating interview on the For The Wild podcast, Ndefo explains how we can channel what our body is telling us so that we can downshift our levels of alertness and not go into intense knee-jerk mode. Lightly edited for clarity, in Ndefo’s own words:
“It's this idea that the body has this wisdom, and if we can cue into, Hey, I'm in this conversation right now. It's a hard conversation, and I noticed my mouth went dry, I noticed I'm holding my breath, I noticed I am having a hard time hearing what's being said, my mind is jumping ahead to what I want to say, if I can become aware of those as stress responses that are starting to crest over my threshold for staying present. If I can become aware of that, and I have some kind of tool to help myself recognize ‘Wait a second, is it really that dangerous right now?’ And most of the time, it's not that dangerous. I can then downshift my response a little bit, which allows me to stay open and my hearing shifts. It’s a biological change: the more stressed we are, our hearing tunes away from the range of the human voice, and more to a low sort of danger sound in the environment. We literally don't hear each other. And so in order to be in a conversation of any kind, let alone a difficult conversation, the capacity to listen is so crucial. So being able to listen to my body's own signs that I'm exceeding my threshold, and settle myself lets me stay in connection, lets me stay open, and have that spaciousness around the ideas, around people's feelings and my own feelings, and the ability to sit with that discomfort.”
There are times that the body may be responding to what is happening in the moment as if it’s still responding to a past incident. A creeping sense of dread, anxiety, or fear that really might not have anything to do with the actual conflict at hand, and more to do with a response or coping mechanism ingrained within us through our personal past experiences. When our bodies exert our uncomfortable stress response in this intense way we might think our body is lying to us then. But it’s not. It’s telling us the truth. It just doesn’t have the timing right. It’s talking about something from the past.2 So when we’re having these deep knee-jerk reactions, we may find that we're overreacting for a host of reasons. And it's not that our reaction is wrong, it's just stronger than is useful.
Developing a more adaptive response to this extra energy of over responding allows us to access what’s being hijacked within us. We can better-understand what has been locked in us because of trust, stress, or trauma. As we settle into modes of responding to our stress calmly, and with clarity, we may find that we’re able to refocus our attention to the stress-triggering issue with some more flexibility and creativity. We can find ourselves more open to the people we’re in conflict with, willing to collaborate or listen for opportunities for reconnection.
Fixin’ The Jerk
Behavioral tools can help us respond in an adaptive manner, instead of just in reactionary mode. There’s no one size fits all approach but experimentation and practice may lead to developing healthier patterns for ourselves. Engaging with these tools may allow for a more easeful way of being, without constant disruptive stress and overstimulation. We can move through conflict more fluidly, feel more in control of ourselves in the process.
Body scanning is a really doable, helpful method. This can be done in the moment, or as a meditation practice. When the body starts overreacting we might focus our thoughts towards what we’re feeling happening within us - chest tightening, mouth going dry, etc. Recognizing our physical responses can help slow us down before acting. We center ourselves in our response, instead of launching our focus onto the person triggering it. It’s good practice to do body scans regularly, when not within conflict, to get comfortable thinking about our bodies in this way. When scanning we ask: what’s going on with me right now? What hurts? Where am I tense? How am I feeling? When doing this we just observe ourselves and take note without judgment or need to do anything. We just be.
Another practical method is movement. First we must recognize our habitual response (Do I want to fight? Am I frozen or at a loss? Am I trying to be helpful instead of speaking up? A combination?) From there we could try movements to temper the response. When feeling a panicked stress over a particular challenge Mallika Dutt suggests specific movements for each type of habitual response. If we feel like fighting, maybe we instead start dancing. (Sure, doing a dance might seem silly. But know what’s not silly? Being insufferable to be around when operating on fight mode.) If we want to flee, we could try yoga. Standing in a warrior pose or stepping into a stance that makes us feel like we got this. If we freeze or disassociate we might wiggle our toes or lick our lips to send sensations to our bodies to reconnect and be more present. If we tend to appease, lose ourselves in people pleasing, we might try to take care of ourselves first- take a big breath, give ourselves a hug, hold and rub our hands together.
Finally, we can also just HALT. This acronym is helpful to consider before we knee-jerk ourselves into some bad decisions. H - am I hungry? A - am I angry or frustrated? L - do I feel lonely? T - am I just tired? Asking ourselves these questions might allow us to realize that our big reaction has more to do with something else instead of the triggering issue. If it’s something easily solvable - like going for a snack, we do it. If it’s something we’re noticing again and again, like loneliness, perhaps we take steps to evaluate what we can do for ourselves to feel more supported.
There are a lot more tools out there. We can each find what works best for us. Ultimately, we all could use a little less stress in our lives. But since that won’t happen overnight, we must do a bit more to take care of ourselves so we’re not all just kicking at each other with our intense responses. We can chill with the knee-jerks.
Shane Bernardo, organizer, facilitator, and co-founder of Food As Healing, speaks on the Emergency Strategy podcast about caregiving, intergenerational trauma, and how in suppressing emotions, the body weakens and becomes ill. Bernardo references Eastern medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which views mental and physical health as intimately connected. TCM pinpoints specific organs as associated with certain emotions.
The popular and powerful book The Body Keeps The Score explains in great detail on how the body holds on to past trauma, how it acts in response to that past experience, and what kind of treatments might be best to process and breakthrough the body’s conditioned patterns.
More On Fawning: Although so far quite limited, more attention is being focused on how humans use fawning or appeasement as a way to respond to stress. Hierarchal systems and cultural cues impact us whether we’re cognizant of it or not. An excellent example is given by Ndefo in the same conversation mentioned above. (The whole conversation is really worth a listen.) She describes how a group of Black women were checking out of their Airbnb when a white neighbor had called the police on them thinking they might’ve been burglarizing the house. Suddenly these Black women were surrounded by police. Despite being terrified, the women did not have the luxury to fight, flee, or freeze and not respond to the officers. So instead the women responded with appeasement- smiling and making jokes with the officers. This appeasing response is what they did to keep safe. Indeed, the officers later framed the incident as “successful” since it appeared everyone left unscathed, happy even. More on this form of hierarchical appeasement in Ndefo’s words:
If you're in a situation where somebody has more power than you, by dint of their identity, what the culture has given them or their role in the organization or the group structure, and something happens, they do something to you. In that situation, your fight and flight are not options, they actually make things worse. And so it's a very privileged place to think that you can fight and sometimes it's a very, very privileged place to think that you can run.
[T]he police force actually did a press conference afterwards and said, we’ll show you the videos, the women were happy, and they were laughing. And this goes to show that there's a masking that happens. And it's not just that we're socially conditioned to do it, because we see bears do it, we see non-human primates appease, we see dogs appease, so we know that there's some biological underpinning when there is social hierarchy. So I'm venturing to think that most of us, when we’re on the bottom end of the social hierarchy, spend the greater part of our existence in appeasement. And that actually is the most common form of our responses that we live in.
Read more in depth insight on appeasement by Nkem Ndefo.
Personal plug but this time with an ask:
I’m helping launch an organization seeking to transform the reentry experience for formerly incarcerated community members through restorative practices and social emotional workshops. We’re also working to change pervasive narratives that devalue people and further harm communities impacted by over-policing and mass incarceration. Drawing upon the wisdom of those most closely affected by the criminal legal system is integral for shifting how our society approaches handling conflict and harm. There’s a lot of work to do. So we’re looking for folks with the energy to dream big and build with intention. Do you or someone you know have skills in web design, video or audio editing, strategy development, or just have a deep passion to affect change? Let’s collab!
Read More Newsletters!
Hi to all the new subscribers from Edith Zimmerman’s newsletter Drawing Links! It’s one of the best newsletters hitting the inbox these days. In comic strip format, very slice of life, it’s often about nature, art, and running, and is incredibly relatable.
Niki Colet’s Voice Notes is robust, poetic, and her voice is a dream.
Want even more conflict in your life/inbox? Amanda Ripley wrote a whole book about it called High Conflict. Her newsletter Unraveled is to the point, fun to read, and enviably concise.
Know someone prone to knee-jerk reactions? Send them this post!
Thanks for reading. Gonna mix things up on the next one. Stay tuned.
Knee-Jerk Overreactions
I love this! Stephen Covey said, "We judge ourselves by our intentions, and others by their actions" and rarely do we give people the benefit of the doubt. I appreciate your practical ideas for dealing with habitual responses. I hope I can remember to do a little dance next time I get ticked off! Thanks!