Most humans have a deeply wired impulse to avoid conflict. Many people, particularly if they are raised by angry or unstable parents, grow up fearing the worst whenever they find themselves in any kind of conflict. To those raised in an embattled home, perceived conflict, and the fear, anger and other startling emotions it inspires, becomes an emotional emergency, to be immediately talked out with the other party. Addressing conflict when you are upset, before you have digested everything involved in the conflict, is a crappy recipe for conflict resolution.

It’s natural, if you were accosted by unreasoning anger over and over in childhood, to assume that if someone seems mad at you it could be the end of a relationship you value. In the home you grew up in, everything was always phrased that way. You were conditioned to respond defensively, meekly, self-denyingly, by long years of this demand that anger is always your fault. “You crossed me again, you little shit, and maybe this time will be the last time I take that shit from you. I brought you into the world, I have the perfect legal right to take you out of it, applicable murder statutes notwithstanding.” At four years-old, about all you can do is blink and try not to cry.

It is hard, very important, work to separate the cause of the conflict from the most dire emotional outcome you can imagine. It’s important to be able to sit with the uncomfortable feelings, fear of catastrophe, until you have a handle on them, are able to consider, and talk about, the situation calmly. The only thing that makes it an emergency to deal with now, now, now! is in your catastrophizing soul.

A conflict may turn out to be very simple to solve. Someone told me they feel under pressure because I respond to emails within a day of when I get them while it takes him/her/them at least ten days to reply. I described a feature on gmail that allows you to schedule when an email is sent. I write back tomorrow, schedule send for ten days later. Your feelings understood, technology to the rescue, problem solved. Easy.

Underlying conflicts that should be very simple to resolve, assuming good will and ability on both sides, is the vast, bottomless swamp of our emotional needs, many of which are unknown and/or disorienting to us. There are some people whose dread of feeling responsible for ever hurting anyone makes them go to ridiculous, sometimes highly antagonistic, lengths to explain why, since they had absolutely no intention of hurting you, you are clearly wrong for feeling hurt by what they did, which was the exact opposite, intentionally, of what you said hurt you. So you are actually hurting them, really unfairly and aggressively, for expressing your hurt feelings when they can explain all the reasons, in exhaustive detail, that you’re completly wrong to feel hurt by what they clearly didn’t mean to do.

It can literally make your head explode, dealing with these relentless characters. In another life, not long ago, I’d have referred to them as relentless motherfuckers, which is as accurate, maybe more so. Characters can be entertaining, endearing even in their limitations and faults. Motherfuckers can only do one thing, which makes their relentlessness something to avoid. You can’t reason with them, they can’t necessarily dance (in fact, they almost never can) but will insist on dancing to the end of endurance if it suits their larger purpose: never to be wrong no matter what.

It takes a long time, in my case more than sixty-five years, but the understanding that it’s literally impossible to resolve conflict (no matter how insignificant) with a relentless motherfucker is probably the single most important thing I’ve ever learned. I pass it on to you to consider, free of charge.