How do you feel about conflict? How do you respond to it? Do you typically avoid active conflict? Or, are you comfortable with conflict, even heated debate? Do you use conflict as a way to agree and disagree in order to find compromise? How often do you participate with conflict towards repair and resolution with your colleagues, friends, partners, family or children?
Our childhood family was the first group we were part of and it creates the initial nervous system map at which we navigate groups and conflict throughout our life. It is where we first learn co-regulation. As humans, our nervous systems co-regulate in relationship. This means we decide whether we are safe or not both by how we individually feel and how the people around us feel. The challenge is that feelings are not often linear or logical. If someone’s nervous system around us is in fight, flight or freeze, it tells our nervous system there is danger present and we need to be alert. It does not matter if this is perceived or real danger. In the most extreme case, this is why vicarious trauma can be more contagious than the flu. But, our nervous system doesn’t need to be traumatized to be activated. We can feel unstable, unsafe and unsteady from the smallest of changes in our environment or relationships especially if they have negative associations with experiences from our past.
Are you curious how co-regulation and conflict resolution are related? We learn to co-regulate in response to dis-ease and ease, to disconnection and connection, to challenge and opportunity - all reflecting a type of conflict and resolution. Conflict resolution requires a dance between the co-regulation of care for self and care for others. If we tend to avoid conflict, we can co-regulate by merging, pleasing, withdrawing or not participating (all abandoning the self or other) as opposed to more adaptively co-regulating by including care for yourself and others, finding shared compromise, repair and deeper connection.
We live in a society that promotes self-growth and dyadic repair in partnership or relationship, but does not as often recognize the importance of community and group support for co-regulation. When it is a 1:1 relationship activating our nervous system, conflict resolution is necessary to find a way for both nervous systems to co-regulate in an adaptive way as opposed to a historically patterned (no longer useful) way. The possibility for resolution and change is dependent on the strategies of the nervous systems of the 2 individuals involved. In contrast, when we are in a group of 3 or more, there are more possibilities in a nervous system response because of the varying adaptabilities and resiliencies of each individual within the group. As a result, in groups our nervous systems can learn to co-regulate with more possibilities, allowing for greater adaptability for each individual.
If we apply co-regulation to kids, the saying “it takes a village to raise a child” comes to mind. If our children are raised by parents, chosen family, fairy god parents, aunties, uncles and community - they develop more adaptive nervous systems. However, this requires conflict resolution because there are inevitably different styles of parenting/authroity, co-regulation and connection. If parents don’t have opportunities to share parenting, than kids often have their parents as their main co-regulators. This is a big ask on individual parent nervous systems. Therefore, beyond self care, support groups for co-parenting and learning conflict resolutions skills are the necessary practice for how to build communities of belonging and repair around kids and families.
We often re-create the original dynamics of our original group, our childhood family. We do this over and over again in friends, work and even the families we create, until we develop new more adaptive possibilities through new experiences. Group work expedites the possibility for change because it offers our nervous system a chance to experience and practice more possibilities at once.
CHANGES in my work…
Moving forward I will be offering more group opportunities with more limited availability for one on one work. If you are curious about group work, have never done it, and feel like you need more information to feel open to it…please reach out for a chat.