We Just Dealt With It

Usually it means nobody dealt with anything.

It gets said about the argument with your co-founder that never came up again. About the client who went cold after the pricing conversation. About the thing your operations lead said in a meeting that everyone decided to move past. Nothing blew up. Nothing got fixed either… the issue went underground and kept operating from there.

Between the school floor, the clinical work and the consulting, the organizations that hold together don't have fewer conflicts than the ones that come apart. Same number. What happens to the conflict is what's different.

The Three Loops

Bad conflict runs one of three ways, and none of them end in a resolution.

Loud escalates. The volume climbs, both sides say sharper things, and it ends when everybody is exhausted rather than when anything is settled. Next time the same trigger fires, it restarts, usually louder.

Silent is withdrawal. The client stops calling. The employee stops raising things in meetings. Your partner stops bringing it up. No blow-up, and the relationship ends by attrition. The worst part is that by the time you notice, you may not have a way to reach them anymore. This is where "we just dealt with it" lives.

Mixed is one party escalating while the other withdraws, and then they trade places. The one pushing goes quiet, the one who went quiet finally bites back. Don't assume the loud one is in control. Withdrawing is also a move, and both people are running the loop.

All three produce the same result: unresolved problems, growing distance, less output, less trust. And the next occurrence starts from a worse position than the last one.

Before Technique, Five Stances

Why does most conflict advice fail? It hands you a script and assumes the script is the hard part.

Five things have to be present on both sides before any resolution process works, and they're stances people already operate from more than skills they perform in the moment.

Humility. "I could be wrong, you could be right. Let's talk." Not "I'm wrong and you're right." The possibility of either. You don't have to say it out loud, you just have to hold it.

Awareness. The capacity to notice when you're wrong. Not a running confession, just the ability to see it.

Responsibility. It bothers you when you've made a mistake. That internal signal is what makes something yours to own.

Empathy. It bothers you when you've hurt someone. You can participate in what they're experiencing without dismissing it.

Reliability. When you're wrong, you change. And the other person has to have evidence you actually do.

Humility is the entry point and the rest follow from it. When all five are present, even imperfectly, almost any conflict resolves. When one is genuinely absent on one side, the process has nothing to grip and no amount of technique fixes that.

One caution before you go looking for missing prerequisites in your team. Difficulty with turn-taking, tone, or reading a room is a communication issue, not an absent stance. Someone on the autism spectrum may have full access to all five and still struggle with the mechanics. Different problem, different response. Don't confuse them.

The Same Situation, the Wrong Tool

Most communication seminars teach this one.

"Communication is 7 percent words and 93 percent body language and tone."

That comes from work Albert Mehrabian did in the 1960s, and the number is real. He built it from two 1967 studies and published the split four years later, in Silent Messages (Mehrabian, 1971). What's wrong is where people point it.

The first study (Mehrabian & Wiener, 1967) had 30 participants listen to single words spoken in positive, neutral, or negative tones. The second (Mehrabian & Ferris, 1967) had 37 participants match photographs of facial expressions against tone of voice. Thirty and thirty-seven people. All women. Single words, not conversations.

And what were both studies actually asking? One narrow question: when the channels CONTRADICT each other, which one does a listener believe? Not how communication works. Not how teaching works, or negotiation, or explaining a policy, or any transfer of factual information.

Mehrabian himself has said the numbers don't apply outside that narrow case. It got repeated anyway, because it's a satisfying number.

The honest version is smaller and more useful: when your words and your tone disagree, people believe your tone. Which matters enormously in a conflict, because that's exactly the moment the two come apart. You say "no, go ahead, I'm listening" in a voice that says something else, and they heard the voice.

A tool that's correct in a narrow situation, applied to every situation, produces confident nonsense. That's true of the 7 percent number, and it's true of conflict resolution.

Sometimes It Isn't Conflict

The tools above are not universal. How do you know which situation you're in? Three of them look like conflict, are not conflict, and get worse when you apply resolution technique.

Bullying. Three things together: aggressive intent, repetition, and an imbalance of power (Olweus, 1993). All three, not one or two. That combination is peer abuse and it has to be stopped, not negotiated. Sitting the two parties down to validate each other's positions hands the aggressor a structured opportunity and tells the target that what happened to them was a disagreement.

Personality disorder. Roughly 9 percent of adults meet criteria for a personality disorder in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (Lenzenweger et al., 2007), with higher figures in other surveys. You are not going to work out which 9 percent from a blog post, and you shouldn't try. What I can tell you from the clinical side is that when several of those five stances are genuinely weakened, resolution tools get very little traction and the work shifts from resolving to managing. Manage to the behavior in front of you, write it down, and bring in the people whose job this is.

Violence. Physical, verbal, emotional. Where there's a power imbalance and one party is in danger or in fear of being hurt, none of this applies. That's a safety matter, and it goes to the people whose job is safety.

When the framework isn't working, the first question isn't what you're doing wrong. It's whether this is actually conflict. Often it isn't, and getting the category right IS the work.

What This Looks Like at Your Table

Two co-founders run Mixed for years and call it a personality difference. One pushes, one goes quiet, then they swap, and the actual disagreement about direction never gets stated in one sentence by either of them. What ends it is usually an equity conversation neither one saw coming.

A manager and a direct report have a power imbalance built in, which changes the math on all of this. The Switch is easier for the manager to call and easier for the manager to fake. And a report who's withdrawing may not be stonewalling. They may have correctly assessed that raising it costs them something.

A client and a vendor run Silent almost exclusively. When was the last time a client picked a fight with you? Nobody has a fight with their agency. They just don't renew, and the agency finds out in a two-line email.

At home it's all three, and the stakes are the whole thing.

Somebody Has to Go First

Every bad conflict has one move available that requires no agreement from anyone: one person decides to stop reacting and start the resolution process.

That's it. It isn't a negotiation. The other party doesn't have to agree, doesn't have to reciprocate, and probably won't at first. Hold the posture consistently and they generally do follow, because the loop was being run by both of you and it takes both of you to keep it running.

"I could be wrong, you could be right. Let's talk." Two sentences, and you don't need the other person's permission to say them.

Your Move

Pick the one relationship where you've said some version of "we just dealt with it" in the last 90 days. ONE. Not the list.

Then answer two questions before you do anything else. First, which of the three loops are you running, loud, silent, or mixed. Second, and be honest here, is this actually conflict, or is it one of the three things conflict resolution makes worse?

If it's conflict and the five stances are there on both sides, you already have everything you need! The only thing missing is somebody going first.

If you want to think out loud about which one you're in, reply to this or come talk to me. The full framework, including the five-step process and the five ways a conflict can actually end, is in my article on effective conflict resolution.

References

Lenzenweger, M. F., Lane, M. C., Loranger, A. W., & Kessler, R. C. (2007). DSM-IV personality disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Biological Psychiatry, 62(6), 553–564. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2006.09.019

Mehrabian, A., & Ferris, S. R. (1967). Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 31(3), 248–252. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0024648

Mehrabian, A., & Wiener, M. (1967). Decoding of inconsistent communications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6(1), 109–114. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0024532

Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent messages. Wadsworth.

Olweus, D. (1993). Bullying at school: What we know and what we can do. Blackwell.