Making Conflict your Relational Superpower
How to Rupture and Repair Well
Attachment theory seems to have become all the rage of recent, and for good reason: healthy, secure attachment to self, to the Earth, to others is a foundation for an open, creative and dare I say at times joyful life.
And here’s some Attachment 101: Secure Attachment isn’t built from everything going well and no harm ever happening in a relationship, it’s built from shit going sideways, and then straightening out even more beautifully then before.. or as it’s commonly known:
Secure attachment = healthy cycles of rupture and repair.
Thus conflict in relationship is not something to be avoided, or seen as ‘wrong,’ it’s, as some of my elders say, an invitation into deeper intimacy….if you know how to repair well.
I have been blessed in this life to be a fool for love of all kinds, and one aspect of foolhardiness has been getting myself into quite a few relational ruptures over the years.. providing me ample opportunity, to slowly, and with the facing of much pain, learn the nuances of relational repair.
I’m no expert, and of recent, I’ve been quite amazed at how much, even in my fairly skilled communities of folks having done lots of therapy, medicine work, and cultural reckoning, I see people struggling with relational repair processes.
So today, I’ve decided to offer a simple few step process to repair.
I’m going to write this from the perspective of one receiving another coming to them with hurt.
For example, someone comes to you and says, “this x thing you did/said… hurt, caused distress, felt shitty for me.”
Six Steps to Relational Repair
1.) REMEMBER HEALTHY FRAMING
This is an opportunity for self/relational evolution and deeper intimacy.
If this isn’t your framing, and you see this situation as burden, move onto step 2. If you’re fully in this framing, review step 2, and move to step 3.
2.) TEND YOUR OWN FEELINGS TOWARDS AN OPEN HEART
Check-in with yourself and your heart - Are you upset, triggered, feeling shame, sadness and these feelings are closing your heart?
If the above is true, then you need to tend your own feelings, emotionally process and come back to an open heart before repair can be possible.
In this situation, here’s one example of what you can say to the person coming with hurt:
”I hear you. Thank you for this. This relationship really matters to me, and I want to tend this well, and to do so, I need to tend to some emotions in myself first, so I can come to you balanced and open. I will circle around as soon as I’m ready to meet you in this way.”
The person who came with hurt, who may feel anxious and insecure, might also need a clear timeline of checking back in. Rather than saying, “I’ll be ready for repair in x amount of time,” you can offer, “I’ll check in with you in (stated timeline.. tomorrow? Two days? The weekend? One week?)”
Pro-Tip: You can also ask the person what would feel good for them as far as timeline to check-in.
Often feeling hurt comes with feelings of lack of relational agency, so offering choice back to someone goes a long way to repair.
3.) REFLECTIVE LISTENING
Part 1 - Whole Body Listening
After you’ve tended your emotions and returned to an open heart, or if you were already, the next step in the process is reflective listening, which is the process by which you reflect back to the person what you heard them say.
Again, and I really need to keep emphasizing this - if you’re not emotionally grounded and open hearted, the other person will feel that in your reflective listening, and you likely will inject trigger and bias into your reflection, only furthering causing more hurt and rupture.
So, when you and the person reconnect for them to share, I’d take a few moments to ground yourself and the space. Depending on who you and they are, you could even light a candle and otherwise ritualize the moment and support the acknowledgement that deep listening is a sacred action.
When grounded and ready, invite the other person to share.
As they share, listen with your whole body; with your heart, with your skin, with your stomach, with your mind - all of it.
I can tell I am full body listening when my body begins to emotionally react with care to what they are saying. This sometimes comes out as sounds such as mmmmm, or body movements such as nodding, placing my hand on my heart, or even tears. None of this is fabricated - it’s all emergent from being emotionally available and tuned into the other.
Remember this is someone you care about sharing how they felt hurt.
Also, track your own body carefully for any signs of distress, overwhelm or losing their thread (i.e. you stop understanding or getting lost).
If you begin to feel flooded emotionally and cease to be able to listen with an open-heart, kindly, even if you need to interrupt, ask for a pause from the person sharing, stating that you need a few moments to integrate to be able to stay with the listening. Do this as many times as you need!
Taking care of your need to integrate is far more loving, mature and in service than becoming flooded and only being half present to listening.
Another approach can also be, if the sharing is quite long, to do part 2 (reflecting) in chunks, rather than in one-long span. Adjust as you need!
Part 2 - Reflecting
Once the person has finished sharing, I’d invite a couple of breathes, and a small pause for both of you to feel.
Then, you can begin to reflect what you heard.
Begin by saying “THANK YOU,” for the sharing, and then follow with “I heard…” and share as much as detail as you can of what you heard. It’s not to repeat everything perfectly, but rather to cover key points, feeling, impacts, needs.
The goals in reflecting are:
1.) Have the person feel heard
2.) Ensure that you properly understand their impact, feeling, needs in the situation, as this will become the foundation for repair. It’s sad and somewhat amusing (cosmically) how often people botch repairs simply because they ceased to actually understand what the person coming with the hurt feels and needs.
After you finish sharing, take a breath, and move to step 4.
4.) ASK IF YOU HEARD THEM CORRECTLY, AND IF THERE IS ANYTHING ELSE
Step 4 is really an extension, or the final part of Reflective Listening, however, it is so important I wanted to offer it as it’s own step.
After you reflect, and take a breath, it’s essential to ask the person - “Did I hear all that correctly?” And “Is there anything else?”
These questions are huge, because for one, they show that you really care, that you really want to know and understand them, and they ensure that you heard them correctly.
Again, this also offers the relational agency back to the hurt individual, to define when to move forward in the process (allowing them to take their own self-responsibility).
The 2nd question, is there anything else, is helpful because often after people are reflected, something else will arise in them about the impact of the situation.
And remember, this is not about following some protocol, but actually coming to true completion, so do not rush through this step, and really offer them another chance to share anything else.
After they’ve shared anything else and confirmed that you heard them (and you reflected what else you heard), you can move on to step 5.
5.) OFFER EMPATHY AND VALIDATION
We now move onto relational repair phase 2 - EMPATHY.
Empathy is the process by which you feel with another human, which is the basis of belonging, togetherness, and true intimacy. Empathy is a super-power that is inherent in being emotional beings with a limbic system (which all mammals possess.. hence why pet owners often feel empathy for and from their pets. I also believe that actually all beings possess this capacity for feeling, and can be empathized with; science just has better tracking of this with limbic system creatures).
I highly encourage you take three minutes to watch this short animated piece of Brene Brown speaking on empathy:
Hopefully, you were experiencing empathy already when the person was sharing, if not, then you were likely not with an open heart, and need to go back to the start of this process.
Step 5, given this is a relational repair, is about Offering Empathy.
In this step, you communicate back to the hurt person that you feel/can imagine/understand their hurt.
There is no cookie cutter language to do this with, but a couple sentence stems for this communication can be:
I really feel your…
I can imagine what it’s like to..
I know what it’s like to..
Sometimes, I also will sparsely continue my offering of empathy with a short story/vulnerability about how/why I understand that feeling with a short example from my own life. This offering however has to be done very carefully, so as not to make the process about oneself, but it can help build empathy.
This could be as short as, “I grew up in an abusive household, so I know what’s it’s like to feel…”
A final step I find in offering good empathy is to VALIDATE the other person’s experience.
One of the biggest pains currently in humanity is gaslighting - where a person is made to feel wrong/crazy/fake for what they are feeling/experiencing.
A worldview for repair (and a wider peace culture), is that whatever a person is experiencing makes sense to them and is PERFECTLY logical based on their life experience up until then.
Thus true empathy is the capacity and willingness to feel into/imagine how that person could feel as they do, even if it doesn’t make sense from your life experience.
So in this step of offering validation, I often communicate with these sentences:
It makes sense that you feel…. (Based on x, y z)
I totally understand why you’d feel..
—
Again, repair isn’t about who’s right or wrong, but rather coming back into mutual care and understanding; coming back into connection.
The quickest way to move forward relationally and repair is to offer full empathy and validation to another’s experience. This does not mean that you need to abandon how you feel (or felt), thus this step is really about developing the capacity for a both/and existence where two experiences, two “truths” can be felt simultaneously. (The word truth deserves some attention, for another post, but in short, in my experience, truth is not static, and is always relational).
Again, repair is relational, so you will feel when you’re offering of empathy and validation lands. This may cause some tears or release in the other, and it could also trigger some further pain and grief as your empathy perhaps touches places in other that has not known love.
In the world of trauma-healing - true healing occurs when a person feels themself being felt - which is what offering empathy is doing.
This brings us to step 6.
6.) FEEL THE GRIEF OF THE RUPTURE
Ok, you’ve came with healthy framing and an open heart, heard the other and reflected them back, and offered empathy. This has been a lot of focus, care and attention on the other!
Now, that this person has been heard and felt, it’s the moment to step back and feel the bigger picture:
Without your intention or wanting, this other person you care about has felt hurt by you, and your relationship has ruptured. Perhaps you also feel some hurt and the same sense of distance.
Perhaps you are wondering if the whole relationship is in question, perhaps you think, this could be the end.
And that may be true.
Relationships aren’t meant to last forever.
And whether or not this is the end, this is a turning point - a rupture being a relational rite-of-passage when done well.
So before jumping into an apology and behavioral promises, it is essential to stop and feel the heart-break of this rupture.
This is the moment in repair when the tides turn and you both come to the shore of grief as equals. In fact, your opening into grief, and sharing that, can greatly support the other to step out of the victim/blame cycle and into that shared resonance of heartbreak, which, the longer I live, I see as the ultimate path to piece.
There’s a story in the Norse Sagas, one of my own ancestral stories, about the Earth Gods and Sky Gods being in a long-drawn and bloody war. Day after day there was more fighting and more death, and no actual movement in the conflict being resolved (remind of you any current global situations?).
Eventually, a wise seer woman, known as a Volva, enters the fray and screams, in the way only a woman could, “This fighting won’t accomplish anything!”
The Gods, feeling the piercing truth in her exaltation, drop their weapons and gather around a vat of brewing mead, where they proceed into a grief ritual, pouring all their tears, snot and spit into the vat, from which is formed the being, Kvasir, which means wisdom.
—
The wisdom of your relational repair will come from the grief vat you and the other are willing to pour some attention, some feels into, even if just for a few moments.
This can simply look like feeling sad and saying, “I feel really sad and heart-broken that this happened, because I care about you so much.”
Make it your own!
And with this, we come to the creme-de-la-creme of repair: Apology.
7.) OFFER AN APOLOGY
When most folks think of repair, they think of apology. And often, in our emotionally stunted culture, people attempt repair by immediately offering a scant apology, without the previous steps, which rarely works.
I like to think of an apology as casting a spell, and without the ingredients of all the previous steps, the spell will not create magic and just be hollow words.
However, with the previous steps, and on the foundation of shared heartbreak, offering an apology is super simple and effortless - it may have already flowed out of you from the grief vat.
In short, because of all the work, at this point, you can just say, “I’m really sorry that x thing caused you pain.”
That’s it. No need to qualify, or stipulate.
And often, the other will also come forth with some sort of apology.
All of this is best when done slow and with lots of spaciousness, as an extension of the shared heartbreak, which by now you should be realizing is one of the most intimate shared human moments possible. Relish in this closeness. Time may seem to stop.
And then, when ready to move on, there is one important and final step.
8.) RECOMMIT TO THE RELATIONSHIP THROUGH SHARING HOW YOU WILL SHOW UP WITH MORE CARE IN THE FUTURE
This step also often flows out of an apology, but if it hasn’t, it’s crucial to, before you part ways, re-affirm your commitment to the relationship and share the behavioral change/more awareness/care that you will proceed with relationally going forward, which is the learning of the rupture.
We’ve all had that situation where someone apologized to us and proceeded to continually commit the same harmful, unconscious, uncaring actions - which of course, only feels worse, because of the vain apology.
This is the step of integration, and like with any good transformative experience, is built from all the preparation work that you did in the previous steps.
This communication can be as simple as,
“I really value this relationship, and I commit to showing up with more care/awareness in X way, now that I know how that feels for you.”
This is an affirmation that to the other that they matter, and that their needs, their wounds and their sensitivities, all matter to you.
This is NOT a promise to proceed perfectly and not cause a relational bump again - you likely will - but it’s a commitment for care, to learn, and really in this sense, is a prayer more than a promise.
The other may also follow-up with their own commitment, and again, don’t expect much from them, be happy just to offer and trust the longer arc, ceasing the need for “equality” in this exact moment.
And lastly, on that matter of prayer, as you close, it may be beautiful to close with a prayer of gratitude for this opportunity to bridge conflict into intimacy, thanking the land, the spirits and the ancestors, for holding you, and thanking both of your hearts and will for daring to step into the shadows of conflict.
Sometimes this can be accompanied by a ritual closing, such as blowing out a candle, offering some water (or anything else) to the land, or even a song or shared tone. Trust the emergent relational field between you two! (A hug also naturally serves as this relational ending ritual with humans!)
As you leave, take care to move slowly, and leave space for yourself that day to continue to feel and integrate. You will likely be in the heightened sensitive and frankly at times psychedelic state of relational repair, and need more rest, nature and even movement to support your body to digest all that happened.
Bravo friend, you did it! May you rest well on that night.
IN CONCLUSION
What I have shared above is my own reflections over the past days around a framework for a relational repair process.
Here’s the cliff-notes version of the process:
1.) Remember Healthy Framing - Conflict is an invitation for deeper intimacy
2.) Tend Your Own Feelings Towards an Open Heart
3.) Reflective Listening
4.) Ask if You Heard Them Correctly and if There is Anything Else
5.) Offer Empathy
6.) Feel the Grief of The Rupture
7.) Offer an Apology
8.) Recommit to the Relationship Through Sharing How You Will Show Up With More Care in the Future
—
Given that “the map is not the territory,” this framework is inherently incomplete, will not function in every situation and will usually need adapting.
And yet, as I reflect on my relational trials over the past months, I’m a bit stunned at how difficult it can be for me to remember these steps! And so I am grateful for this opportunity to write this framework out, so that I can proceed with more ground and beauty in the relational repairs still to be had in my life.
And this is an open source repair framework, meaning, please share your feedback, questions, concerns, and adaptations, here with me (thank you!) and with the world.
This work was built on all my teachers, mentors and elders who’ve put up, so lovingly, with all my relational foibles and healing the past years, and I look forward to seeing how all of you can adapt and make it even more beautiful.
XO John
PS - Update Fall 24’ - my amazing film team made this post into a “relational repair checklist” for easy reference when in the process. See below and feel free to copy, print and share. Just attribute me (John Wolfstone) if you do please!
Please consider a paid subscription to From The Dragon Heart, supporting me to continue to sharing work of cultural redemption.
This is a beautiful post. Reminds of a rupture I currently find myself in and leaves me with a prayer it might find resolution through a path like the one you have shared.
In utterly perfect timing, John. I cried a lot reading this, just imagining being received like that brought more of me here. Thank you.