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Why Listening Can Feel So Hard in Conflict
Understanding someone is not the same as agreeing with them AND in the middle of conflict, it can really feel that way.
In the first post in this series, I explored some reasons why being heard matters so deeply to us, and why so many of us seem to live with a kind of deficit of feeling truly understood.
But there is another side to that conversation.
If being heard matters so much, why is it often so incredibly hard to offer that experience to another person: especially when we are in conflict with them?
I notice this most clearly in my own closest relationships.
It is one thing to listen when I am calm, resourceful and not personally involved in what someone is sharing.
It is something else entirely when the other person’s experience is about me and sounds negative.
When someone says, “your being controlling", “You are the problem”, or “You created the mess we are in”, there is often something in me that immediately wants to respond:
But that's not a fair assessment.
That isn’t what happened.
You’re not seeing everything I was trying to do.
What about your responsibility in all of this?
Even when I know a lot about communication, conflict and listening, those impulses still arise in the most vulnerable and difficult moments of connection.
And I think one of the reasons is that listening can begin to feel surprisingly risky in these moments.
If I listen to you, will you ever listen to me?
One of the things I find hardest about listening in conflict is when I am already carrying my own hurt, anger or frustration, and alongside it the fear that my experience will never really be heard.
If I am holding the belief, or even just the worry: that I will listen to you, but you will never listen to me, then my willingness to deeply understand you becomes much smaller.
There can be a sense that if I make space for your pain, I am somehow giving up the space for mine, you will win the argument, I will carry the responsibility of our relationship alone and you will be free to enjoy the relief of being taken seriously.
And then what..
Will my experience be forgotten?
Will my listening be expected and taken for granted?
Will I become the one who is expected to understand while nobody ever turns towards me?
This is where the very thing both people want can become impossible to create.
Both people are saying, in one way or another:
Please understand what this has been like for me.
But neither person feels safe enough to be the first to really listen.
And so we enter a cycle of defending, blaming, correcting, explaining and trying to prove our own reality.
Someone has to go first.
But that sounds much easier than it feels in deep conflict.
Perhaps one of the hardest parts of listening in conflict is not simply knowing how to listen, but learning how to be with and hold the vulnerability of listening before we know whether we will ever heard in return.
The person I most want to hear me may be the least able to
There is another piece I notice in myself.
When I am hurt by someone very close to me, where I hold a deep attachment to be heard by them, that gets triggered in the way we relate, there can be a powerful longing for that person to be the one who hears all of it.
I want them to hear the anger, the frustration, the disappointment, the impact of what happened.
There is something that feels deeply healing about the idea that the person who has triggered hurt in me could stay present, really take in my experience, reflect on their part in it and understand what it has been like for me.
You were part of what hurt me, and now you are willing to witness what that hurt was like for me. Uuuffff… writing it down my body lets go into softness.. It's a deep which in me that clearly triggers moments in childhood and past relationships where this wish and need was longing to be met.
And sometimes that is possible.
But it can also feel like a huge ask.
If I arrive with all of my accumulated fury, judgement and story about who you are and what you have done, I may be asking you to offer me your deepest curiosity and sensitivity at exactly the moment when your own nervous system is most likely to protect itself.
The person I most want to hear me may, in that moment, be the person least able to meet me there.
Sometimes the first place our pain needs to be heard is somewhere else, with a friend if that feels safe and respectful to the other, a therapist, mediator, coach or empathic listener who can stay with our experience without needing to make us right and the other person wrong.
Being heard somewhere safer can help us begin to discover what is underneath the story:
What was I longing for?
What felt threatened or lost?
What mattered so much to me?
What am I actually hoping this person might understand?
Sometimes that process helps us translate the anger into something the person we are in conflict with has a greater chance of being able to receive.
And what happens on the other side?
There is also the experience of being the person receiving that anger.
When someone comes to me with blame, fury, disappointment or judgement about me, it can activate something very vulnerable:
I’m not good enough.
You don’t see who I really am.
You don’t understand what I was trying to do.
And underneath the defensiveness, there can sometimes be another fear:
What if you are right about me?
If I really take in the possibility that my behaviour has caused such pain to someone I love, what will I do with that knowledge?
For some of us, looking honestly at our impact can lead very quickly to shame:
I’m terrible. I ruin everything. I’m unlovable.
And if that is where my mind tends to go, it makes sense that something in me may fight very hard not to hear you. So often shame gets immediately covered up with anger, numbness and a wish to get away from the situation. Have you ever felt like you want to leave the conversation because it feels so uncomfortable to stay in?
We might argue with the details, explain my intentions, point out what you did, minimise the impact or correct your version of events.
Not necessarily because I do not care about your pain, but because fully taking it in feels as though it might confirm something truly unbearable about me.
One person is saying:
Please understand how much you hurt me.
The other is hearing:
You are a bad person.
The first experiences the defence as evidence that their pain does not matter.
The second experiences the increasing anger as evidence that it is unsafe to listen.
And both become more desperate to be seen.
This is one of the places where I think an important distinction can help:
I can acknowledge that something I did hurt you without concluding that I am fundamentally bad or even that your hurt feelings are my full responsibility alone.
And:
I can allow my intentions to matter without using them to erase the impact you experienced.
This is why mediation can be so powerful
This is also part of why I value mediation so much.
What is often missing in conflict is a space that can hear both people who are hurting.
A mediator can listen to one person’s experience without needing to make the other person wrong, and then turn towards the other person’s experience with the same care and seriousness.
They can hold two realities at once.
Sometimes, through the mediator, I can finally hear something in you that I have never been able to hear directly from you because every time you tried to say it, my own hurt, shame or defensiveness became too loud.
For a while, the mediator can hold a capacity that the relationship itself has lost.
And perhaps, over time, we can begin to internalise and integrate something of that mediator ourselves, between us.
Can I create enough space inside myself to say:
This is hurting me, and I still want to understand what is happening for you.
Your experience can matter without mine becoming less important.
I do not have to decide which of us is right before I can listen.
Perhaps that is one of the deeper capacities we are trying to build when we learn to navigate conflict: the ability to let two experiences exist without one having to defeat the other.
Not surrender.
Not agreement.
Not abandoning our own needs.
But allowing another person’s reality to matter alongside our own.
And if we can do that, what becomes possible when someone finally feels heard?
That is what I want to explore in the final post in this series.
If you would like some support in navigating the sometimes tricky dynamics of hearing one another in your relationships, family or workplace, book a free discovery call with me:
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