Daniel Borschel argues that most conflict stems from a skill gap, not childhood trauma. Adults often never learned to manage difficult interactions, a pattern he sees across court-referred divorces and business breakups. Defaulting to trauma explanations is speculative and keeps people stuck.
Conflict is not a childhood issue. It's a competency issue. Lots of people had negative childhoods, but they learned competency, how to deal with things, how to mature, how to be present with things. And I can tell you, I've come into a lot of very, very difficult situations. The highest level mediations you could imagine between married couples, court referred married couples in divorce. I've been in that room as a mediator between huge businesses, business part breaking up. And immediately they'll try to start diagnosing each other and they'll assume there's something bad that happened to the person in the past that made them this way. We need to stop doing that. That is almost always counterproductive. And by the way, it's applying meaning to something that we can't know. And we probably weren't even there. What we have to do is go, maybe this person's just never been taught how to do this. Maybe they are following a pattern from the past, but that's not as relevant right now as maybe they literally, as adults, have not had the ambition to develop themselves yet. They've not yet had the permission to learn to try to test out their thoughts and feelings and needs and desires with you yet.
