How to Stop Fights and Arguments Around COVID

All right, it's 10 o'clock, let's get started. Well, welcome to my talk, uh, oops, everything's good. My name is Doug Noll and I am a lawyer turned peacemaker. I've been a mediator and an arbitrator and a peacemaker and a specialist in human conflict for over 20 years. Not only do I have a law degree, but I also have a master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies. And I've written a number of books and teach people de-escalation skills. We've been noticing— that is, my wife and I have been noticing— that a lot of people are having conflicts in their relationships over what to do about COVID and so I thought it might be useful to create a Facebook Live event to talk about some of the strategies that you can use in order to stop these arguments. And this is all based on my de-escalation work. You can see my email on my website up there, dougnoll.com. Please feel free to go there to get more resources. Later in the, in the presentation, I'll put up my book link if you want to get more information and learn more from my book. So let's get started. So the problem is this: family members are not taking COVID precautions seriously while you are, and this could be your partner, your spouse, it could be children, it could be your parents, it could be friends, it could be anything, and the problem is with this is that you're feeling anxious, you're feeling frustrated, you're angry and pissed off, you're worried, You're concerned. You're probably a little sad. You're definitely confused and bewildered. You feel completely disrespected. You're not being listened to. You're not feeling heard. And you may even feel completely abandoned by those you love because of this problem. But on the other hand, your partner or your family members are feeling things too. They're feeling frustrated, and they're angry and pissed off, and they feel harassed. They feel rebellious. They feel like they're experiencing a loss of freedom and liberty by the imposition of the COVID pandemic, social distancing and masking and things like that. They feel disrespected. They feel like this is all a huge conspiracy, and they may feel, "I'm healthy, so why should I comply with all this stuff?" So let's take masks, for example, just to give you— bring this really home. So are masks, are they shameful or not cool, or do masks show weakness? Are they undemocratic or are they unpatriotic? And there are a lot of people who feel this way. Or are masks essential to stopping the spread, essential to public health, and a civic and patriotic responsibility? Because the only way our economy is going to get restarted is if we can stop the spread of COVID and right now without a vaccine, the only way we can do that is by using masks and social distancing. So you can see that there's these huge conflicts that are arising out of these different, and these different feelings are coming up. So what are some of the fundamental issues? Well, first of all, this COVID crisis is pointing out some very different values that we may hold around the pandemic. For example, There are rule, rule followers versus people who are anti-authoritarian. They're nonconformists, they don't want to follow the rules. There are people who are very risk-averse versus people who are risk-indifferent, and there are people who accept science and accept the advice of the scientists and medical professionals, and there are people who reject science and they reject the advice of the medical professionals. Professionals. So these are really very different perspectives and realities about what's going on with the pandemic. There's also a strong unwillingness to compromise because this has become so polarized. There's mistrust that is growing even between loved ones around this issue. There is a growing lack of respect for each other's different attitudes, values, and perspectives. And so these are, these are problems. These are fundamental issues. But what's really going on is that there are underlying needs that are not being met. For example, the need for safety, the need for trust, the need for freedom, the need for security, the need for stability. The need to be vindicated—that's the sense of having to be right, I'm right and you're wrong—and the need to be heard, to be listened to, and to be understood. So how do we go about solving this problem without arguments and without fights? Well, I have a phrase called listening other people into existence, and what that means is we're going to listen to the emotions and not the words. We're going to ignore the words, in fact, and the reason that we're going to ignore the words when we're talking to somebody, a partner, a family member, or a close friend around these COVID issues is because if we can ignore their words we won't get triggered ourselves. We're much, much less likely to become angry and frustrated and disrespected and not heard if we literally ignore what they're saying. That doesn't mean we ignore them. No, we're going to pay attention to them in a very different and deeper way. But what we are going to do is ignore the words. And when we ignore the words, not only do we protect ourselves from being triggered, but we also free up bandwidth to allow us to do a couple of other things that are going to be really helpful. So the first thing we need to do is ignore the words. It's just noise. They're— for the next 35 or 45 seconds that you're going to be doing these other things, the words are not important. And I'll just say this: for those who really are worried about 'Gee, I'm going to be ignoring the words and I might miss something.' When you engage in listening another into existence in the way that I'm going to talk about here in a moment, your brain will still process those words. And actually, you will remember the words better ignoring them than if you paid attention to them. Because memory is associated with emotion, and because you're going to be focusing on their emotions, rather than their words, you will automatically be able to recall what they said without effort. So ignoring the words doesn't mean that you're not going to hear the words, it doesn't mean that you're not going to remember what they are. What it means is you're not going to give them any weight, you're not going to pay attention to them. Really try to make the words that are being spoken white noise for just 30 or 40 seconds. Then the next thing we're going to do is we're going to read the emotions. And what does that mean? Well, it basically means that we want to try to understand what the emotional experience is that our partner or family member or whoever we're discussing these COVID issues with, we want to know what they're experiencing emotionally. And it turns out that our brains are hardwired for recognizing the emotional experiences of others. It's not something that we practice very often because our Western society is very biased against emotional competency. We are taught from a very young age that emotions are bad and should be avoided at all costs because it leads to chaos. And this has been the teaching since the time of Plato and Aristotle. They're wrong. And it turns out that we are 98% emotional and 2% rational. We are emotional beings, not rational beings. And it's really our emotions that make us human. But unfortunately, Western culture has given privilege to rationality over emotionality, and as a result, we have never been trained in how to be emotionally competent. And what neuroscience tells us today is some fairly astounding and counterintuitive facts. One is, for example, we can't even be rational. Unless we're emotional first. Because how would you even know to engage in rational thinking unless you had some emotional reaction to the environment that told you that, oh, I better apply some critical thinking here, or I better apply some logic here, or I better apply some linear processing here. The only reason that you would know to do that is because you had an emotion that told you, that triggered you into what Daniel Kahneman calls System 2 thinking. So how do you read the emotions? Really simple. You're ignoring the words, so you're in silence, and just stop all inside processing and just sit there as you're just being present with the person and you're ignoring their words. And if you just sit in silence for a few seconds, your brain will automatically start to tell you what the emotions are. Now even if that doesn't work for you, when you're in an argument or a fight or a heated conversation around COVID or anything else, you know what the emotions are that the other person is experiencing. They're going to be the emotions that I talked about a few minutes ago. People are going to be angry and pissed off. They're going to be frustrated. They're not going to feel like they're being listened to. They're going to feel disrespected. They're going to feel like they're being treated unfairly. Maybe they feel sad because there's a loss of connection. Maybe they feel some shame or embarrassment. Maybe even deeper, they feel unloved and abandoned. So with just a few words, you can cover the vast majority of emotional experiences that your partner or spouse or family member might be experiencing around discussions of protections and COVID. So that's how you're going to read the emotions. It's going to be basically letting your brain, the inside of your brain, the unconscious part of your brain, do its thing automatically without any effort. And it's also going to be aware that the the emotions that people are going to be experiencing around this are going to be the same for everybody, and it's going to only come down to 5 or 6 different words that you really have to understand. And then the last step, the last step, which is the most counterintuitive and in some ways the most difficult, is that you're going to reflect back the speaker's emotions with a simple you statement. So you're going to say something like, you're really pissed off and angry, or you don't feel like you're being heard or listened to, you feel completely disrespected, you're, you're mad, you feel like this whole thing is just a big conspiracy, you're anxious, you're sad, you feel like this is all really unfair. You feel put upon, you feel harassed. Whatever the emotions are that you're sensing, use a you statement. So let me talk about this a little more because this is a little counterintuitive. A lot of people have learned so-called active listening where you're going to use an I statement. What I think you're feeling is anger. I statements don't work. They never have, they never will. And if you don't believe me, then do this test. Find a friend and have them tell you a little story with some emotionality in it and reflect back using an 'I' statement, and then reflect back again using a 'you' statement, and ask your friend to tell you which set of statements was more powerful. The experience that most people have when somebody tries to reflect back with an 'I' statement is that they feel patronized, they feel like the person reflecting to them is rude, manipulative, and patronizing. And that's the experience that everybody has. So why is it that we use these I statements? Well, it turns out to be historical. The concept of active listening was developed by the humanist psychologist Carl Rogers, and in 1956 he wrote a book, and in that book he was describing how he was going about listening. And a lot of people watched his transcripts and completely misinterpreted what he was doing. So when the Human Potential Movement got started in the late '50s and early '60s, people started using this I-statement and it just caught on and became kind of the conventional wisdom. And even today in mediation training, beginning mediators are taught how to reflect using I-statements. But the problem is we all know it doesn't work, and yet We persist in teaching a skill that doesn't work. And I know this because when I went through my master's degree program back in the '90s, I was looking for ways to de-escalate people. And so I went through all the programs— NVC, Active Listening— I took every listening class I could find. They were all talking about I statements. And I found in my professional practice, when I was dealing with deep and abiding intractable conflicts with high emotions, that I statements simply did not work. And it was only until 2004 when I stumbled upon the idea of listening to emotions using a you statement that I found something that really worked. And just to go on and tell you how powerful this really is, in 2010 my colleague Laurel Kaufer and I founded the Prisoner Peace Project, and we decided that we would use this listening skill called affect labeling as a sort of a fundamental skill of teaching lifers and long-termers in prisons to be powerful peacemakers and mediators, and we needed skills that worked the first time, every time, without failure, because in those prison environments there's violence, and if our mediators and peacemakers could not de-escalate somebody immediately, lives were on the line. So that's what we taught, and for the past 10 years we taught thousands and thousands of inmates these skills And it's worked every single time. So you don't have to take it from me about using use statements. You can go out and test it for yourself, give it a fair test, and you will find that even though you're uncomfortable using a use statement— and I'll explain that in a moment— when you use a use statement, you're going to listen another person into existence. Now let me, um, talk talk about why we use I-statements. And the reason that we use I-statements is because when we're in the presence of, uh, when we're in the presence of people who are highly emotional, many of us, if we're not skilled in emotional self-regulation, and most people aren't, will feel a lot of anxiety. So when you use an I-statement, you're essentially engaging in self-soothing. You're soothing yourself, and the idea here is not to soothe yourself. The idea here is to soothe the other person, to listen them into existence. There are all kinds of neuroscientific reasons why this works. I don't have time today to go into it. If you go to my website and read some of my blogs, I cite the papers, the research, and the science behind this that supports why affect labeling is so powerful. Anyways, I was talking about how using I statements also developed as a way of self-soothing. And so it's all about me wanting your emotions to go away so I can calm myself. Okay, let's move on. So that's basically what we're doing here is, is when we're talking about— we'll quickly flip through all of this, get through. So here are all the emotions that you're going to be using: you're anxious, you're frustrated, you're angry and pissed off, you're concerned, you're sad, confused. Disrespected, not heard, abandoned. If you just write down these emotions, this is your list that you're going to be using when you're talking to somebody about COVID And if you want this list or you want another list, you can simply email me at Doug@dougnull.com, and I'll be happy to send a list to you of how, how all this works. So I'm going to keep working through this. All right, here we go. So here's the 3 steps: ignore the words, Read the emotions and reflect the emotions with a simple "you" statement. All right, now once you have mastered this concept of affect labeling, listening to emotions, you're ignoring the words, you're reading the emotions, you're reflecting back the emotions with the "you" statement, and you have a certain comfort level with it, now the way that you can have a conversation about COVID and beliefs around what sort of safety measures should be in place is by asking 4 questions. And as you ask each of these questions, you're going to be reflecting back the emotions that come up for the person who is answering the questions, and that becomes very important. So this is not about you being heard, It is, um, it's really about, uh, you listening the other person into existence. So what are these 4 questions? So the first question is, tell me how your life experiences have led you to the beliefs you have around COVID. Tell me how your life experiences have led you to the What are the beliefs that you have around COVID? Now, when you ask this question, people are gonna kind of look at you funny, and they're gonna say, "Huh?" Well, it turns out that our beliefs are formed from life experience, and if you have somebody who is, for example, anti-authoritarian, or risk indifferent, or does not want to be told what to do by health authorities or any other authorities, What is it in their life that led them to this kind of belief structure? And you want to find out, you want to find it because their beliefs are formed by life. They just— babies are not born with beliefs, they're created. So what happened? And as people tell you their stories, you're going to learn things that you've never learned before. You're going to listen to their emotions. And as you reflect back their emotions with a simple 'you' statement, they're going to feel deeply heard and validated. Now you're not challenging anything that happened to them, you're not challenging their beliefs, you're not telling them that they're wrong, no judgment here. All you're trying to do is to get them to reflect on how their beliefs came to be formed. And what will happen as you do this is you will start seeing that you have many life experiences in common and that it is much— you, you have much more in common than you have differences. Yes, you might disagree about some issues or values around COVID, but you have far, far more things in common, and the only way you get to this common ground is by asking people to talk about their life story and how it led them to the beliefs they had. This conversation might take a while, and you want to keep encouraging them. When they finally have gotten to that place where they have basically explain to you why their belief is, then we can ask a second question, and that is, how do your beliefs inform your everyday life? Beliefs are nothing more than shortcuts, decision-making shortcuts. They make decision-making really easy because if we have a belief, a strong belief about something, we don't have to ponder problems anymore. We, we can just simply rely on our beliefs to tell us what to do. And that's why beliefs have such great power. And in fact, there's neuropsychological studies that show that when people have beliefs and they are shown information that is true but contradicts those beliefs, they actually release dopamine in their brains to strengthen their existing beliefs and to resist against changing the beliefs, even though the beliefs are mistaken. They're not based on evidence, for example. So we have a built-in mechanism that when we have a deeply held belief, we have built-in mechanisms that make it very difficult to change those beliefs, very difficult. And so trying to argue against beliefs is like pounding your head against a brick wall, you're just not going to get anywhere. But you can ask the question, how do your beliefs inform your every day life? Now most people have never been asked this question before, and so they're going to have to think about, well, what do you mean informally? Well, I mean, you obviously have this belief you're very strongly against wearing masks, or maybe you're very strongly in favor of wearing masks. This belief about respecting science or not respecting science, or being a rule follower versus a non-conformist, how does that help you make your decisions in everyday life? 'And so you're going to get them to reflect a little bit about how— because most time our beliefs operate outside of consciousness, we don't even think about it, it's just all automatic, it's habit— and you're going to get to start reflecting on how, whether their beliefs help them or hurt them. And you're not going to have any comments about those beliefs. All you want them to do is to reflect by telling you what their thinking is. And of course you're going to reflect back With affect labeling, ignore the words, pay attention to the emotions, read the emotions, and reflect back the emotions with a simple "you" statement as they do that. Now the third question that you want to ask is, how do you manage with people who disagree with you? Well, you already know the answer to that question because it's a family member or a partner or a spouse or somebody close to you, and you've been having these arguments, so you know that One way of managing this is to fight about it, but this is a different, slightly different kind of question. You're getting them to reflect on the fact that they know people, you for example, that have, uh, have different beliefs, and how do they manage it? And, and, you know, the snarky people will come off with a flippant statement, so, well, we shoot them all. I mean, people say that to me, you know, they don't mean that, But what they're doing is reactively dismissing the idea that other people can have beliefs. And you just got to be a little persistent about it and say, well, really, how does this happen? What do you— how do you manage people with different beliefs? And they're going to mostly say, well, I really try to avoid people like that. And you don't come back with a comment saying, well, what about us? You can't say that because that's judgmental. Just say, why do you— and so why And it's going to come down to that they're uncomfortable and anxious and frustrated and angry and pissed off and don't feel respected around people who disagree with them. And so that's why they'll go into avoidance mode or they'll go into defense mode or they'll become counter-aggressive or they'll fight because they don't have any other way of dealing with people who have beliefs different than their own. And for the first time now, they might be really processing and thinking about, well, gee, how do I manage my differences? And that can open up a really fruitful, powerful conversation about your relationship. All right, one more question. The last question, if you can get this far in the conversation, and these questions don't have to be all at once, you can ask them over a period of time and have these conversations over a period of time, you know, I mean every day is the just one day in a 50-year conversation if you're in a relationship. So the fourth question is, how should our society manage these different beliefs? How should society manage these different beliefs? And what you're getting here is you're trying to pry open the idea that when we live in what is what philosophers call a liberal democracy. Liberal not in the sense that it's left or socialist or anything like that, but liberal in the sense that there's a free exchange of ideas, as opposed to a conservative government where that's an autocracy, where thought is controlled. In a liberal democracy, thought is not controlled. In a conservative autocracy, thought is controlled. So we live in a liberal democracy and thought is not controlled with some very few exceptions. So that means that we can have a lot of different kinds of beliefs, and so the question becomes how should our society manage these different beliefs? And you want to have a conversation around this and listen to the emotions and reflect those emotions, and this person might say, well, I think that we should have— I think that anybody who disagrees with us should 'You know, they should be punished, they should be shot.' People will say that, and you'll say— and you just, you don't judge that, you don't criticize it, you just say, 'Tell me why you think that. Say more, tell me more.' And what will eventually come out, if you can get the conversation long enough, is that people feel anxious and frustrated when they are confronted with beliefs that are different than their own. They just don't know how to deal with them, so all they want to do, all they can do is become reactive, emotionally reactive, because they don't self-regulate very well. And they figure out that, you know, just because I get emotional around all of this and I get pissed off at this group or that group doesn't mean that they don't, the people don't have a right to express themselves. And that can lead to a conversation about, well, How can we allow, how can we coexist with each other when we have these very different beliefs? And how can we self-regulate so that we don't disrespect each other, we don't get each other pissed off, we don't trigger each other, and we can agree to disagree, but we just, we respect as much as possible each of the values that we all hold. And how can we do that? And that leads you into an interesting negotiation around how to deal with COVID mask or no mask, social distancing, no social distancing, and I think what most people will find is that if they've got a partner who at least accepts their beliefs, may not, may violently disagree with them, may just totally disagree with them, but at least they understand it, most people who are in respectful, positive, healthy relationships will move some way to try to accommodate a family member or loved one's beliefs without necessarily compromising on their own beliefs, because there's always room to figure out how to make things happen. And if nothing else, people will develop a higher level of sensitivity to each other that will moderate them a little bit, and so the fighting will tend to go away. And if fighting does erupt again, if somebody does get angry or pissed off or frustrated and lashes out, all you have to do is fall back on listening them into existence. They're not being listened to when they get angry. Ignore the words, read the emotions, reflect back the emotions with a simple you statement. So that is basically how we go about dealing with arguments and fights over COVID. Now, a lot of people might be interested in learning more about this, so let me just say a little bit. You can go to my website, www.dougnull.com, and in the website there are plenty of links to my book, "De-Escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less." And that book will be a great starting point, a great starting place for you to learn more about these skills and to learn more about how to bring peace into an angry room.