My Way vs. Your Way

What happens to you when you experience disagreement? What kind of thoughts do you have? What do you sense in your body? What emotions do you feel? What kind of words do you tend to use? Are you more likely to want to speak or listen? Are you able to come to a mutually satisfying agreement or, at least, agree to disagree?

This article is for those who experience discomfort or lack of satisfaction in answer to the preceding questions. For those who tend to think blaming, defensive, fighting, judging, put down, guilty, or hopeless thoughts. For those who feel tightness or discomfort in their body and whose breath stops or becomes shallow. For those whose feelings tend to be angry, fearful, anxious, or sad. And for those who tend to use words like “you are wrong”, “I am right”, “you never…” or ” I always…”, “there’s no point in talking to you”, “you don’t understand or care”, “I do too care!”. Or “I don’t have the strength”, “You are completely hopeless”, “it’s not all my fault”, “it’s all your fault”, “if we talk about this, it will only make matters worse”…. just to name a few of the many ways we cultivate and reinforce arguments and separation when disagreement comes our way.

Why is it so much more comfortable to agree than to disagree? Why is it so much easier to feel good with someone or to feel love for them when that person agrees with us?

We are biologically wired to defend ourselves whenever we perceive that we are in danger. As animals we have learned to fear differences because that which is different from us may very well be planning to have us for dinner! However, in the jungle, the forest, and in the ocean, animals of all sorts live in harmony with one another — all looking physically and behaving differently from one another, yet, quite comfortable in each other’s presence. When an animal which is its predator comes into the environment, the harmony is broken and immediately the prey animal will go into fight or flight so that it may survive. Each animal’s instinct provides the wiring to discriminate potentially dangerous from harmless differences without regard to the particulars of the situation.

As human animals we can learn from the past and apply that learned response to the present situation. We also evolved the ability for Conscious Awareness. This enables us to take in new information and produce an entirely new response to a given situation. We can think through a situation and consciously discriminate between safety and danger. Therefore, we did not need to only depend upon our instincts to help us survive. This gave us more flexibility to respond to new information.

For example, a person can approach us wanting to know the time of day. Another person could approach us and want to steal our watch. Our senses can help us perceive and our intellect can help us interpret how to respond to these two similar looking people with different agendas. Our behavior is guided by the integration of this information through our Conscious Awareness. Our culture, however has elevated the importance of the intellect over the senses, and has relegated instinctual response to the lower animals. As a result, over time, we have relied less and less on our instincts and sense perception and more and more on our intellect.

Unfortunately, our intellect doesn’t always tell us the truth! Unbeknownst to us, our intellect has been, for the most part, governed by our defensive structure. This means that our survival needs, our fears and the associations and memories that accompany our fears, often control our thoughts and our perceptions.

For instance: Say as a toddler you were badly bitten by a dog and that hurt you and it frightened and upset your mother. Your defensive structure would catalog dog as a dangerous animal. Every time you saw a dog, thereafter, your intellect would remind you of the danger and you would want to get away from that dog. You would feel fear in your body. Fear is contagious and the new dog, who otherwise might have been quite friendly, sensing your fear might then feel fear himself and bite you to protect himself. So instead of having a new and positive experience with a dog, you end up reinforcing the original negative experience. These reinforcements could go on until you might not be willing to visit a friend who had a dog even if the dog was tied up, because it might just get loose and then you might just get bitten again.

This is an example of a person’s intellect being automatically governed by her defensive structure — unavailable for Conscious Awareness in the present moment. Of inappropriately generalizing fear from one specific dog in one specific situation to all dogs in all situations, just to be safe.

This person does not have the advantage of the animal’s instinctual ability to discriminate spontaneous predator danger, nor does she have the advantage of utilizing her Conscious Awareness to discriminate the danger. She is somewhere in the middle, disadvantaged altogether.

I propose that human kind in the process of evolving its ability to be Consciously Aware and that the next step in our evolution requires that we actively participate in the process. A good barometer of our progress lies in the way we respond to disagreement.

It is essential to understand that we are biologically wired to defend ourselves. Any stimulus which threatens our perceived sense of self or safety automatically triggers both psychological and physiological defense. Unfortunately, we do not understand or respect the impact that this defensive orientation has on our thoughts, emotions or our physiology. This lack of understanding and awareness enables our intellect to be governed by our defensive structure rather than our Conscious Awareness. And so we often are operating according to our perceptions of what was true in the past rather than what is actually true in the present.

We need to learn to identify that we are in fear and we need to be able to look to our Conscious Awareness rather than our defended intellect to see whether or not the fear we are feeling is appropriate.

Defended intellect would say all dogs are dangerous and have us avoid them at all costs. Conscious Awareness would observe how the particular dog was actually behaving as well as how others around us were responding to that dog and then decide.

Those whose intellects are still governed by their defensive structure will perceive a disagreement as a dangerous difference and will automatically experience fear, both physically and emotionally.

Defensive thoughts will follow your feeling of fear, causing you to perceive the other person — whether you intend to or not — as someone who is trying to hurt you. All ensuing conversation will be, to some degree, polarized, argumentative, and win/lose if not lose/lose. Certainly not mutually satisfying!

Fear is the original, primal, and often unfelt feeling that our wiring evokes in the disagreement. However, frustration, anger, impatience, helplessness, superiority, inferiority, futility, and/or judgment are more often the feeling experiences we recognize once our defensive structure has leapt into place. These feelings are quickly justified and maintained by defended intellect with the utmost righteousness and inflexibility.

Sometimes what seems to be the reason for the disagreement and conflict is only the tip of the iceberg. What lies underneath the surface may be some unexpressed, unacknowledged, or unresponded-to resentment or need. For example, a couple might get into an apparent argument over opposite sides in a political issue. But underneath the surface, the husband might have been feeling that his wife had been unavailable and this hurt his feelings. So he identifies with the side she is opposing as the underdog or just decides to play the devil’s advocate. The unexpressed emotional charge he had been feeling fuels him on and what started as an intellectual exercise becomes a full blown fight. What he is really defending is his right to have his wife be more available. What his defenses are doing, however, is not inviting availability. As he can address his real need here, and she can respond to him there no longer is a need to fight over the political issue.

In fact, numerous times, as these hidden agendas are resolved people often find that they were arguing over issues that they actually agreed upon! Their minds, however, were locked into defense causing them to perceive the difference as enemy evidence. And so they misinterpreted what was being said as justification for the fight their hidden agenda was asking for.

Every new disagreement provides us with a new opportunity to stop defending against what is bad about the different point of view and start to be interested in what that point of view might mean to the other person. We can check our personal barometer of consciousness and navigate toward mutual safety through compassion, respect and the willingness to listen. To listen all the way through to whatever misunderstanding, withheld resentment, or unexpressed need or desire might be at the root of the perceived stalemate.

We need to become more sensitive to our physical sensations and emotions: Are my muscles tight; is there a knot or churning in my stomach; am I holding my breath; are my hands or feet cold; are my palms sweaty? We need to see how our feelings are related to our perceptions of the other as our enemy.

We need to look for signs of polarization: Is my voice raised; am I frustrated of angry; am I using judging, blaming, victim words; is my point more important than hers; am I thinking about what I want to say instead of listening to what he is saying?

As we do so, we will then be able to identify that we are in fear and give ourselves the chance to see if defended intellect and automatic wiring or Conscious Awareness is governing our experience. We can then choose to see the other as our brother or sister rather than as our enemy. We can support our intention to co-create a mutually satisfying resolution. We can step out of fear into love and actively participate in the evolution of our consciousness. A consciousness that sees the other not as a threat but as a benefit to our survival. Where we can pool our resources in abundance in community rather than compete, dominate and even kill to survive in a cut-throat jungle.

The choice is ours. Each new moment brings an opportunity for a new choice. In the asking, in our honesty, and in our willingness to grow we can have love and peace. We can become love and peace.