The Dysfunction of Fighting
Fighting is almost never the best answer. Almost.
Fighting has its purposes, all stemming from the Snake Brain’s imperative to help us survive in an emergency situation. When our Snake Brain sets off an alarm that something is the matter with our environment, we instinctively go into fight or flight mode in order to survive. If you’re being chased by a bear or attacked by an assailant, by all means, fight or flee, your life depends on it. But how often does our life actually depend on us fighting? Not very often.
Most of the threats we encounter in our lives are not life-threatening (a coworker taking credit for our work, a spouse having an affair, money lost in a bad investment). But things that threaten our social bonds or put us at risk of violating cultural and legal agreements can feel life-threatening. They put our lives as we know them in jeopardy. So we're willing to put a lot on the line emotionally and socially in our desperate efforts to hold on to that way of life. That's what we mean by fighting in this blog: engaging in emotional and verbal violence. This is when our Snake Brain takes over and tells us the only way to overcome the difficulty is to fight.
Fighting is a very costly endeavor: you expend a lot of energy and you incur a lot of injuries. These injuries can be physical, mental, emotional, psychological, financial – all depending on the type of fight you’re having. For this reason, people rarely look to start a fight because they are so damaging – even to the instigator – and yet so many fights start.
While we like to think that our goal in a fight is to win, what are we actually winning? Our survival, our right to live another day? The only circumstance when fighting is the best option is when your immediate goal is to avoid death, because when we fight, even if our opponent incurs greater injury than we do, we never come out unscathed.
If your desired result is to achieve something greater than simply surviving a conflict, your best bet is to let your Sage Brain run the show.
The Sage Brain is the complex thinker, the problem solver, the part of your brain that thinks beyond, “Don’t die!” and can actually try to devise a solution to a problem. The Sage Brain can move us from fight-or-flight to functional confrontation (we have a lot to say about functional confrontation here).
“But wait,” you’re thinking, “I’ve been in plenty of fights where I’ve had to use my Sage Brain. You can’t always physically club someone over the head during a fight, sometimes you have to bludgeon them intellectually.” You’re right, we’ve all engaged in fights where we’ve had to deploy plenty of smarts. But those are the times when the Snake Brain has hijacked the Sage Brain and tricked it into doing the Snake Brain’s bidding; the Sage Brain is not sitting at the controls devising a plan on how to arrive at the optimal solution.
The Illusion of Rationalization
You’ll know the Snake Brain is playing puppet master of the Sage Brain when you start to rationalize engaging in a fight that isn’t an immediate life-or-death situation. Rationalization is the act of justifying a behavior with reasons that seem logical, even if these reasons are not appropriate. For example, I’ve rationalized finishing a pint of ice cream because “there’s no use putting just a few bites left back into the freezer. I might as well finish it.” (Uh-huh.)
Rationalizing a fight is far more destructive than over-indulging in Ben & Jerry’s. It can lead to hurt feelings, damaged relationships, loss of time, energy, resources – even life! – and without any of the benefits that could have been achieved through functional confrontation.
I know a bride, groom, and future in-laws who went head-to-head over the menu for the wedding reception. The bride and groom were strict vegetarians and wanted to keep the menu meat-free. But 800 guests – mostly friends of the bride and groom’s parents – were invited to this wedding, not all of whom were vegetarian. Rationalizations abounded:
“We’re vegetarian because of our religious beliefs. A wedding is a religious ceremony. It would be hypocritical for us to serve meat!”
“Not everyone shares your religion, and even some people who do still eat meat. We will have vegetarian options they can select, but you can’t make everyone conform to your beliefs.”
“Meat is not healthy. Are you really going to serve the wedding guests something that’s not good for their bodies?”
They went back and forth and back and forth in front of the stunned caterer, who just wanted to duck for cover. Finally, one of the mothers turned to the caterer and said, “What the children mean is, because we’re paying for the wedding, you will serve meat.” Ouch.
Simply realizing you’re in a fight should be enough for you to know that you need to get out of that fight. But the Snake Brain has a lot of sway over the Sage Brain. The Snake Brain can trick the Sage Brain into making rationalizations for entering the fight, then recruit it into coming up with sophisticated tactics and strategies for debilitating the opposition, when a productive solution where no one gets hurt can only be found by cooperating with the opponent.
This is why we must train ourselves to question the assumptions that support the Snake Brain’s rationalizations: nobody actually “wins” in a fight because problems still need to be resolved at the end of it, but everyone gets hurt. When we realize that the premise for the fight is rooted in the Snake Brain’s drive to survive, and not to qualitatively solve the disagreement, we need to stop and reconsider how to approach the problem. (Of course, it’s also possible that the Snake Brain was triggered because it noticed a pattern but there isn’t actually a problem. More on that here.)
Fighting is a reflexive function of the Snake Brain. When we have a problem or a grievance that we must resolve to make progress, the Snake Brain shouldn’t be the one in charge. When you see that somebody is in their Snake Brain and trying to engage you in their fight – either on their side or as their opponent – using rationalizations, step back, you can’t win this argument; it’s hopeless to confront someone in this state of mind. If you do engage with this person, you’re essentially endorsing the premise that this is a life-or-death situation that warrants the severe debilitation of the enemy.
After the Fight
Hopefully we’ve managed to stay out of a fight, but if our Snake Brains have gotten the better of us and we ended up in the fray, well, at least we’re alive, right? We survived. As we look around, though, we see all of the collateral damage: broken relationships, wasted time, emotional exhaustion, and still no solution to the problem in sight. Why do you think so many couples who recount a fight start by saying, “I don’t even know what we were fighting about in the first place”?
Even if we’ve managed to “win” the fight, our Sage Brains still have to process that a short-term gain can turn into a long-term disaster because our Snake Brains weren’t able to think through the consequences of “beating” the opposition. If you’ve made your partner feel like an idiot or a loser in your absolute drubbing of them during a fight, what good is it to you that your beloved now feels like an idiot and a loser? There will be unanticipated fallout.
When we “lose” a fight but survive to live another day – and fights like this happen repeatedly, and with the same person – after a while we can become conditioned to taking the beating. In our minds, we think, “I’ve survived this before, I can survive it again.” Unfortunately this is how many people become victims of abuse. This is precisely why we say that the Snake Brain is short-sighted and we still have to engage the Sage Brain to put a long-term solution in place.
If fighting is not the best path to solving a problem or grievance with another party, then what is? Functional confrontation, of course.
