Discovering and managing conflict hooks, part 1

One of the best ways to increase emotional agility in conflict is to recognize and manage your conflict hooks.

Image by Daniel Lincoln

📌 This post has been updated and expanded upon in a new article. Please click here to read the more recent version.

I bought a pair of sports sunglasses with swappable lenses for different light conditions. I didn't take the time to experiment with the different lenses and kept wearing the dark gray lenses all the time. They did the job well enough for kayaking, hiking, and outdoor dog agility trials.

One day, when cleaning a drawer, I came across the other lenses and the booklet describing their best uses. The next time I went out in my kayak, I used a set of lenses for better contrast and found it easier to see large boulders lurking just beneath the water's surface. Hiking on a rainy day, I found the light-enhancing lenses better for the dull light in the dripping New Hampshire forest. I hadn’t realized what I’d been missing.

When we view conflict through our go-to explanations, it's like wearing a single set of lenses. Our usual lenses work well enough, but we're unaware of the information and nuances we're missing. We don't spot the boulders just beneath the smooth surface until we bump into them. We lose our footing in mud we didn't notice until we were suddenly ankle-deep.

Much of what I try to do with my writing and teaching is offer credible, fresh lenses to filter a conflict situation and see new angles and depths. One of those lenses is identity -- the way we see ourselves in the world and want others to see us.

Conflict and identity

When we get angry, we say that someone "pressed our buttons," implying that the impetus for our behavior was outside of us and deliberately caused by someone else. Externalizing the cause may soothe our egos, but it also distracts us from the more powerful internal awareness that can help us improve our reactions in the future.

Every person you fight with has many other people in his life with whom he gets along quite well. You cannot look at a person who seems difficult to you without also looking at yourself.

Jeffrey Kottler, psychologist

In 2007, I coined the term "conflict hook" as an alternative lens for thinking about the genesis of our reactions.

You’re familiar with hooks: Hooks for hanging coats, hooks for fishing, hooks for crocheting, hooks in computer programming, hooks in barbed wire. They share a kindred function: To intercept and snag, to catch and hold.

Conflict hooks follow the same idea. They are internal to us, a part of the human condition, and occasionally, they snag on something passing by, perhaps someone's comment to or about us. Maybe it was a deliberate attempt to insult us, or perhaps it had no ill intent at all. Nevertheless, it caught our attention and prompted our reaction — it hooked us.

When we get hooked, we are negotiating not just what we disagree about but also “face.” Face is about how we see ourselves and want others to see us. When we “lose face,” something at the core of our identity feels threatened or insulted, and we experience emotions like embarrassment, shame, humiliation, and anger.

Once we get hooked, dealing with other issues is tough until our self-image is sufficiently restored. We want the other person to amend the damage they seem to have caused.

The six classic conflict hooks

Decades ago, intercultural conflict and communication theorist Dr. Stella Ting-Toomey researched the ways we negotiate face during conflict. She proposed a helpful taxonomy of six core identities that can feel threatened during conflict. Translated into conflict hook language, they are:

1. Competence: We get hooked when we perceive that someone is questioning our intelligence or skills.

2. Inclusion: We get hooked when someone appears to be excluding us in some way (from a group, an event, a committee, etc.) or implies we're not a good companion.

3. Autonomy: We get hooked when someone appears to be trying to control us, impose on us, or threaten our self-reliance.

4. Reliability: We get hooked when we perceive that someone is questioning our trustworthiness or dependability.

5. Integrity: We get hooked when someone appears to be questioning our moral values or integrity.

6. Status: We get hooked when we perceive that someone is threatening or disparaging our tangible or intangible assets, including power, position, economic worth, and attractiveness.

Are these all the possible hooks? I don’t know, but I can say this: In working with the six hooks with graduate students, clients, and audiences for over 15 years, those six dominate when people identify their conflict hooks.

I can also say this: I don’t know that it matters whether or not the list of six is exhaustive. It matters more that we figure out our own hooks — whatever they turn out to be — and identify ways to manage them.

We can find ourselves hooked whether or not the threat or insult is real. We can get hooked when we perceive a threat or insult to our identity, whether or not the other person intended to convey it. For a story about how a perceived insult almost made me angry about something benign, check out my Mobil Station Story.

We can experience face loss related to any of these hooks, though many of us tend to have one or two dominant hooks. And because we don't all share the same dominant hooks, what bothers me may not cause you a passing thought, and vice versa. I joke to my audiences that when someone says, "Oh, don't let something like that bother you," just wait until they're good and hooked by something and then remind them of their ineffectual advice.

And when we're both bothered by something said or done by another, we may be bothered because of different hooks. For instance, one of my dominant conflict hooks is Competence, while my husband's is Autonomy. Years ago, my brother came to the old house we'd just purchased to help us fix the rotted porch columns and rebuild the rotted railings. There was a moment when my husband and I struggled to put a section of railing together, and my brother called over sharply, "Don't do it that way! Do it the way I showed you!"

What did my husband hear in my brother's message? "Do everything my way!" What did I hear? "You idiots, you're doing it wrong!"

When we become familiar with our conflict hooks, we strengthen our emotional agility and deepen our toolbox. We can both experience and observe our reactions, creating choice-point moments for ourselves.

Next month, in part 2, I'll discuss and walk us through an exercise for discovering and managing conflict hooks.

Over to you

Some journaling / conversation / comment prompts for your consideration:

• When trying to understand a conflict, what are your go-to lenses — what do you rely on to gain understanding?

• “Face” has to do with the ways we see ourselves and wish others to see us. Have you experienced face loss in a conflict? How did that perceived insult or threat influence your reaction?

• When you look at the taxonomy of six common conflict hooks, do any of them stand out as ones you’ve experienced in yourself?