High Conflict Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

Her most recent book is High Conflict, which chronicles how people get trapped by conflicts of all kinds--and how they get out.

So the goal this I was taught by Gary Friedman... And one of them is Gary Friedman, who is a really renowned conflict expert who ran for office in California.

when I started working on high conflict, I was following people who were trapped in really ugly dysfunctional conflicts of all kinds, all around the world. And I was asking them, how did you get out? And it turned out that's the wrong question because we need conflict.

high conflict is a special kind of conflict that becomes conflict for conflict's sake. It escalates, it begins to distort our perception. It's usually an us versus them kind of deal.

in that state, the research is really clear that we just make a ton of mistakes. I mean, we literally lose our peripheral vision and figuratively.

So high conflict is characterized by things like contempt, disgust, predictability. You know exactly, it's the same arguments over and over, and you're maybe having them in your head. And also a real sense of righteousness and superiority.

good conflict is more about anger. Anger's okay. Anger means you want me to be better. Contempt means you've given up on me.

You wrote I think in in complicating the narrative which was 2018 um there are all kinds of ways to analyze right and you can talk about the influence of social media you can talk about the business model of journalism and you said all of this mattered this is where you came to but none of these explanations felt quite adequate something else was happening to something that had not been named.

Amanda Ripley is the author of several books including high conflict why we get trapped and how we get out.

The term was popularized by journalist Amanda Ripley in her 2021 book, High Conflict, Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.