Hello, and welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about four conflict-avoidant strategies.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay. So, let's talk about conflict and conflict avoidance.

I'm very excited because my friend, Jason Gattis, who's a relationship coach and expert who I really admire, really admire his expertise, has just written a book called Getting to Zero.

And it is all about how to resolve conflict, both internally and in relationship.

Then I've read it. I've written a blurb for it. It is an incredible resource for any human.

And I say any human because we are all always navigating conflict. It is just inherent to the human experience.

He describes conflict as a rupture, disconnection, or unresolved issue between two people, which would be an outer conflict, or inside of you, and in our conflict.

And, chances are, you've had a good deal of conflicts in your life, and they can often be very painful.

They can sometimes break relationships if we don't know how to work through them.

And I do think a superpower is knowing how to meet conflict and work through it to get to the other side.

And part of that is understanding your conflict avoidance strategies.

A big thing with reading Jason's book Getting to Zero was that I saw a lot of my own strategies being illuminated through the pages that he wrote.

I was like, oh wow, yeah, I could totally see that in myself.

And so we all have particular strategies when we feel triggered, when we feel threatened in some way.

And these can be viewed as disconnectors. Jason calls them, he has four of them, the four disconnectors.

And they are one posture, which is puffing yourself up, trying to make yourself bigger.

Two, collapse, which is when we get small.

Three is seek, which is a sort of invasion of sorts, where it's like we start to feel like, oh, something's off, and we get into the other person's space.

And it's sort of that neediness, like love may love may love me.

Or four is avoid, which is we create distance, we withdraw.

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