What would be a common mistake that people might make when they're first learning how to use BIF responses?

One of the most common mistakes is trying to teach the other person a lesson.

I talked about brief, informative, friendly, and firm.

This gets us into what we call the three A's, advice, admonishments, and apologies.

You want to avoid these.

No one's asking for advice when they're telling you they're angry with you.

But admonishments, people are very tempted to admonish the other person.

What are the patterns that you see in children that grow up in these sorts of high conflict households, whether or not they're divorced? What sort of patterns you see when they grow up? children learn

So can you tell us a little bit more about the frequency of these, um, interactions and then also how you're classifying people as high conflict w- within your framework?

Yeah.

So my framework is basically four characteristics, is a preoccupation with blaming others, which means they're not taking responsibility for their own part.

High-conflict people don't look for what's my part.

They see it 100% as other people's fault.

So that's about 10% of people.

Then the second is a lot of all-or-nothing thinking, and so they see things as all good, all bad.

How do we get them from blaming to problem solving [laughs] in 30 seconds? Because that sounds amazing.

Hmm.

And at this point, I might mention that my, uh, co-founder of High Conflict Institute and I, uh, Megan Hunter, we wrote a book together called Dating Radar, and we talk about these personalities in there.

So I'll quickly go through them.

One is, of course, the narcissistic personality, which in the extreme is a personality disorder where the person just really, really, really repeats a very self-centered behavior, very demeaning and insulting behavior.

Then some people have this, you know, occasionally.

Um, it's not a personality disorder if there's some flexibility, but if it's really rigid, then this is what they do, and they may actually increase this more and more.

And, and there's a lack of empathy with this personality.

Do you feel like our culture and our society is producing more high-conflict people?

Oh

... for high-conflict people.

You open up emotions, you're not gon- they can't close them up.

Here's what seems to happen.

The emotions take over, whether it's anger or tears or whatever.

It seems that people with high-conflict personalities don't go through the normal grieving and healing process that most human beings have.

We have that built in.

Mm.

So can you just explain to us what that is and how it can really help somebody when they're dealing with a high conflict kind of person?

Well, it's brief is typically, let's say you get an email, let's say you get a two page email saying how horrible you are, you're doing everything wrong, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so it's brief, which is typically just a paragraph, you know, four or five sentences at the most.

Even if you're responding to two pages, you don't need to respond in detail like that.

Informative is just straight information.

So you don't need emotions, judgments, doubts, or defenses, etc., um and ironically when you defend yourself emotionally it reinforces to the person that you had to defend yourself because you did something wrong so if you just skip over that and just provide some information and so that's informative then friendly is just you know thanks for letting me know your concern or have a good weekend or something really doesn't have to be much just brief and and a lot of people who have been um targets of blame and and and narcissistic behavior etc um why should i be nice and it's like just be civil you know um and then firm means basically end the hostile conversation And if you have a question, is ask for a response by a certain date and time, because a lot of times you just don't get that.

The other person ignores you.

Can you tell us what that's about and how it's going to help somebody, whether they're in or out of a narcissistic relationship?

Did you, like, personally run into a lot of these people? Like, w- where did this desire to work in this field come from?

Well, it's, it's hard to say.

Um, one of my books, Our New World of Adult Bullies, I-- in the, the, the beginning of the book, I talk about an experience I had in third grade when I was eight years old.

And for most of that school year, I had a bully who picked on me, and I'm not sure why he picked on me except my parents were very, uh, strict, I would say, and I was not allowed to fight.

They said, "It takes two to get into a fight, so if there's a fight starting, just walk away." Well, what if I can't walk away? What if I'm trapped in the stairwell, you know, just outside of school? And it's like, "Well, find a way to get away." And so I think this, this other boy figured, "Okay, Bill Eddy's not allowed to fight back, so I can pick on him." Um, because other kids would punch him in the face.

[chuckles] He gave them a hard time.

So I don't know if that influenced me, but when I was an adult, and especially after college, I was drawn to conflict and conflict resolution, and I was always fascinated by other people's conflicts.

And I'm sure you, you have a lot of opinions on the pitfalls of using that when you're trying to, um, solve a conflict, and maybe you could explore that a little bit.