Two Ways to Handle One High Conflict Case with Dr. Anthony Mazzella

So...

When we talk about high conflict and high conflict personalities, you know our definition after listening to our podcast a lot, unmanaged emotions, extreme behaviors, all or nothing thinking, and focusing on a target of blame.

I like to explain it to the person on the airplane next to me as people take different approaches to conflict and to relationships and to interactions.

And I think with the high conflict individual, their approach to conflict and relationships and interactions is going to be exactly what you described I need to kind of have control over this and it's a very opposites opposites world so we're curious about if you have a definition of your own about high conflict personalities or I know you're you're coming at it from a you know the clinical perspective personality disorders but do you kind of have a similar or a little bit different different definition

No, I think the definition is very similar to the way the two of you describe it.

I think what might be slightly unique or different is the approach that I take with these individuals.

Like if we use the example for now of the dialysis patients, when I sat down to work with them, the focus was never on the behavior.

It was on what function does this behavior serve? So in other words, even with high conflict individuals, the focus, and many people see this, right? What is it? It's the anger, the blaming, the conflict.

Remember, the two of you know this, it's all your fault, right? Taking no responsibility, the dysregulation, poor income, poor impulse control.

I can keep going.

The two of you know about high conflict.

But most people think, and this was the problem in dialysis as well, is we need to get this behavior under control.

So that's something different in terms of the way I conceptualize the behavior.

The way I think about it is the behavior is solving a problem.

So it's either there to solve a problem or to protect the person from something or to manage something that's going on, some sort of psychological function that's going on inside of them, perhaps a conflict, an internal conflict, for example, of needing to be dependent on the staff and on hemodialysis to survive.

Because again, people with personality disorders like narcissism in particular do not do well with dependency or with needs.

So in short, I think the approach or the way I conceptualize it is a little different, is that I want to get closer to the behavior.

The goal is not to make the behavior go away.

It's to understand the emotional inner conflicts, the attachment patterns, the defensive strategies that they use to get rid of painful feelings.

So the theory in terms of the The study that I just mentioned was when we could get closer and help them understand all of what's driving the behavior, which is the manifest presentation of the problem, then hopefully over time they no longer need that problematic behavior to solve an internal problem.

It makes sense.

I know that sounds like quite a bit, so maybe I could just pause there for a second and see if that raises any sort of questions.

Well, let me just

respond, because I really like that as a therapist, as a licensed clinical social worker, a lot of what we say, because a lot of what we're dealing with, mediation, human resources, legal cases, is we don't have much time And so we often are focusing on setting limits, imposing consequences, and not trying for insight.

And what I was thinking is your work sounds like it leads to some really good insights.