The Anatomy of Conflict
Written by Sabio Janiak, Founder of Mastering Harmony
Sabio Janiak is a psycho-sensory specialist and human behaviourist, and founder of Mastering Harmony. He guides individuals to rewire stress-driven neural patterns, resolve trauma, and restore emotional balance using cutting-edge neuroscience and holistic methods, empowering lasting clarity, resilience, and high-performance living.
Conflict rarely begins with raised voices or visible disagreement, but with the hidden assumptions, interpretations, and emotional responses that shape how we experience another person’s actions. By understanding what happens beneath the surface, we can create space between reaction and response, allowing curiosity, choice, and connection to replace the cycle of escalation.
From agreement to disagreement and beyond
Conflict rarely begins where we think it begins. We usually notice it once it becomes visible. Voices rise. People interrupt. Listening disappears. One person attacks, the other defends, withdraws, or retaliates.
Conflict can also be quiet. Messages become shorter. Eye contact disappears. Affection is withdrawn. Two people may sit in the same room while an entire argument continues without a word.
So perhaps shouting is not the beginning of conflict. Perhaps it is already the performance. Like a play in a theatre, by the time the actors step onstage, something has already happened behind the curtain. What happened backstage? That is where the anatomy of conflict becomes interesting.
Before disagreement, there is often an agreement
Relationships are full of agreements.
Some are explicit:
“We’ll meet at seven.”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
Others are implicit:
“If we are friends, you won’t deliberately humiliate me.”
“If we are partners, you won’t betray me.”
Then there are assumptions that feel like agreements, even though they were never negotiated.
“If you love me, you should know what I need.”
“If you respect me, you should answer when I call.”
One person may have lived according to such a rule for years. The other may never have known the rule existed. Then something happens. One experiences betrayal. The other experiences intrusion. Both believe something obvious has been violated.
Perhaps many conflicts are not only about what happened. They are also about the invisible rules we believed the other person had agreed to follow.
Disagreement is not conflict
Two people can see reality differently without fighting. I can dislike what you love. You can believe something I reject. We can disagree and remain curious about each other. So where does disagreement become conflict? Perhaps it happens when the difference becomes consequential. Something important now feels threatened: dignity, freedom, fairness, safety, belonging, a relationship, a boundary, or even my image of who I am.
I no longer simply disagree. I want something to change. You may want something different. I want you to stop. You want to continue. I want an apology. You refuse. I want closeness. You want distance. I want to talk. You want silence. My attempt to restore what feels right to me begins to interfere with what feels right to you. My solution becomes your problem. Your solution becomes mine. The loop has begun.
The signal is not the meaning
Now we need to move one step further back. We do not receive another person’s meaning directly. We receive signals and interpret them.
Imagine someone does not return my call. The observable event is simple: My call was not returned. Then interpretation begins: They ignored me. Meaning follows: They don’t respect me. Then comes the label: They’re selfish. Eventually: That’s the kind of person they are.
We began with a missed call. We ended with an identity judgment. Human beings respond not only to events, but also to what we believe those events mean. Two people can assign completely different meanings to the same behaviour.
“I was trying to help you.” “You were controlling me.” Same event. Different realities. Now the argument may no longer be about what happened. It can become a struggle over which meaning defines what happened.
The conflict before the conflict
If we slow everything down, a hidden sequence begins to appear:
Signal – Perception – Interpretation – Meaning – Discrepancy – Emotional activation – Reaction.
Then something crucial happens. My reaction becomes your next signal. You interpret my reaction through your own history, beliefs, expectations, and emotional state. You react. Your reaction becomes my next signal. What began as a sequence becomes a loop:
Reaction – Counter-reaction – Escalation.
Each person experiences themselves as responding to the other. At the same time, each person is producing the next signal the other will respond to. This is the conflict before the conflict. By the time somebody shouts, the process may have been developing for some time. The shouting is simply where we finally notice it.
When the nervous system enters the conversation
Another layer to this process exists. Conflict happens between two minds and two nervous systems. A tone of voice, facial expression, gesture, or familiar phrase can carry emotional significance before we consciously analyse it.
We can see this clearly in relationships between parents and their adult children. You may genuinely think: “I’m fine with my mother now.” Then you meet after several months. She uses a particular tone. A familiar expression appears. One sentence is spoken in exactly the way it was spoken twenty years ago. Suddenly, you feel 12 years old again. The reaction seems to come from nowhere. It may actually be coming from a very long history.
A parent can represent one of the richest sensory and emotional patterns we ever learn: voice, face, posture, characteristic phrases, affection, criticism, approval, rejection, safety, unpredictability. The nervous system does not respond only to what a signal is. It also responds to what experience has taught that signal to predict.
The amygdala helps evaluate the learned emotional significance of such cues, alongside sensory, memory, autonomic, and regulatory systems.
So the conscious adult may know:
“I am safe. This is only a conversation.”
An older learned response may still carry another prediction:
“When this tone appears, something bad follows.”
The present is new. The prediction may be old. This does not mean a literal child is frozen somewhere inside the brain. Internal Family Systems uses the language of protective “parts” to describe experiences like this. Neuroscience approaches the same territory through concepts such as learned associations, memory retrieval, threat generalisation, and regulation.
These are different ways of describing an important human experience: The past can become active inside the present without the present actually being the past.
When the loop escalates
Now imagine what happens when two activated nervous systems begin responding to each other. Your tone changes. I hear criticism. My body mobilises. My face changes. My voice gets louder. You now receive a stronger signal. Your body responds. Your voice changes. I hear your response and think: “See? I knew you were attacking me.”
The psychology and physiology begin feeding each other:
Signal – Meaning – Activation – Reaction – New signal – New reaction.
This helps explain why an argument about dishes, lateness, money, or a missed phone call can suddenly become much larger than the event that started it. Eventually, someone says: “I lost it.”
They have not literally lost their rational brain. High emotional arousal can narrow attention, increase impulsive responses, and make reflective regulation harder. Nuance begins to disappear. Listening becomes harder. The conversation that started with: “What happened?” can gradually become: “Who is going to win?”
From “What is true?” to “Who is right?”
That change of question matters. When we ask, “What is true?” new information is useful. I may discover that I misunderstood you. You may discover that you misunderstood me. Both of us can update our understanding. When the question becomes, “Who is right?” new information can start to feel threatening.
Being wrong may feel like losing. Now I am no longer protecting only an idea. I may be protecting my credibility, dignity, authority, certainty, or identity. The object of loyalty shifts from discovering truth to defending the self. Listening becomes much harder when the self believes it is on trial.
Can I feel the reaction without becoming the reaction?
This is where the practical work begins. The aim is not to eliminate anger or suppress emotion. Nor does it mean accepting harmful behaviour or abandoning boundaries. The aim is to create enough space to ask:
"Can I experience the impulse to react without automatically obeying it?"
I can feel angry without immediately speaking from anger. I can feel misunderstood without correcting you this second. I can notice the urge to defend myself without immediately launching into defence. Not every disagreement requires immediate correction.
Sometimes one of the most intelligent things we can do in conflict is simply: Stop producing the next signal. Not punitive silence. Not withdrawal. A conscious pause.
The familiar sequence: Reaction – Counter-reaction – Escalation now has another possibility: Reaction – Awareness – Choice.
The pause does not need to solve the disagreement. Its first purpose is simpler. It gives us back a choice about what happens next.
Working with conflict at Mastering Harmony
This is central to my work at Mastering Harmony, where I work with individuals, couples, and groups to understand and navigate what happens underneath conflict. Instead of looking only at: What did the other person say?
We can also ask:
What happened inside me when they said it?
What meaning did I give it?
What did I believe had been violated?
What was I trying to protect?
What might this moment have reminded my nervous system of?
What happened in the seconds before I reacted?
I also draw on psychosensory approaches, including Havening Techniques, to work with learned emotional responses underlying recurring patterns of conflict. The aim is to disrupt maladaptive associations between present sensory cues and threat responses learned in the past, allowing the nervous system to respond to what is happening now rather than automatically repeating an older pattern. The signal may be familiar. The response does not have to be the same.
When conflict becomes resentment
What happens when the argument ends while the conflict continues inside us? Resentment can begin carrying it forward. Anger says: “Something is wrong. Change it.” Resentment says: “Something was wrong. It was never adequately resolved, and I am still carrying it.” Then the next disagreement does not arrive alone. It lands on everything that came before it. A small event can activate a much larger history. The past is no longer physically present. But the system shaped by the past is.
The opposite of conflict may not be agreement
Perhaps the goal is not to make everyone agree. Two people can experience the same situation differently and remain connected. The deeper capacity may be learning to remain in disagreement without immediately needing to correct, dominate, silence, defeat, or destroy the other person’s reality. That begins with recognising a simple distinction: “I experience this as true.” is not the same as: “This is true.” Enormous psychological space exists between those two statements. Inside that space lives curiosity.
Curiosity changes the questions we ask. Instead of
How do I win?
How do I prove I am right?
We can ask:
What am I actually reacting to?
What meaning have I given this?
What am I trying to protect?
Am I responding to what is happening now, or to what something similar once meant?
Perhaps most importantly: Do I need to react to this right now?
The pause does not need to resolve everything. It creates something more immediate: the possibility of not automatically creating the next conflict.
When we stop trying to win long enough to become curious again, something fundamental changes. We move from defending positions to clarifying realities. Perhaps that is not simply how conflict ends. Perhaps it is how we stop creating the next one.
Read more from Sabio Janiak
Sabio Janiak, Founder of Mastering Harmony
Sabio Janiak is a psycho-sensory specialist and human behaviourist, and the founder of Mastering Harmony. Over the past two decades, he has worked in 88 countries as a therapist, musician, and workshop facilitator, exploring the connections between sound, art, the nervous system, and human behaviour. He specialises in trauma resolution and nervous system regulation, helping individuals rewire stress-driven neural patterns and restore emotional balance. Using holistic modalities and applied neuroscience, Sabio empowers people to cultivate resilience, emotional clarity, and self-regulation. He continues to evolve the Mastering Harmony Method through individual sessions, group workshops, and practical training programs.
