What If the Impasse Isn't in Your Head?

I'm really excited, really, really, really excited about this episode. I'm going to try and lasagne together all of the work that we've been doing in this podcast and that I've been doing for the last two years and even before that building, building tools, techniques, tips of trade, all neuroscience-based, in complex resolution. This is like, what is the secret sauce of flannel people mediation? What is the secret sauce of Ryan McLaughlin? I want to get into exact specifics, things that you can use tonight in your own relationship, in your own marriage, in your own analysis of your brain and psyche and body and how you move through the world. It's going to be a banger.

If you stay through the end, what will you get? We're going to go through three kind of roadmaps. One is tools to understand and unwind, complex in the body, tools and techniques to unwind, complex in the mind, and tools and techniques to unwind, complex in the room. We're going to go through the principles that underlie this. This guy is meant to be like a textbook. When I started this podcast, I sought to understand the anatomy of complex. What makes the anatomy of complex in, what builds, what's the ingredients, what's the formula, what's the structure, and the reason I want to study the anatomy of complex is to study how we can unwind it and pull it apart more successfully.

Today, if you stay to the end, you're going to see that essentially, this is why I say neuroscience, we're studying conflict as biology. This will make more sense as we go, but stay tuned. My name is Ryan McLaughlin. This is Anatomy of Conflict Podcast, and this episode is brought to you by Flannel People Mediation, a virtual mediation practice where we do everything from divorce mediation, separation mediation, post divorce mediation to business commercial disputes between franchise e-franchisers, co-founders, and the like.

If you are in a conflict and you want a facilitated virtual space, supported by 250 plus 5 star Google reviews, check us out at flannelpeopleimmediation.com to get your free 30 minute console. All right, let's hit it. Today, we're going to go over 15 somatic tools that can break a conflict in past and none of them involve talking.

Okay, so here's what nobody tells you about an impasse, and these are the tricky problems, like these are the problems that are worth, that are, they get presented to a mediator, right? It's like, we try everything else, we try the kitchen table, we try therapy, we try talking, we try studying, we try podcasts, and nothing works. Can you help us? What's the magic? And I'm interested in what is the magic?

So when people are stuck, essentially what we're assuming, if we go to first principles, is that they disagree on something, right? This is sort of the definition of conflict, two differences in positions. They can't agree on the right dollar amount, they can't agree on the right words, they can't agree on the right version of facts, they can't agree on the right schedule.

So it's party A, party B, and they have a difference. And the goal then, at least what we think is to, yeah, resolve, get to a right number or the right schedule, get to the right thing. And the reframe that we're going to do today is, we're going to reframe this as a biological problem. And we're going to do this, as I said, with the mind, body, and the room.

And so, so, let's just, I was going to preface this by diving into Lisa Feldman, Barrett's work, body budget, but that's going to underlie everything we're doing. So let's just dive right into the 15 tools and talk about, and talk about how they break the nervous system, how they regulate the nervous system, how they break cognitive loops. That's what we're up to. Those two things, nervous system in the body, on one hand, cognitive loops on the other because we get stuck. And today, you could, you could think about this as, let's do a deep dive into the biology of getting stuck. What's happening when we get stuck? What's happening when we're at impasse?

And at the end of you're going to have a toolkit, you're going to have a guide, you're going to understand, um, from the research, what's happening? So again, we're going to go through three things today. Number one is the body. And this is, I refer to this as the bottom up, bottom up, somatic resets. I refer to this as the hardware, right? We are going to do things like kick deep breath. We all know that these are tools that use our body's hardware. Our nervous system to bring our thinking brain back online, very important. Tier two is the mind, which is to say, once we're back online, prefrontal cortex was back online, a meagdala is offline. Once our, our hardware is, is operating, we're still stuck, right?

We're regulated. We're breathing great. We're wonderful. We're under 100 beats per minute. We're still stuck and here we attack cognition and, and where brain makes pattern as, and is predictive, just like an LLM, and we go for pattern interrupts, questions and or activities that break the predictive loops that is the essential characteristic of our brain that often trap us in repetitive thinking, that often trap us, therefore, and, and complex because we can't pick up new solutions, we can't have creative approaches, we can't have new and different points of view. And third, the room, right?

So we have body, mind, and the room. The room, what I mean by the room is the first principles, and we're going to talk more about, this is why these things work, okay? So let's go to the body. We've all heard the body keeps score. We've all heard trauma and prep, form practice understands somatics and the body and the body is key to the work.

So we're going to go through some tools, and we also have heard of this podcast about the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, and how essentially we need to be regulated before we can engage in conflict work, otherwise, our sort of thinking, thoughtful problem solving brain is off, and our fight or flight brain is on.

So let's get into some tools that can help bring highly elevated people back to a regulated state. And these are banger tools, in other words, like these are tools that I've saved and bookmarked over the last months and years to bring to you today. Tool number one, this is the butterfly hug, also known as bilateral stimulation.

So in 1998, I want to tell you guys a story because it's pretty cool. New psychologists were working with hurricane survivors of Mexico, hurricane Poline. And they needed to help people fast, they needed to regulate people fast, and they needed to do something that didn't require a clinical setting, and then they could do themselves.

So they developed what we call today, the butterfly hug, and here's how it works. You, and you guys can do this as you're listening. Cross your arms across your chest so that you're right hands on your left shoulder and your left hand on your right shoulder. And then you tap left, right, left, right, left, right, slowly and rhythmically. And this is a form of bilateral stimulation. It's the same core mechanism behind EMDR therapy. The alternating tapping of the left and the right hemispheres, the alternate tapping across the left and the right side, require the left and the right hemispheres, the brain to coordinate through the corpus colosum.

And this, this cross body action stuff, cross hemispheric talking, what it does is it asks the working memory to do something and ask the brain to do something. Hey, here's a thing for you to do, you're going to need to think about this. And because the brain doesn't have unlimited bandwidth, right, it has to focus and only has a limited amount of focus, it can't therefore carry the same load of emotional intensity while also processing this new task of this cross body tapping, okay, it'd be like saying juggle. You have to focus on the juggling balls and you can't focus so much on the anger of the frustration, the rage, the sadness, the panic that you previously had. You can't carry it all. What happens?

The volume of the panic or the anger or the rage gets turned down. Secondly, there's another mechanism, the slow rhythmic motion. If you combine it with deep breathing, signals to the nervous system that you are safe. And so it shifts your body from sympathetic activation, also known as fight or flight toward parasympathetic, also known as rest and digest or rest and relaxation.

So tool number one that regulates the body is use the butterfly hog. If this feels too vulnerable, like I could see myself being a little bit intimidated to do this in a mediation, you can adapt it by tapping opposite knees or even tapping your shoes. But the bilateral mechanism is the same and you're just making it less pronounced.

So I'm curious, would you guys ever use something like this in a session in a conflict? It's a weird tool but it's effective, it's been studied a lot and it's not that weird and it's cheap and it's easy, it's free, right? So let's tool number one, butterfly hog. tool number two, the physiological side. This one comes from Andrew Schubberman's work at Stanford Neuroscience Lab and it's probably the fastest single tool for lowering heart rate in real time. Huge. If you have elevated heart rates, if you have stressed out people, if you have elevated people, here's the technique. Little inhale, two quick sips of air through the nose, followed by a long, slow exhale through the mouth. Why two inhales?

That second little baby sip of air at the top, re-inflates the little air sacs in the lungs and when you're stressed, those little sacs collapse. So you get less oxygen and we want more oxygen. The long exhale is key because it stimulates the vagus nerve which is the main kind of parasympathetic nervous highway.

So the long exhale is huge. Okay, sip of water, let's go. That's all there is to it, okay? Little inhale, long exhale, inhale through nose, exhale through mouth. Is this too woo-woo? I think because the Huberman Lab, it's getting more and more mainstream. I would research and do this as a way of relaxing. I might do this multiple times. I might put this in a participation agreement and say it's part and parcel of our practice so it's expected. I might give my video outlining the number of tools that we might use in mediation so that they can see them, practice them, etc. I also think it's just really great information and really rich information to share.

Tool number three that regulates the body is vagal cooling, also known as the mammalian dive reflex. This one we might hesitate to use but has some of the best data which is like when you apply cold to your face or neck, particularly behind the ears where your vagus nerve is close to the surface of your skin, it triggers something that they've called the mammalian dive reflex which is a primitive involuntary reflex that all mammals share and it immediately slows your heart rate and it immediately redirects blood to your brain and core organs. It's the body is like holy shit, we got to conserve everything, go and mode, okay?

So you can do this very subtly by taking a cold glass of water and holding against your wrist, you can take a freezer, not a freezer, you can take a spoon and put it in the freezer and then take that cold spoon and put it behind your ears. So again, very simple to execute, very powerful to use. Tool number four, put the tongue on the roof of your mouth, rip on your teeth. The tongue and your jaw are neurologically wired and reflect and cause a threat response.

So when we're stressed, we cleanse our teeth, most people don't even notice. And when you push your tongue gently against the roof of your mouth, just behind your front teeth and you consciously relax your jaw, it sends a signal to your brain, stem that heart or relax now. That's simple as that, but you can just cue that, right? Let's just put the, it's invisible and I don't have to do it. And then I'm going to go through these next, those are, those are the ones, actually I don't have any priority for these, but those are the ones I researched first and was like user of the bangers.

But let's go through four more because these are tools, I think we should get more and more comfortable throwing out there on the table to use. And we need to talk about them first before we use them, we need to practice on ourselves before we use them. So two or five, panoramic vision, when we are stressed, our vision field narrows because we go into threat detection mode, like we're literally zooming in for danger. And the fix then is to imagine you're meditating, soften your gaze, notice the periphery of the room without moving your eyes. It sends, that in the shift sends a neural pathway that inhibits the sympathetic nervous system.

You're telling the brain, there's no predator, we're chill, we couldn't stand down. And so you might say, let's just take a second to look around the room, right, and broaden our perspective. It's a, it's a beautiful metaphor and it's also neuroscience. School number six, I've done this before without knowing why. This is five, four, three, two, one grounding, tell me five things you see, four things you touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. What's happening here?

This is sensory work, it's sensory bypass, it forces the brain again, because it has limited ability of process to switch from raging hot, pissed off in the amygdala to cool, calm, collected processing of the central prefrontal cortex, right, you have to engage with these stimuli, you have to do something different, you have to redirect cognitive resources. School number seven is weighted pressure. This is a deep pressure from the relaxation effect it has, so weighted blanket, if you're at home, which many of the virtual mediations are, and you can even just press your hands firmly on the top of your thighs, or press your palms into the table.

Anything with proprioceptive feedback, it tells the brain, hey, we're here, okay, we're a body, we're in space, we're stabilizing, we're not floating off into the ether. And lastly, and my, maybe my favorite, shaking, shaking, shaking off, right, we see animals if you have a pet or pet dog, see them shake, see animals in the wild, shake after a predatory encounter, they're discharging, they're adrenaline and cortisol, humans, we can do the same thing, but we, but we often suppress it.

So that's why she gone has shaking, and in, in mediation, you just call movement break. Hey guys, we've been sitting, listen to a hard conversation. Let's stand up for 60 seconds and just shake out our hands and shoulders. Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, I've done this in yoga class, I've done this in she gone, I have not done this, I've done this in the English classes I used to teach, I have not done this in mediation. The move is to bring these to the arenas in which they're least likely to appear, but most needed, divorce mediation, commercial disputes.

Let's get people talking about these, testing these, trying these out in their own bodies. This is taking the offline brain and trying to bring it online, the hijacked amygdala and trying to go to prefrontal cortex, super usable with kids, if you're a parent, super usable with co-parents, if you're a parent, super usable in your own arguments. Let's come back online, listen and relist into that section, I know I will.

Section two of this episode is once we're back online, everything's regulated or breathing great, let's say we've done all those, cold spoon behind the ear, firm pressure on the legs, we've shaken, we've looked at the room, we've named 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, we've done the superman double exhale side, we've done the butterfly hug, okay, and we're still stuck, still kind of in huge disagreement land.

Now what, now how to, now this next section I said this is now the mind, right, now we're going to begin to do some jujitsu on the mind. Reality is regulated, heart rates down, we're still stuck, now the brain isn't in reactive mode anymore, it's in predictive mode, and this is its default mode, the brain doesn't see reality as it is, right, it sees, it constructs reality based on its previous past experiences, and so in divorce or any business conflict, it's a sustained dispute, right, the other person has become an amalgamation of all the past prior experiences, and so sometimes the brain has stopped taking in new data, and this is the problem, it's playing back a loop of past arguments, and it's a prediction loop, and so what we want to do here, to be able to generate solutions, to be able to generate new ideas, to be able to generate new possibilities, is to break the predictive loop, we have to take the brain off road, we have to throw the curveball, we have to give it something new, give the brain something new, that's the mechanism here, you have to force it out of its neural ruts, its neural highway ruts, and so here are the tools, I'm going to go through these a little bit quicker, and you get the idea, you can just see as I read off these tools, oh yeah, that would potentially cause me to think differently, so this is tool number nine, the future self audit, ask the person to describe their life five years from now, specifically a Saturday morning when this conflict is a distant memory, so what does this do, it puts time, so it's temporal distancing, but it's time between the you now and the you later, and it, again, you're forcing the brain to go into prefrontal cortex mode, away from threat, think differently, tool 10, the inheritance question, this is a good one, and I use this, I've used this a couple of times, if your child were sitting in this room 20 years from now looking back at this exact moment, what would they see that they're very proud of, what's one thing that they'd be proudest of you for doing, and this shifts the brain from maybe ego protection to legacy building, it's particularly in family disputes, it's a good one, tool 11, this is trying to get a perspective shift, this is all about theory of mind, theory of mind says, can we adopt another, can we put ourselves in another person's shoes?

So a question might be, if I interview the other person right now and ask them what they're most afraid of in losing this negotiation, what would they say? So you have to do the juxtaposition, it's trying to like get some neuroplasticity, these questions are pushing you to be neuroplastic, tool 12, the hidden variable question, this is what's an example of the hidden variable question, so they're talking about who gets the house, and you introduce, you ask an open question that says something like this, okay, on a scale of one to ten, how much of your current know they're in a no position is about the house, and how much of the no is about something you didn't get say ten years ago, so you just throw it out the wild card, the wild card is the pull on the brain, so we want to try and name some of these hidden variables, and this is tricky and we could do a separate podcast on kind of each of these and fleshing these out, but just get in the idea to take away as we're going for neuroplasticity, we're going to throw the brain in new something new, and this is where the tarot cards and the oracle cards come in, one of the ways is neuroplasticity, throwing in something it didn't expect, something that isn't part of its script.

I'll just do a couple more real quick, one is the rightness tax, which is, how do you say this, what would you, the rightness tax is, okay, let's say you're right, right, let's say that you deserve the house, how much if we continued argue about this, how much are you losing in sleep, how much are you losing in stress and gray hair, how much are you losing in peace of mind, like what is being, if you got the house, what would it cost you in those things, do you try to create a different valuation structure, the tool 14, the blank page reset, if we burned everything that we'd written started completely from scratch, what's the very first thing you'd write down that's most important to you?

And the last but not least, this is really interesting, this is the paradoxical intervention when someone stuck, as the mediator you could say, hey guys, I've been thinking about this, I think maybe we've been pushing too hard, maybe you guys just need to stay exactly where you are, stuck for another couple months, it might be expensive and stressful, but maybe that time is really useful.

So it shifts, it flips it on its head from now, we need a solution to, I think you should actually stay stuck. And when you do that, there's a human drive, it's like reverse psychology, they want to move forward now, you've given them permission to be stuck and now they want to move forward.

So which of these questions would you use, which questions do you think would land, which questions scare you guys, which ones feel risky? Let's wrap this up, right? So part one was how do we get the body to be calm? Question two is how do we get the mind to be more plastic? And question three is why do these things work, right? What about them? What are the first principles? Because this is what's interesting, what's the science here? What's the first principles?

And so if you just hang on for five more minutes, we're going to do each of the five principles to kind of wrap this up. The first principle is the idea of alostasis or the body budget, and this is your body's primary job, your brain's primary job, excuse me, is not to think. As much as we think that it is, it's not, it's to keep us alive, to manage resources, to make sure you sleep and eat and manage cortisol. And when it's depleted, when you're stressed and you're exhausted and you're tired, your brain can't think, your brain's going to allocate resources there, and it's going to, it's going to short change the cognitively expensive, the calorically expensive tasks of empathy and yada yada yada.

This means take breaks for food and drink and movement. It's, it might sound basic, but it's not basic, but your brain needs it. Principle two, you can't think your way out of a elevated body state. You can't think your way out of an hijack of mandala. When someone's flooded, no amount of argumentation will reach them. You have to go through the body, through breath, through bilateral stimulation, the butterfly stuff, through cold, bring the cortex, the prefrontal cortex back online, and then negotiate. Principle three, the brain is a prediction machine. It doesn't perceive reality, but it predicts based on past experience. This is super interesting.

This is one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot. How do you break the cognitive mold? How do you interrupt the patterns? How do you get the brain to stop predicting and start like actively listening? How do you recalibrate the mind? The evidence shows that it's doable with these techniques. They're in, I think, lies rich soil for creative mediators. Principle four, and this is a rehash of the earlier one, is that the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex are on a seesaw, which is to say that throughout processing and logical processing sit opposite one another. When one goes up, the other one goes down. They can't be fully online at the same time.

So grounding techniques pull blood flow back into the brain part that is thinking. Principle five, we haven't talked about this. We could do a whole episode just on this, but this is co-regulation, which is to say there's a lot of research that how your nervous system is in a room as a mediator, your body language, your eye contact, your heart rate, your muscle tension, your pupil dilation, all that stuff. If you're the person facilitating the conversation and you stay deeply regulated, that you have slow speech, a low pitch, relaxed posture, that their nervous systems will begin to mirror yours. And this might be the most important and or accessible tool in the entire episode.

Your own regulation might be the most powerful intervention that you have. And you can extrapolate here and say, there's a common phrase that takes to the tango in conflict. Here, the research really is with the exception of like really abuse, basically, that yes, if one person consistently stays regulated and engages in active listening, or just let's just say, never mind active listening, let's just say stay is regulated, then the conflict flavor will really stay very controlled and it won't spin out. Let's wrap up. Here's the takeaway. Well, boy, what's the takeaway? We have the body, we have the mind and we have these first principles.

The take home for me is there are real tools, ingredients, to a sauce, that this field of conflict management, of conflict resolution, of mediation, of studying conflict need not be, it's not conflict whispering in any kind of woo-woo sense. It's a learnable, trainable practice backed by many, many, many studies and tools.

And so the goal in this episode is, let's throw some tools out there, listen to this episode, study this episode, and let's get some of them circulating in practice, even though they might be a little scary to implement. So guys, if you've got something out of this episode, if it was interesting to you, share with friends. Share with friends. Why share with friends? Because I think conflict is something we could all bond over. I think we all have complicated lives. We all have weak spots where we can use some of these tools. Parenting is a great one. That's one for me where it's like, yeah, I can talk about this on a podcast, but how can I begin to implement some of these in parenting, right?

Never mind professional stuff. Let's just focus on parenting. Message me personally if you want this in a written guide and I'll send it to you. Send me a text for 7, 6, 3, 3, 1, 6, 8, 3, 2, 3, and I'll message you the companion guide, which is a one-page visual of all 15 tools and the mechanisms behind them. You got to message me though. We got to be brave and reach out. It's free.

So that's cool. Guys, my name's Ryan McLaughlin. This is an army of conflict. I'll see you next episode.