Several years ago I was asked to write a short article for a professional online newsletter.  I decided to write about what happens when you encounter conflict in a relationship and then work things out with your partner.  In my professional world, we speak of this as "disruption and repair".  Most of us think that after we "work things out", we go back to the status quo, or "the way we were".  But if you really think about it, something often changes in the relationship after we repair a rupture. We understand one another better, or we feel like the relationship is stronger because we survived a potential threat.

The article was my attempt to rethink ideas about disruptions and repairs, and to understand the role that these experience play in the process of change.  At the time, I was just beginning to explore ideas from complexity theory, ideas that have been popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling books The Tipping Point, The Outliers, and Blink. From a complexity perspective, conflict isn't necessarily a bad thing.  In fact, in order for relationships (and the people in them) to grow, deepen, and become more complex, the apple cart has to be upset. Complexity theorists talk about this in terms of homeostasis and order - when a relationship (or any kind of system) settles into a very structured, ordered way of being, change happens exceedingly slowly, if at all.  From a complexity perspective, too much order and equilibrium equals death. So, if we have any hope for change to occur, we need to tolerate and learn from disruption. When you feel perturbed, you have an opportunity to pause, reconsider things the ways that you automatically respond, and try something different. Even the smallest adjustment changes your interaction with the other person, and this can affect your relationship with that person in unexpected ways.  This is what has been referred to as "the butterfly effect" - the idea that even a small change (a butterfly flapping it's wings) can result in large differences (the creation of a hurricane).

So, next time you feel a bit perturbed, you might pause and think about small ways that you can respond differently than you have in the past.  You just never know how even the smallest change - pausing and taking a deep breath before you reply - might start your relationship off in a new direction.  In Gladwell's terms, a disruption or perturbation gives us an opportunity to start a "positive epidemic".

If you're interested in learning more, I hope you'll check out my article and let me know what you think!

http://www.psychologyoftheself.com/newsletter/2008/sperry_01.htm