Containment is the ability to prevent issues, problems, and challenges from escalating unnecessarily. And escalation is a grave relational threat that lurks just around the corner in almost every interaction.
Think about your key relationships at work and at home. Typically, it is not the initial issue or the root cause that inflicts the most damage when a conversation goes off the rails, it is the emotionally charged words that are spoken as the conversation escalates and spirals out of control.
When conversations escalate, many negative, destructive things happen but two dastardly occurrences deserve special attention.
First, escalation has a terrible way of bringing out the worst in everyone. There is no such thing as thick skin when it comes to harsh, damaging words in our closest relationships—these are the people who mean the most to us and their words have huge impact. When our spouse, our boss, our friend, or our trusted coworker unloads on us, it is profoundly impactful. And when we are stung by words, we often react with some venom of our own. In no time flat, whatever conversation you were formerly having goes off on a tangent of relational pain and suffering.
And speaking of damaging detours, this brings us to the second dastardly outcome of conversational escalation: Many of the topics, secrets, and dirt and were mercifully off the table prior to an escalation become fair game as we reach into the cemetery of negative thoughts and exhume any old bone we can find. And this is a real problem because in our closest relationships we know where the bones are hiding.
We log countless hours with the boss, key coworkers or clients, our spouse, children, close family and friends. In so doing, we accumulate many, many reasons to love them but also a few reasons that they drive us crazy. Fortunately, we can usually keep a lid on the things that annoy us about the other person and not let these negative and tangential thoughts leak out during conversations. But when a conversation escalates, it becomes far more likely that we will dig into the relational boneyard and toss out a legbone.
Simply put, escalation is especially dangerous to our closest relationships because we know more ways to hurt the people closest to us. And because the previous sentence is so ugly, containment is a beautiful–and an indispensable–communication skill.
Whenever you sense a conversation escalating, make containment your first action.
Click here for four key tips on containment.