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High Conflict Emotion Contagion · It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People

• Megan Hunter: Welcome to It's All Your Fault on TruStory FM. The one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most damaging relationships, those with people with high conflict personalities. I'm Megan Hunter, and I'm here with my co-host, Bill Eddy. Bill Eddy: Hi, everybody. Megan Hunter: We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute in San Diego, California. In today's episode, we are going to talk about emotions and whether they are contagious or not. What do you think? But before we dive in, we have a few quick reminders. First, we'd really love to hear from you. Have you dealt with a high conflict situation or been blamed, experienced violence or abuse from an HCP, or maybe you simply dread seeing that person again, but you have to tonight at home or tomorrow at work. Send us your questions and we just might discuss them on the show. You can submit them by clicking the Submit A Question button at our website, highconflictinstitute.com/podcast, emailing us @podcasthighconflictinstitute.com, or dropping us a note on any of our socials. You can find all the show notes and links @highconflictinstitute.com/podcast as well. Make sure you just subscribe, rate and review, and please tell all your friends about us. Telling just one person that you like the show and where they can find it is the best way you can help us out, and we'd love that and really appreciate it. And now, on with the show. So today, we're talking about emotions and, Bill, I know, and we've talked for 15 years about emotions and unmanaged emotions particularly when it comes to high conflict people. So, the first question really is can someone, anyone, get emotionally hooked and unhooked? Bill Eddy: And the answer is definitely yes. It seems like this is part of how we're built as human beings. That emotions are something that help us work together, help us let each other know if we're in trouble and need help, help us know if people like us and people we want to like. So, emotions really operate constantly almost in the background. You're not consciously thinking about it, but we're constantly absorbing each other's emotions and ordinary emotions we're just vaguely aware of, somebody smiles, somebody laughs, but high conflict emotions or any intense, even intense positive emotions, ratchet up our perception and we absorb some of that. The more intense it is, the more likely we are to absorb it and have the same emotion and at a high level of intensity, so if somebody's really angry with us, next thing you know, we're angry. Now, we may be angry at the person who's angry at us, or we may be angry with the person about somebody they're angry at. And when you think about mob behavior like after a sports event or something like that, let's say your team won and everybody's happy and excited and dancing around and all that, there's all these street mob outcomes of victories in sporting events, and you can see how people can absorb a whole mob just ripple through with positive emotions. But, of course, history is filled with mobs with negative emotions and people get swept up in anger or hatred without even knowing why. One thing that's interesting is research on emotional intelligence tells us if you have, say, a small group of people, half a dozen, six, eight, 10 people who don't have a hierarchy between them like an authority figure, they're all fairly equal, that the person with the most emotionally expressive face will dominate the group. So, our emotions not only are contagious, but they really organize us into groups sometimes, and they also really influence relationships. When you're close to somebody and they're happy, you can say I feel your joy and it may be true, or their sadness, and you could feel their sadness. We go to the movies and you have tears near the end of the movie and everybody's sobbing when they walk out of the theater, or a sporting event where they're running down and they make the goal. Well, that's us making the goal with them. So, definitely, emotions are contagious, but they're also mostly out of sight and I think that's why they're worth talking about today. Megan Hunter: So when you talk about absorbing others emotions, essentially you're saying we get hooked by those emotions, right? Bill Eddy: Absolutely. Yes. Megan Hunter: What does that feel like to be hooked, to absorb those emotions when we don't even know it's happening? Bill Eddy: Well, it just takes over and can take over your brain, and you can become obsessed with how upset you are. And when you're dealing with a high conflict person that often in many ways hijacks your emotions and you have fear, it's like, uh-oh, what's happening now? Where are they now? What are they going to say next? You may have anger. I can't stand this. You may feel helpless. Like in the workplace, workplace bullies, their targets often start developing stomach aches, can't sleep worrying about going to work the next day. So, getting emotionally hooked can happen to someone who's around a high conflict person, it's something we hear about a lot, so yeah but other people can also get hooked against you, and that's also upsetting. Like a divorce case, you're going to court, and let's say your co-parent or your ex-spouse is a high conflict person. Their high conflict emotions could hook the judge, and the judge could look at you and say you're doing it all wrong, and you realize you're the victim here, but the high conflict person has emotionally hooked the judge. We talk about strategies for dealing with that, but you have to watch out for that. That's how bullies can influence a crowd, or a playground, or a high school, all of that. It's a human nature problem that people generally aren't enough aware of. Megan Hunter: Is this the same thing as emotional persuasion? Bill Eddy: Yes, and since high conflict emotions are highly contagious, we see that high conflict people often can be very successful at least in the start, say, of a court case because their emotion, everyone goes, oh, something terrible must have happened to that person, when in fact, we can say, no, that's the person's personality. Megan Hunter: It's interesting. I know in those court cases, the person who truly is the victim will often then have an overreaction because then they've been dealing with this high conflict co-parent for a long time, and now the judge seems to be emotionally hooked by that parent or persuaded or on seeing them as the favorable parent, I guess, and then the true victim overreacts. That seems to be common, would you agree? Bill Eddy: Yes, and it's not wise if you can prepare for that because then that makes the judge think, oh yeah, see how upset she is. Now she's in tears. So we have people who are perpetrators of domestic violence saying, look at my wife, she's a mess. She's emotionally distraught. She can't get it together. And when the judge agrees that the person who's really the victim or survivor of this looks like how they've been defined by the perpetrator, and so it's really, it's a dilemma if people don't recognize it. That's part of what we teach judges to understand. What you see may be the opposite of what's going on out of your sight and you have to consider the possibility that it's the reverse of what's being told to you. Megan Hunter: A couple of things have come to mind while you were talking. One was being in a movie theater years and years ago when a particularly emotional movie came out. I remember I was about to cry at the right moment, right, where they really meant to get to your emotions, but when I paused for a second, I heard everyone else in the movie theater sniffling and it interrupted my own emotion, but I realized, of course, they're emotional from the movie, but maybe there was emotion contagion going on as well. That was just a moment I never forgot because just everyone sniffling. Then the other one, I recall being in a meeting once, and there were probably about eight or nine people around table. It was a group that were meeting to do a study together, and one person got very upset at one point. I found it fascinating that everyone at the table immediately changed. You could tell something in the room had changed even though there wasn't a big upset, but the emotion that was coming out, there was a negative look on the face, angry, the tone of voice of the person changed a little bit, and you saw everyone either freeze or shift in their seat, and a couple leaned forward. We were all hooked emotionally. And in the moment, I observed everyone and saw that the conflict avoiders, they just froze or they didn't even, they couldn't even move, right? They just wanted to be anywhere but there. So, the more aggressive conflict people that like to argue or explain and prove a point maybe were eager to lean forward and argue with this person. Then you had people that just shifted around. They were probably the conflict avoiders as well. But I talked to all of them later and because I thought I really liked to what they were feeling in that moment, and what I found is that their feelings, their emotional feelings were so strong in that moment that they projected those feelings onto everyone else. For example, a conflict avoider would say everyone at the table just wanted to flee. Everyone wanted to get out of there. Well, that wasn't true. That was how that person was experiencing the emotion and they're being hooked to it, and they just projected that on everyone else. Does that make sense? Is that what was happening there, Bill? Bill Eddy: Absolutely. And I think it's so good, you're giving a really good example of being sensitive to emotional contagion, being aware of it, being able to see it happening, which I wish more people would do and know because they often jump to conclusions like you're describing. Everybody wanted to get out of there, whereas it may have been they wanted to get out of there like you've said. That shows we all do really have different personalities and different ways we handle emotions, and we assume that everybody has the same emotions and handles them the same way and that makes for a lot of mistakes in communication, especially with strangers, people you don't really know, people from different cultures, ethnic backgrounds. There's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding because we have these automatic unconscious responses to others' emotion. And if we're not able to check with ourselves, and that's something we talk about a lot with us in High Conflict Institute is checking yourself. Don't assume, check things out especially when emotions are flying high. Megan Hunter: Right. Right. How does this work in our brains? Bill Eddy: Well, it's interesting. There's at least three things that I've learned about that seem really important contributors to emotional contagion. One, of course, is the amygdala in our brain, and we all have that. We actually have an amygdala in each hemisphere of the brain. The amygdala is like the alarm, the smoke alarm that says danger, danger, stop everything and run, or stop everything and fight, and so the amygdala's always looking, always looking in the background for danger, and is much more sensitive to angry faces and fearful faces, and especially the right hemisphere amygdala is faces that show fear and anger grab the amygdala's attention. Faces that show irritation, jealousy, stuff like that don't grab the attention as much because for survival, its fear and anger, and that's what you really want to know about. If somebody's really looking afraid, you want to know why because maybe you need to be afraid and get out of there too. So, there's the amygdala. There's also mirror neurons. This was a more recent discovery that in our brains, we really mirror the behavior we're seeing other people do as if to get us ready to do the same behavior. And we may identify with that behavior that we're having the same reactions to it, and they think that's a lot of like what empathy is. When someone says I feel your joy, they may actually be feeling some of your joy. Their facial expression may take on a similar expression, and your face can actually influence how you feel. When they say put on a happy face, it actually does help you feel a tad happier. So, there's mirror neurons. Then the one that's fascinating to me about high conflict people especially is a smaller corpus callosum, which is the bridge between the hemispheres in the brain. Repeatedly, abused children, for example, grow up with a damaged and smaller corpus callosum, which means they're less able to handle the emotions that operate more in the right hemisphere with logical problem solving, which happens more in the left hemisphere. And so some perhaps personality disorders have this smaller corpus callosum, so it's easier for them to just get emotionally hooked and stay hooked. They have a harder time talking themselves down, and that's why family, friends, and professionals need to learn techniques to calm people down like that so they can do logical problem solving again. There's a lot going on in the brain that's just automatic, but if you think about it and learn about it, you can override a lot of that, and that's a lot of what we teach. Megan Hunter: Right, and we find that most of us engage in those moments because we don't know something has happened in that other person's brain. They're stuck in those right brain emotions and we don't know it yet. We might feel that something's different or we might be completely oblivious, and so we just keep engaging or we get angry and yell or try to explain a lot of those things. In those moments, that person is trapped in really negative emotions where the blame comes out, the all or nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, extreme behaviors, those four key characteristics that we talk about all the time in all of our trainings, the four key characteristics of the high conflict personality we all, on the other side of that, that we just don't often see it and stop ourselves from engaging in that moment. When we do, we just keep them trapped in that right brain, so it can be a challenge. The other thing I was thinking about is in episode one, I told a story about a training participant in a training I was giving who approached me halfway through the training and was pretty hostile, very angry and in my face, and I froze. I went into fight or flight because my amygdala, which, as you know, Bill, I've nicknamed the amygdala Miggy, and my amygdala said, hey, there could be a potential problem here, this person is not your friend right now. So, I couldn't think about what to say, right? My emotions were hooked in that moment. It took me a bit to get unhooked and I eventually did, but things can happen very rapidly. We're not always prepared and sometimes we're going to get it wrong, but we can repair it. But the second part of this that is a few days later, I was on a safari. We were in an exposed completely open Jeep, my husband and I, and we were within 10 feet or so of nine lions who were killing two Cape Buffalo for 45 minutes. It was the most dangerous moments of my life, most dangerous 45 minutes of my life, and I stopped to assess my emotions at one point because I'm nerdy that way. I thought why in that training, when that person approached me and was really in my face, did I freeze, but here I'm not. Maybe there are other psychological processes in place, but I really do believe the amygdala is very sensitive, right, and really doing a job for us to protect us when it hears a tone of voice that spark, it seems unfriendly or sees that angry face or hand movements that look like they could harm us, and it serves to protect us. So, I just found that really interesting that is not in fight or flight in the most dangerous situation of my life, but a few days earlier I was in fight or flight when I really wasn't in danger, but my amygdala said you're potentially in danger. Bill Eddy: Yeah. That's a really fascinating example, and also a good example of why we need to be able to make decisions not just based on our amygdala because we may miss a real dangerous situation and we may overreact to one that isn't really dangerous. That's why we've got a brain that's got more than the amygdala in it. Megan Hunter: Right. Right. And I loved what you said about mirror neurons, that's just a really fascinating field. There are some people that are just, we want to be around because we feel happier around them and I think we feel safer around them. They just have a naturally happy face and just naturally calm emotions. One of those is my husband. There's a joke in our family that he's a special creature. People want to be around him because he's just pleasant and calm and he must not activate amygdala. Bill Eddy: Let me add to that. With COVID, we've missed having that. You get to have him giving you smiles and good cheer and all of that, but we're so cut off that by missing that it actually has influenced, I think, a degree of depression around the world because people aren't getting the happy face mirror neurons activated as much as in the past and hopefully in the near future. Megan Hunter: Absolutely. That leads me to thinking about decisions. Can emotions lead us to make bad decisions? Bill Eddy: Absolutely. I mean, the first one to think about, especially because we're in the family law business so much, is helping people get out of relationships that they probably shouldn't have gotten into in the first place. Of course, the one that's the biggest problem in many ways is a domestic violence relationship was someone who was very charming and people can manipulate your emotions, and they may do it on purpose depending on their personality. If they have an anti-social personality, they may be doing it on purpose, or they may be doing it totally unaware, say, someone with a borderline personality who can be intensely loving, friendly, affectionate, and yet they're not able to manage their intense emotions. The next thing you know, they're intensely angry. A lot of men who are engaged in domestic violence have borderline personality disorder or traits and they really attach themselves, but they're so over reactive that they get violent some of them. This is not all of them. Anything we say about personality disorders isn't everybody with that, but it does seem that that's a personality with emotion dysregulation, and so it can deceive people, and the person you're with may truly be excited and happy the first couple months they're with you, but then you see this other side that they can't manage as well. But this is true in the workplace, hiring decisions. Oh, I really like this person, let's hire this person, and they turn out to be a disaster, or you don't hire somebody and you hear they go on to be super successful in another organization and you missed a wonderful opportunity. Where we put our money, people that get us to donate to them or to do a project. I wrote in the first book, High Conflict People and Legal Disputes, about a former stock broker I guess who conned people. A couple years later, I get an email from a woman saying, I wish I read your book because I gave that guy $10,000 to do some repairs on the property of my home and he never did any work. He just took off. Megan Hunter: Ouch. Bill Eddy: And so he's very good at getting people's money and then taking off, take the money and run. Whether it's intentionally being conned or someone who's just emotional person who can't manage their emotions, all of these can lead to bad decisions. That's why we have a whole brain, not just an emotional brain, so we can really think through what's best to do. Megan Hunter: How do HCPs deal with emotions? Bill Eddy: Well, it's interesting because this is, first of all, all high conflict people seem to be more driven by emotions and more emotions than logical self-interest, but it's different for each to them. The five high conflict personalities we talk about handle them slightly different. So, let me talk about borderline personalities that I was talking about earlier. They're often thought of as having emotion dysregulation, and it may have come from early life trauma. It may be an inborn trait, something like that, but they tend to go too far with emotions, so they're, on a scale of one to a hundred, you're getting a one or you're getting a hundred. That may be a hundred loving, but it also may be a hundred hating when they're angry with you. It's disproportionate, and that's one of their issue, and there's treatments for that, and some people get that. When you think about con artists, the anti-social personality, they're very manipulative of emotions. They can show emotions that are intimidating and angry, and you feel like I've got to do what this person says or my life is in danger. I once had a court hearing of an ex, my client was a husband. The ex-wife had, I think, anti-social boyfriend. After the hearing, I get into traffic, get on the highway and I glance over to my right, and that's the vehicle with that boyfriend driving and the ex-wife next to him. The boyfriend gave me a look like if I wanted, I could just ram your car and cause your death. Megan Hunter: Oh, you just gave me chills. Bill Eddy: Yeah, and the guy did, and he made some false allegations that really messed up my client's life for about a year. We got it sorted out, and it turned out he had lied to police at one point, and that's part of what ended his part of that case, but the idea that they can manipulate and intimidate. Narcissists. Everyone talks about narcissists. Narcissists can be just so charming, and so their charming emotions, they make you feel wonderful, they make you feel special, and then they've got you. Let's say you marry them. Next thing you know, you're their target of blame and they're publicly humiliating you to make themselves look superior. So, those are just some examples. Paranoid personality overreacts to fearful things. Histrionic personality overreacts to drama. It's using the other parts of our brain to go logically does this fit the situation, and that'll help you decide and understand people you're dealing with. If you have to deal with a high conflict person, it's going to help to understand not to react to all their emotions. Megan Hunter: How do HCPs communicate differently using their emotions? Bill Eddy: Well, it does seem like their facial expressions are more intense. That's what I mentioned earlier where they can dominate a group because of their facial expressions, so they may be, their voice may be louder, may be more extreme and then maybe even more seductive, and they can be more persuasive by pointing their finger at you, like in a courtroom and saying, "You know what she did," and they're pointing the finger at her and physically you follow that finger. I see the judge's eyes and the judge's eyes follow that finger and look at the person that's being talked about who may be totally innocent of having done anything wrong. So they use their bodies, they use their face, they use their voice, and you have to be aware of that. By the way, the best judges don't move with that finger. They stay focusing on the person who's talking, and that really deflates their power because the person who's talking and blaming hasn't succeeded at influencing where the judge looks. Megan Hunter: Wow. Truly a neutral. Bill Eddy: Yeah. Yeah. That's what you want. Megan Hunter: Fascinating. Are emotions part of why we have such angry polarization today in families and in politics, and I mean, basically, in general society these days. Everybody's fighting this year about vaccines, and mandates, and masks, and all kinds of things. Bill Eddy: Yeah, and what's fascinating to me, fortunately, learning about this many, many years ago and seeing the change in the national and world emotional level, we're much more emotional. I think it's not about issues. And we have a saying at High Conflict Institute. Often, the issue's not the issue, the personality's the issue. There's other things going on here. I would say it's the intensity, the escalated intensity of emotions that, for example, in families where you see alienation, a child doesn't want to spend time with one of the parents. Let's say it's dad. I don't want to see dad anymore. I don't like how he wears his hair. Well, that's not why. It's because of the emotional intensity that mom may be putting out and mom's family may be putting out, and children can't tolerate too high a level of intensity without looking for the fastest way to resolve that, and it's not even conscious and they go okay, mom will calm down if I agree with her. So, you're right, mom. Dad's a jerk and he doesn't wear his hair right, and so, you absorb it emotionally. It's interesting that family alienation like that, where people start hating each other in a divorce, and sometimes in an intact family, you get people hating each other. It's because of the emotions and the repetition of the emotions. And interestingly, that's how they say prejudice develops is that kids become prejudiced by five or six years old. Not because they know cultural history, but because they see their parents' expressions and other adults' expressions. Let's say they're in an elevator holding their mother's hand and someone from a different ethnic group gets on, and the mother tightens up and grabs the child's hand tighter. The child emotionally absorbs that's a dangerous person, and that's what we see in divorce alienation cases. A child absorbs. Now, dad's a dangerous person or mom's stupid at Math, so I never want to see her again. That's all emotional transfer. And now, we're seeing this in politics so much. I really think in many ways it's a media-driven polarization because media has the ability to repeat facial expressions, hand gestures, tone of voice thousands and millions of time, and that's why I tell people, if you're feeling stressed by today's politics, turn off the news. Don't look at the Facebook news. Just get yourself away from news for a little while and you will feel better. Nothing's going to change for the world. So much of this is an emotional contagion that nobody sees, but we see it, and the cure for this is to get people talking one to one. When people talk one to one, people that they thought they hated, they don't at all. It's of human beings. But, via all these media being in the middle can make you hate people that you see, but you don't know. And, that's the thing. We got to be really careful. We don't want to absorb that. It's not about the issue, and I agree. It's not about wearing the mask or not wearing the mask. It's about the emotions that have been generated around that. One thing that really bugs me is when the news media says how polarized we are. If you say that a million times, we're going to feel polarized. I don't think we're that polarized if we sit down and talk one to one. Megan Hunter: I agree. I agree. I can attest to taking a social media break. I'm not a big social media person, but I got a Twitter account last year and I loved it. For me, there's a lot of information and education, and it's almost like having access to research that you would never find just in ordinary reading and getting a lot of different people's opinions. I do value that and love it, but I did notice that I was absorbing the intense emotions. The original post might be okay, but it's just all the follow-up, everyone responding to that or reacting, and then just immediately attacking. It's just what social media is. So I have taken a break now for a few months, and I feel pretty good. Bill Eddy: There you go. Megan Hunter: Yeah, a little less stressed. Last question here is what can we do to calm down emotions? Bill Eddy: Well, I'm glad to say we have two techniques at High Conflict Institute that we teach and we just keep getting very positive feedback on. One of them is the BIFF method we mentioned earlier in writing how to respond to written hostility or emotional extremes by being brief, informative, friendly, and firm. And it's too detailed for us to talk about right now in any depth, but we've got that on other podcasts, books, and articles. The other is EAR statements that show empathy, attention, and respect. And our book, Calming Upset People with EAR really helps show how anybody in the middle of an upsetting conversation can really turn it around and saying things like tell me more, I want to understand your point of view, or I can see how frustrating this issue is for you, or I have a lot of respect for the work you do or your commitment to solving this problem. And your tone of voice, hand gestures, facial expression, by showing a desire to connect, can just totally calm these conversations, and we find within 30 seconds, probably 90% of the time, the practice exercise that both you and I do and our other trainers do, people give us feedback within 30 seconds. They felt better because they felt the person was trying to connect with them, and that's what we need. We need more connection, less extreme emotions and we need to understand in many cases the issue is not really the issue. Megan Hunter: And then once we recognize that, we have to adapt what we do, and use the EAR statement or use BIFF so. Well, there you have it. Emotions are contagious, it turns out. If you want to read more about that, we put some articles about emotion contagion in the show notes, along with some links to some books and courses. And I'm sure we'll be talking a lot more in the future, in different episodes about emotions. In the next few episodes, I want to give you a little heads up. We're going to be talking about high conflict people in love and romance. So, we'll do four episodes on dating radar. First. What are the red flags? How can you see who you shouldn't be dating or commingling finances with marrying, living with, having a child with, all those kind of things. Then the next episode will be the romantic types that you might want to avoid. Then lastly, should you get out, and if so, how can you get out safely? So these are all based on the book we wrote a few years ago called Dating Radar, which was based on a survey that we did with over 500 responses from people who had been in some pretty awful relationships with high conflict people. They provided a lot of content, so we are rich in dating radar content, and we'll talk about it in these episodes. Then the final episode will be your questions, so please submit a question on highconflictinstitute.com/podcast. And remember to rate and review us and tell your friends and colleagues about us, which means a lot. Thanks for listening and we hope our words impact your life in a very positive way. And just don't forget to enjoy every day. Think about emotions and manage your own emotions. Learn how to get unhooked. And most importantly, find the missing peace. P-E-A-C-E. It's All Your Fault is a production of TruStory FM. Engineering by Andy Nelson, music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins, and Ziv Moran. Find the show, show notes, and transcripts @truestory.fm or highconflictinstitute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.