Conflict Isn't Contention, A Love Letter to Elle

When I was seventeen, I took a mediation class, and I had to write a paper about a conflict I was in and analyze it using the theories we’d been learning. This professor was a family friend. I’d known him for years. We went to the same potlucks. We ran into him at Costco. He knew my family. So when I told him I wanted to write about my sister for the paper, he laughed and said, “How could anyone be in conflict with Elle?”

I pointed at him. “Exactly.”

If you don’t have the benefit of knowing Elle, I’m sorry. She has freckles and blue eyes that I absolutely covet. She is magic with little kids and pets. She likes puns and indie pop and clothes and immigration studies. Her first words were “no thank you,” as in we’d say, “Elle, time to go to bed” and she’d say, “No thank you.” I’ve known her her entire life, and she’s never been anything but delightful.

At the time, Elle was twelve. She was known for being happy and sweet, neither of which were very good reflections of the complexity of her personhood. (To this day, one of the fastest ways to make Elle upset is to call her sweet.) Professor Ford couldn’t imagine anyone getting on her bad side, because he couldn’t imagine her having a bad side. He couldn’t imagine us being in conflict, and that was the “exactly,” because we weren’t in conflict. We were almost never in conflict. That was the problem.

*My family, I have no idea when. (Look at my mom’s smile! She’s so pretty! Look at my dad’s mustache! It’s so bad! I love this picture.)*

The mediation class changed how I thought about a lot of things, conflict first and foremost. Early on in class, my professor announced, “Conflict isn’t contention,” and I thought, What?

The differentiation my professor offered was this: contention is picking a fight. Contention is a spirit of discontent or a need for control or whatever it is in you that consistently asks you to treat others as less human than you. Conflict, though, conflict is what happens when two people are honest and vulnerable with each other. Conflict is the price of really knowing each other, of really being together.

This was disorienting for a lot of us in the class. We were a bunch of LDS Christian kids who had grown up hearing that “contention is of the devil” (3 Nephi 11:29). In a church atmosphere, it’s hard to come up with anything more damning than that. If contention is of the devil, then we better be exactly the opposite of whatever contention is. But, as my professor pointed out, Jesus was the opposite of the devil, and he was in conflict all the time. Look at a Jesus story—there’s probably some kind of conflict happening. We’d figured that being mediators meant stopping anything even associated with contention from happening, but that wasn’t what our professor was saying. He was saying that our job was to make sure that conflict happened and happened well.

Professor Ford convinced me: no conflict means that someone isn’t speaking up when they should. It means that someone is getting run over. And that means that they are not truly allowing themselves to be known. And that meant that something was going wrong in my relationship with Elle. That’s what I wanted to write about.

I really, really wish I still had that essay. I wish I could remember it in greater detail. I do know that I wrote about how I had used my five-years-older standing in the family to make it difficult for her to voice opinions that were different than mine. I talked about other ways that I’d treated her as less human than me and how, as a result, we weren’t engaging in conflict anymore. I’d hurt her and she’d withdrawn. It was more complicated than that, much less conscious and less one-sided, but that was the long and short of it. There was no conflict, but there was contention. I actually think that wherever there isn’t any conflict, there’s probably contention.

I poured my heart into that paper, and when my professor handed the paper back, he said, “I can tell you want to be better, and that’s the highest praise I can give.”

I did want to be better. I spent the next few years repenting. I asked Elle what she thought and wanted and tried really hard to listen. I tried to get over the habit of talking down to her, tried to treat her wants and needs as equal to my own.

Doing this sucked. I remember the first time Elle disagreed with me—I hated it. I was used to getting my way, so not getting it felt like a loss of control and identity. And then Elle started figuring out the ways I hadn’t been a good sister—right when I was finally being a better one!—and she had to get mad at me, because getting mad was a necessary part of forgiving me. It sucked.

One of the bravest things I’ve ever done was let Elle read that essay I’d written. I’d told her when I was writing it that she could read it whenever she wanted, and one day she asked to. I sat in the living room as she sat in our room, and I listened to her cry. There are only three other things in my life that ever made me feel that awful. But, after an hour or so, she came out and gave me a hug, and thanked me for writing it and letting her read it. It was pure generosity.

This didn’t mean we were done with the conflict—on the contrary, in a lot of ways that conversation was the start of it. We were finally working together to know each other, to let each other be different, to be together in those differences. We’re still practicing this. We’re going to be practicing this our whole lives. But we’re getting better at it.

Years after Elle read the essay she was on her mission, and she wrote me an email talking about conflict she was doing with her companion. “I don’t like it as much,” she said. “When I do conflict with you, it’s like we’re on the same team. We’re pulling together. This feels like pulling apart.” It’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.

I’m so glad that Elle let me know her. It was a brave thing for her to do—choosing to be known, choosing to do conflict, especially in a context where you have been hurt, is brave. It’s Brené-Brown-courageous. I’m grateful Elle let me know her, because knowing her is one of the best things that’s ever happened in my life, and I couldn’t do it if she hadn’t let me into the places where we disagree. Doing conflict with Elle made me better, and I think this is what conflict can do. It can be what burns away our tin. It can be what smooths our rough edges. It can be part of how we enter into the celestial relationality that makes up heaven.

I’m thoroughly convinced, now, of what Professor Ford preached. Contention is of the devil, but conflict is how we become like God.