This is the real reason why so many conflicts persist: Not because of a lack of solutions or because people are unwilling to compromise, but because combatants don’t understand why they are fighting in the first place. They haven’t discussed the deeper topics—the emotional issues—that are inflaming the dispute. And they’ve avoided that emotional discussion because they don’t want to admit they are furious and sad and worried. In other words, they don’t want to talk about How Do We Feel?, even though it’s the most important conversation to have.

  Discussing emotions won’t solve everything, of course. Sometimes, one person wants a baby and the other doesn’t, and no amount of emotional sharing is going to make them agree. “But if you don’t at least talk about your emotions,” Heen said, “you’ll just keep having the same argument over and over.”

  So how, exactly, do we make people feel safe enough to talk about their feelings? It’s a hard task, particularly if people are discussing something—like guns—they’ve been fighting about for decades, and everyone is certain they, alone, represent righteousness, while the other side is immoral and wrong.

  TALKING GUNS IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Melanie Jeffcoat and her fellow gun-control activists, as well as an equal number of gun-rights enthusiasts, arrived in Washington, D.C., on a warm day in March 2018, and gathered in the lobby of the Newseum on Capitol Hill. It was the same weekend as the “March for Our Lives” rally organized by the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting. Right outside the doors—and in more than eight hundred cities and towns across the United States—students and parents were marching against gun violence. In response, hundreds of gun-rights groups were staging counterprotests. In all, an estimated two million people were in the streets that day to decry, or support, how easy it is to buy firearms in America.

  As the participants walked into the Newseum, they could hear a hundred thousand people chanting outside. “It was beautiful,” Jeffcoat told me. “Just really inspiring, all those people fighting for a better world. And then I went into a meeting room and sat down with someone who owned forty guns and said he needed an AR-15 for deer hunting.”

  Once everyone was assembled, the organizers explained their goal: “Whether you agree or disagree with what’s going on outside, I think everyone can recognize this is a moment when our country is trying to have one of our most difficult conversations,” John Sarrouf told the group. “This is a conversation about guns and safety that America has been trying to have for over two hundred years, and, for almost as long, it hasn’t gone very well.” Discussions about guns, he said, often devolve into shouting matches and accusations. Or, even worse, they never occur because people self-select into like-minded groups. “That’s dangerous in a democracy,” Sarrouf told the participants. “If we can’t talk across our differences, we can’t make decisions together.” So the goal of this gathering was to have an honest discussion about guns and to “demonstrate that we can do this conversation differently. We think we can prove it’s possible to discuss this issue with thoughtfulness and civility, and learn from each other, even if we disagree.”

  But first, Sarrouf continued, a bit of training was needed.

  The training was important, because the organizers had a second, no less important goal. They knew almost everyone in the room was practiced at talking about guns. Everyone had facts memorized and talking points readily at hand. They all knew each argument and counterargument, how to frustrate their adversaries and lay rhetorical traps.

  But the organizers wanted this conversation to be different. They wanted to see if they could get everyone to start sharing personal stories about guns and gun control, the emotions and values underlying their beliefs, and then see if that might change the tenor of the debate. In other words, they wanted to foster a How Do We Feel? conversation, in the hopes it might neutralize the poison that usually contaminates these discussions.

  But the organizers couldn’t simply command participants to reveal their innermost feelings. That was too odd a request, especially among people who believed the other side was an enemy. So, instead, the organizers focused on a different approach: Teaching everyone a technique for listening that makes it safer for emotional disclosures to occur. The secret was proving you were listening to each other.

  Emotional intelligence comes from showing someone we have heard their emotions. But when we’re in a conflict or a fight, simply showing often isn’t enough. In those moments, everyone is skeptical and untrusting: Are they listening, or just preparing their rebuttal? Something more is needed, an extra step. To convince others we are genuinely listening during an argument, we must prove to them that we have heard them, prove we are working hard to understand, prove we want to see things from their perspective.

  As one 2018 study put it, when someone proves they’re listening it creates “a sense of psychological safety because [the listener] instills a confidence in the speaker that at least their arguments will receive full consideration and will, thus, be evaluated based on their real worth.” When people believe that others are trying to understand their perspectives, they become more trusting, more willing “to express their thoughts and ideas.” The “sense of safety, value and acceptance” that comes from believing a partner is genuinely listening makes us more willing to reveal our own vulnerabilities and uncertainties. If you want someone to expose their emotions, the most important step is convincing them you are listening closely to what they say.

  The problem, however, is that most people don’t know how to prove they’re listening. They try things like making eye contact with the speaker, or nodding their head to show agreement, and hope the speaker will pay attention. But speakers usually don’t. “We have trouble noticing other people while we’re talking,” said Michael Yeomans, a professor at Imperial College London. When we’re speaking, we’re frequently so focused on what we are saying that we don’t pick up on how our listeners are behaving. We miss the signals that listeners are trying to send to show they are following along.

  So if a listener wants to prove they’re listening, they need to demonstrate it after the speaker finishes talking. If we want to show someone we’re paying attention, we need to prove, once that person has stopped speaking, that we have absorbed what they said.

  And the best way to do that is by repeating, in our own words, what we just heard them say—and then asking if we got it right.

  It’s a fairly simple technique—prove you are listening by asking the speaker questions, reflecting back what you just heard, and then seeking confirmation you understand—but studies show it is the single most effective technique for proving to someone that we want to hear them. It’s a formula sometimes called looping for understanding.[*] The goal is not to repeat what someone has said verbatim, but rather to distill the other person’s thoughts in your own words, prove you are working hard to understand and see their perspective—and then repeat the process, again and again, until everyone is satisfied. Using techniques like looping “at the beginning of a conversation forestalls conflict escalation at the end,” one 2020 study found. People who engage in it are seen as “better teammates, advisors” and “more desirable partners for future collaboration.”

  In the lobby of the Newseum, John Sarrouf divided the crowd into small groups with instructions: One person—the speaker—should describe “a time when they took on a challenge where they were not sure they could succeed, but eventually tried and overcame the challenge and were proud of themselves.” Then, those listening should ask questions. And, once the questions were done, the listeners should summarize what they heard and ask the speaker if the summary was accurate.

  Soon, the Newseum was filled with the sounds of dozens of people looping for understanding. One participant, a gun-rights advocate from Alabama named David Preston, described to his group how his mother had committed suicide when he was just eleven months old. “For the first five years of my life, because everyone felt sorry for me, I never heard the word ‘no,’ ” he told his groupmates. “Never telling a toddler ‘no’ isn’t a good idea. It messes you up, makes you selfish. And when that’s combined with this grief I felt for someone I couldn’t even remember, that’s devastating.” Preston started to cry as he spoke. “I’ve come so far since then,” he told the group. “I’m proud of myself, because I’ve built a life with people I love, and I can show them that I love them. I didn’t know how to do that before.”

  His groupmates followed the instructions they had received for looping and began asking questions: How did he feel about his mother now? How did he show people he loved them? What had he carried away from this tragedy?

  Then they summarized what they had heard: “What I hear you saying,” said a woman from New York who identified as a liberal gun-control activist, “is that you’ve felt a lot of pain for most of your life, and it’s been hard for you to express that pain, and that has made you push people away.”

  “Exactly,” Preston said. “When you grow up in the South, you’re taught to avoid sharing your emotions, to not complain, don’t be weak. But then you keep it all bottled up inside, and what leaks out instead is anger.”

  “And now you want to let that pain go,” the woman said.

  “Yeah,” Preston replied. “It feels like such a relief to hear you say it that way.” He took her hands. “Thank you for hearing me.”

  Preston later told me this was one of the most meaningful conversations of his life, even though it happened with someone who was essentially a stranger and with whom he disagreed ideologically in nearly every way. “It felt so validating to hear her say that,” he told me. “It felt like I had been heard, for maybe the first time in my adult life, like I could talk about this and people wanted to understand. It felt like I could be honest.”

  Methods like looping for understanding, says Sheila Heen, are powerful because even when people lead very dissimilar lives, they can often find emotional similarities with one another. “We’ve all experienced fear and hope and anxiety and love,” she told me. By creating an environment where people are invited to discuss their emotions, and then prove to one another they want to understand, we foster trust, even among people accustomed to seeing each other as foes.

  Heen teaches approaches like looping for understanding to her Harvard Law students because it’s one of the best techniques for ferreting out the deeper, more emotional issues that can derail a contentious conversation or negotiation. “Everyone has a story inside their head that explains why they think they’re having a fight,” she told me. “And all those stories are different. We usually don’t understand what’s in the other person’s head, even if we think we do.” Looping lets us hear others’ stories, and prove to them we’ve heard what they are saying. “When you start to undersand each other’s stories, that’s when you can start talking about what’s actually going on.”

  * * *

  —

  Eventually, the organizers in Washington, D.C., asked everyone to start discussing the issue that had brought them here: Guns. However, the conversation began in a curious way. Participants were asked to share a personal story explaining why this issue was so important to them. There were guidelines: People should tell stories about their own experiences and not about things they had heard or seen online. They were not to offer lessons or takeaways, only memories, feelings, and perceptions. As for the listeners, they could ask questions, but they had to be open ended and curious. No rebuttals disguised as inquiries; no asking a question when you think you already know the answer.

  Jeffcoat listened as one woman described how a relative had been assaulted within her own home. The next day, the woman said, she went to a firing range for the first time and has slept with a handgun in her bedstand ever since. “That’s how I know I’ll never let that happen,” she told the group. “I’ll never let myself be a victim.” Jeffcoat asked if she worried the gun might be stolen or misused. No, the woman said, she had taken precautions. There was a trigger lock, and there were no kids in the house. “That gun is my peace of mind,” she said, “and when people say they want to take it away, what they’re saying is they want me to feel powerless again.”

  Someone in the group stepped in to summarize what they had heard: “You see your gun as a symbol that you won’t let anyone hurt you. Did I get that right?”

  “It’s proof that I deserve to feel safe,” the woman said. “I belong here as much as anyone else.”

  Another participant described his pride in teaching his children about ecology and their family’s history while hunting together. Another lived near the border, in an area where people sometimes smuggled drugs, and said he once ran off an intruder by brandishing a rifle. Jeffcoat told her own story about the school shooting and her fears for her daughters. They all asked each other questions and summarized what they had heard, until everyone agreed they had all gotten it right.

  “It shook me to hear everyone’s stories like that,” Jeffcoat told me. “It made me feel naïve, like I had just assumed all gun owners were the same angry white guys I saw at rallies.”

  By the end of two days, both of the organizers’ goals had been satisfied: Participants had engaged in honest conversations about guns without those discussions becoming shouting matches. And people had learned how to show they were listening, ask honest questions, and become vulnerable enough to reveal feelings that, if they were lucky, led to finding common emotional ground.

  “The whole weekend was exhilarating,” Jeffcoat told me. “I walked away from it thinking, if we can do this on a large scale, we can change the world.” As everyone left Washington, D.C., they promised to stay in touch. The organizers had established a private Facebook group so participants could keep the discussion going. There were moderators to guide the digital dialogue, and the organizers had invited over a hundred additional people to participate in the online conversation. These new people hadn’t had the benefit of the training in D.C., but the organizers hoped they would absorb the new communication techniques from the moderators, as well as the participants who had been trained at the Newseum.

  It didn’t work out like that.

  “I went home and went online, and it only took, maybe, forty-five minutes for someone to call me a jack-booted Nazi,” said Jon Godfrey, the former cop. For Jeffcoat, the change seemed even swifter: “I flew back, got onto Facebook, and everything fell apart.”

  THE LOVE SHRINKS

  Why do some conversations change so abruptly? Why, at times, can it feel like we’ve made a real connection with another person—and then our environment shifts, or a small conflict gets bigger, and suddenly we find ourselves so far apart?

  In the 1970s, a group of young research psychologists began wondering about these kinds of questions. In particular, they were interested in studying how spouses navigate their relationships when conflicts emerge. Marriage, until then, had received surprisingly little academic scrutiny. Couples’ problems were “something that pastors and friends usually dealt with,” said Scott Stanley, a professor of psychology at the University of Denver. “Marriage hadn’t been much of a priority.”

  The young psychologists came from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Texas A&M, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Washington, and over a dozen other schools, and they had come of age amid the cultural shifts of the 1960s, when divorce, the pill, and gender equality went mainstream. The idea of marriage—and what people expected from their spouses—was changing. All of which caused the researchers to wonder: Why do some married couples stay happy for decades, even as society shifts around them, while others, who had once been so certain they were soulmates, descend into bickering and misery?

  This group of psychologists never had a formal name, nor an official membership list, but some referred to them as “the Love Shrinks.” Their early research consisted primarily of videotaped interviews. Husbands and wives were brought into laboratories and asked to describe their marriages, sex lives, conversations, and fights. Arguments, in particular, interested the researchers. Spouses squabbled while scientists ran their video cameras. Within a few years, more than a thousand arguments had been recorded.

  These early studies revealed interesting patterns: Many couples were quite good at listening to each other and even proving they were listening. “That’s kind of the minimum for a marriage,” said Stanley. “If you can’t show the other person you’re listening, you probably won’t get married in the first place.” Couples might not have been looping each other, but, either through intuition or advice they had received, they had figured out how to show they wanted to understand one another.

  And yet, despite all that listening, America’s divorce rate was skyrocketing: In 1979, more than a million couples—triple the number from just a decade earlier—had chosen to end their marriages. The scientists wondered: If couples were so good at hearing each other and proving they heard one another, why were they still splitting up?

  The researchers started digging into their data. Eventually, two findings emerged. First, unsurprisingly, they confirmed that nearly every couple fought. Some couples argued frequently—about 8 percent of married Americans fight at least once a day—while others bickered only occasionally. But regardless of frequency, nearly every marriage contained some degree of conflict.