Describe conflicts anonymously
If you are having a conflict and want to know your friends’ honest opinion (‘Am I The Asshole?’ style), consider describing the conflict to them but hiding the identities of the people involved.
E.g., rather than,
‘I didn’t do the dishes for a week and my husband got really annoyed at me’,
say,
‘A didn’t do the dishes for a week and B got really annoyed at them’.
Why do this?
Anonymizing conflicts might be useful both for the person involved in a conflict (the ‘conflict-haver’) and the friend who listens and gives advice (the ‘advisor’). It’s useful for the conflict-haver because their friends will be less automatically biased in their favour, and they’ll be more likely to get an honest opinion.
It’s important that conflict-havers don’t use this to ‘test’ their friends (‘I can’t believe you thought I was B! I would never do that!’), or get angry at them if they empathize more with the other person. Also, this tool is only appropriate for ambiguous conflicts, where the conflict-haver has some genuine uncertainty about whether their own reaction or behaviour was reasonable. If someone is being unambiguously awful, it’s ok to just seek your friends’ sympathy! This technique also won’t work if it’s obvious from context who A and B are.
Anonymizing conflicts could also be useful for people playing the ‘advisor’ role. Many people, when they hear about their friends’ conflicts, want to act as their cheerleader or advocate; they defend their friend’s conduct and express incredulous outrage at the absurd behaviour of the friend’s antagonist. And this ‘cheerleader’ role can, in fact, be really useful — particularly if your friends are genuinely surrounded by arseholes, or excessively prone to self-doubt.
But some situations are more nuanced; sometimes it’s clear that both parties have behaved somewhat badly; other times neither one has and there is some misunderstanding; and other times your friends, delightful as they are, are just in the wrong. In those situations, anonymized conflicts encourage the advisor to form an opinion on the situation as a whole, empathize with both sides, and, if one side seems clearly wrong, to express this as tactfully and constructively as possible. If you immediately leap to defend A and start trash-talking B, you’ll feel pretty awkward if your friend turns out to be B. So anonymized conflicts can help advisors build skills in empathy and conflict resolution, and prevent unfair grudges, enmities and partisanship.
Sometimes advisors may be willing to offer their conflict-having friends honest advice, but worry that their friends are just looking for cheerleading, and therefore be reluctant to defend the antagonist or point out their friend’s mistakes. If conflict-havers ask to describe a conflict anonymously, this is a strong signal to advisors that they are genuinely looking for honest advice.
Sometimes when people are upset, they want to be heard and understood; other times they want solutions (and other times they want other forms of comfort). When our friends are upset, it’s useful to ask them which of these they want. Similarly, when our friends are having conflicts, it might be useful to ask them ‘do you want cheerleading or detached advice?’