When Crisis Management Becomes Conflict Management

When Crisis Management Becomes Conflict Management

The psychological toll of the pandemic has challenged workers and managers in a variety of ways. As we head into the third year of Covid, a new issue has sprung up: “splitting,” a mental defense mechanism which allows us to tolerate difficult and even unbearable emotions by seeing someone or somethi…

✒ As we transition out of the pandemic, from emergency, to regression, and to recovery, we will encounter a complex psychological cocktail: delayed gratification, feeling of injustice, and a race to fill the emotional vacuum created by years of living with restrictions.

In light of such difficult or even unbearable emotions, we may resort to black-or-white thinking, a psychological reaction called splitting.

We identify others as either heroes or villains, good or bad, “with us” or “against us”. This frees us from the burden of having to face our own shortcomings and missteps, while allowing us to cast our opponents a purely and fully bad, instead of looking for nuance and common ground.

We mentally make this a conflict-ridden world.