You’ve been on the volunteer committee at church for three weeks when the texts start.
It’s 9:47 PM on a Tuesday, and your phone lights up with a wall of text from Linda. She’s furious about the budget vote. Except the budget passed the way she wanted, so you’re not sure what she’s furious about. Best you can tell, she thinks you sided against her in a meeting three weeks ago, and somewhere in there she’s accusing you of running a “shadow agenda.” You have no idea what that means.
Instead of writing back a snippy comment, you use your fully developed prefrontal cortex and write a calm, friendly note explaining that you didn’t side against her, that you actually agree with her on the budget, and that you’re happy to talk through the rest. You even ask your wife for a second opinion on the draft before you hit send.
Twenty minutes later Linda replies, angrier, because your calm reply proves you’re a condescending jerk. She starts a group chat with two other committee members and gives her rant again. Then she posts a scathing accusation against you on the congregation’s Facebook group. By morning, it’s a . . . thing.
Every attempt to smooth things over just throws gas on the fire. You apologize, and she treats the apology as a confession. You offer a compromise, and she pushes for more. After a couple days you find yourself dreading a volunteer gig you used to enjoy. You get your first case of heartburn. All because of a lady named Linda.
And you can’t for the life of you figure out what you’re doing wrong. Why aren’t all those tactics you’ve read about managing interpersonal conflict working?
Well, the thing you’re doing wrong is that you’re using normal, reasonable interpersonal tactics on someone who isn’t normal or reasonable.
Most advice about handling interpersonal conflict rests on a hidden assumption: that the person you’re in conflict with is reasonable and acting in good faith. We’ve talked about these tips on AoM before: Listen actively. Use “I feel” statements. Try to see things from the other person’s perspective. Look for a win-win compromise. For most people, in most conflicts, this advice works. The vast majority of folks you’ll butt heads with don’t like conflict any more than you do. So when you try to work things out, they’ll work things out with you.
But there’s a small percentage of people for whom this advice not only fails, it backfires. These are what Bill Eddy calls high-conflict people (HCPs). Eddy is a lawyer, therapist, and mediator who spent his career working with HCPs. He’s written some great books about how to deal with them like 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life. By his estimate, they make up about 10% of the population. But while they’re a small segment, just a single HCP can blow up a group or make your life miserable.
There’s not much advice out there on dealing with HCPs, so when most people encounter one, they’re baffled. Thankfully, Eddy has laid out some solid, field-tested advice on how to avoid them and how to protect yourself when you can’t.
What Makes Someone a High-Conflict Person
A high-conflict person isn’t just someone who’s difficult, prickly, or having a bad day. What sets HCPs apart is a specific, predictable pattern of behavior. Eddy identifies four traits:
1. A preoccupation with a target of blame. When something goes wrong in an HCP’s life, it’s the fault of their ex-wife, or their boss, or the neighbor, or you. Eddy calls this person the HCP’s “target of blame,” and it’s the defining trait of a high-conflict person. The HCP doesn’t just hold their target responsible for their problems. They become fixated on punishing them, often to the point that the vendetta overrides their own self-interest. Eddy has seen HCPs spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees just to keep an ex from getting $1,000 in a divorce settlement.
2. All-or-nothing thinking. For the HCP, people are either allies or enemies, and situations are either total victories or total defeats. It’s all black and white. This is why compromise doesn’t work on them. To an HCP, compromise feels like surrender.
3. Unmanaged emotions. HCPs have reactions wildly out of proportion to whatever triggered them. You take three hours to answer a text, and they respond as if you’d spit on their mother. Eddy explains this in terms of the brain: while most of us process conflict with our “thinking brain” — the prefrontal cortex, which handles logic and weighing consequences — HCPs process it with their “reactive brain,” the fight-or-flight machinery of the amygdala. They experience an ordinary disagreement the way you’d experience a bear attack. Which is why appealing to their reason mid-conflict is futile; the part of the brain that reasons is offline.
4. Extreme behaviors. Because HCPs believe they’re victims of a grave injustice, they feel justified in doing things 90% of the population would never do: spreading vicious rumors, filing frivolous lawsuits, making false accusations, showing up at your door at 10 PM to yell at you. What looks like an unhinged attack to you feels like righteous self-defense to them.
If you’re thinking these traits sound a lot like those of people with narcissistic, borderline, antisocial, or histrionic personality disorder, you’re right. Eddy spent years working as a therapist in psychiatric hospitals, and he developed his HCP framework with the DSM’s personality disorders in mind.
But Eddy is careful to point out that being an HCP and having a personality disorder aren’t the same thing. He estimates that only about half of people with personality disorders act as HCPs. A woman with histrionic personality disorder might cause a temporary ruckus when her boyfriend ends the relationship, but if she doesn’t spend five years trying to destroy him, she’s not an HCP.
At the same time, you can have HCPs who wouldn’t be given a personality disorder diagnosis.
For your purposes, none of this matters much. Diagnosing someone doesn’t help you deal with HCPs. What matters is the pattern. If someone shows all four traits, treat them as an HCP.
Your Best Bet With High-Conflict People: Avoid Them!
The best way to deal with an HCP is to never get entangled with one in the first place. That’s harder than it sounds, because HCPs are often charming, smart, and impressive at first. The pattern only reveals itself over time — usually after you’ve hired them, married them, or signed a lease with them.
To speed up your detection, Eddy offers a screening tool he calls the WEB Method: pay attention to a person’s Words, your Emotions, and their Behavior.
Their words. Listen for all-or-nothing language. When a person tells a story about a conflict, do they heap all the blame on the other person without admitting any responsibility? When an HCP tells you about their past, every story has a villain, and the villain is never them. All the bosses from the jobs they got fired from were idiots. All three ex-girlfriends were crazy. One bad ex is a data point; three is a pattern, and the common denominator is sitting across the table from you at Chili’s right now.
Your emotions. Notice how you feel around this person. If you find yourself walking on eggshells, feeling vaguely attacked, or getting angry for reasons you can’t quite name, take note. And watch out for the opposite feeling, too. If someone you met a week ago makes you feel like the most fascinating human being on earth, that too-good-to-be-true charm can be the front end of a high-conflict pattern.
Their behavior. Apply the 90% test: has this person ever done something 90% of people would never do? Keyed an ex’s car? Sued a neighbor over a fence line — twice? Normal people don’t do these things, no matter how upset they are. Extreme behavior is the most reliable tell there is.
If you detect a potential HCP, keep your distance. You don’t need to be rude. Just keep things arm’s length and formal. Be boring. The goal is to fly under the radar so you never become a target of blame. If a job candidate shows these signs, look at someone else. If you’re thinking about popping the question to a gal who’s shown repeated HCP behavior, reconsider.
How to Deal With a High-Conflict Person When You Have To
Sometimes avoidance isn’t an option. The HCP is your coworker, your sibling, your next-door neighbor. You’re stuck with them, so you need a strategy.
Start with what not to do. Eddy has four rules he calls the “fuhgeddaboudits”:
Forget about giving them insight into themselves. An HCP’s self-image is that of an innocent victim, and no amount of gentle feedback will change it. Try to help them see the role they’re playing in the conflict, and they’ll just add your feedback to the list of your offenses.
Forget about arguing over the past. HCPs have their own immutable version of history. Relitigating it accomplishes nothing except handing them fresh material to distort.
Forget about focusing on their emotions. Asking an HCP to reflect on their feelings will likely just make them more upset.
Forget about labeling them. Never tell someone you think they’re a narcissist, a borderline, or an HCP. It will not produce the moment of humble self-reflection you were hoping for. It will produce a war.
So what do you do instead? Eddy has a framework for interacting with HCPs: CARS. It’s an acronym for Connect, Analyze, Respond, Set limits.
Connect with EAR statements. When an HCP is escalating, your first job isn’t to solve the problem; it’s to calm their reactive brain enough that a problem can be solved. You do that with a statement showing Empathy, Attention, and Respect. Say an HCP on your work team is ranting that you’ve torpedoed his project. You could say something like: “I can see this is really frustrating. Tell me more about what’s going on. I know you’ve worked hard on this.”
You haven’t agreed with him, admitted any fault, or conceded a single point. All you’ve done is show him you’re not a threat, and that’s usually enough to get his thinking brain working again.
Analyze options. Once the HCP has calmed down a bit, move the conversation toward the future. HCPs like to dwell on past grievances, and they’ll rehash them all day if you let them. But thinking about what to do next requires the thinking brain, so questions about options and next steps help keep them out of reactive mode. These questions also keep you from getting saddled with a problem that isn’t yours. If an HCP starts dumping his problem in your lap, you can say, “That sounds like a tough spot. What do you think your options are?” Now he has to come up with a plan instead of a complaint, and the responsibility for his problem stays with him.
Respond with a BIFF. Writing a long reply in your defense will only give the HCP more ammunition. He’ll pick apart every sentence and use it to fuel another round of attacks. So instead of a rebuttal, Eddy recommends you respond with what he calls a BIFF — a reply that’s Brief, Informative, Friendly, and Firm.
Let’s say your coworker Dave sends a three-page email accusing you of sabotaging his project, and he cc’s half the department on it. Here’s what a BIFF response would look like:
“Hi Dave, thanks for your email. To clarify the timeline: the report was submitted to Susan on March 3rd, per the schedule she set in February. The project files are all in the shared drive. Best, Steve.”
That’s it. Four sentences. You’ve stated the facts, you’ve stayed polite, and you haven’t given Dave anything to work with.
Set limits and enforce them. HCPs don’t have internal brakes. You have to supply the brakes for them by setting boundaries and enforcing consequences if they’re violated.
When you set a limit with an HCP, it helps to tie it to some outside authority instead of your own personal preference. If an HCP asks you for something you have to turn down, “Company policy doesn’t allow me to do that” will go over better than a flat “no.” The HCP can be mad at the policy instead of at you, and you’re less likely to end up as his target of blame.
If there’s no policy or authority you can point to, you can still set limits on how the HCP gets to engage with you. Take Linda and her Tuesday night text barrages. You could send her a BIFF like this: “I won’t be continuing this conversation over text. If you’d like to talk, we can meet in person Sunday after the service.” Then mute her texts. You’ve drawn a line, but you’ve also given her a legitimate way to air her grievances. She probably won’t take you up on it, though. HCPs like attacking from behind a screen; sitting across from you after church is a lot less appealing.
Whatever boundary you set, enforce it. This takes some grit. HCPs wear people down by pushing the same boundary over and over. Hold the line, and if you need help holding it, bring in reinforcements — HR, church leadership, or, worst case, a lawyer.
How to Break Away From a High-Conflict Person
Sometimes you need to end the connection with an HCP entirely. How you exit matters a lot.
Whatever you do, don’t deliver the honest exit speech. Telling an HCP you’re leaving because of their behavior just makes you more of a target, and they’ll pursue you more intensely. But don’t fall on your sword either; taking the blame yourself just confirms their victim narrative.
Instead, frame the split as a neutral mismatch: “Our goals have gone in different directions.” “It’s just not a good fit.” Nobody gets blamed, and nobody takes responsibility. Then withdraw gradually rather than dramatically.
And brace yourself for what Eddy calls “hoovering.” The HCP may suddenly get uncharacteristically vulnerable and offer a tearful apology. It’s usually a tactic to suck you back in. Keep walking.
Most of the people you’ll ever be in conflict with deserve your good faith, your listening ear, and your willingness to meet in the middle. Keep giving them all three. But learn to recognize the small number of HCPs who will use those things against you. With them, the best thing you can do is steer clear. And when you can’t, use Eddy’s battle-tested tactics to keep them at arm’s length.
