It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People

Bill Eddy and Megan Hunter explore the crucial distinction between temporary high conflict behaviors and established patterns of high conflict conduct. As co-founders of the High Conflict Institute, we address common misconceptions about conflict dynamics while introducing our new platform, Conflict Influencer, designed to support individuals navigating challenging relationships.
Understanding High Conflict Patterns
We examine how situational stress differs from persistent high conflict behavior patterns through an insightful analogy comparing one-time excessive drinking versus chronic alcohol dependence. While anyone may demonstrate high conflict behaviors temporarily during intense stress, persistent patterns typically manifest in:
  • Preoccupation with blaming others
  • All-or-nothing thinking
  • Unmanaged emotions
  • Extreme behaviors
The episode clarifies that high conflict patterns often emerge in close relationships but may remain dormant until triggered by significant life changes like divorce or job loss. We emphasize that effective responses avoid giving insight, emotional engagement, or labels, instead focusing on future solutions rather than past conflicts.
Questions We Answer in This Episode
  • Is high conflict behavior always situational?
  • Does conflict always require two participants?
  • How can professionals identify pattern-based versus situational conflict?
  • What approaches work best with individuals demonstrating high conflict patterns?
  • What resources are available through the new Conflict Influencer platform?
We also introduce ConflictInfluencer.com, our new online community and learning platform offering individual coaching, consultation services, and comprehensive support for personal conflict challenges. This platform provides both self-directed and guided learning options, making conflict management resources more accessible to individuals seeking ongoing skill development.
Special emphasis is placed on the importance of practice and support in building confidence when managing difficult interactions. We demonstrate how the same conflict management skills work effectively for both situational and pattern-based conflicts, while providing practical frameworks for understanding and navigating challenging relationships more effectively.
Additional Resources
Connect With Us
Important Notice
Our discussions focus on behavioral patterns rather than diagnoses. For specific legal or therapeutic guidance, please consult qualified professionals in your area.
  • (00:00) - Welcome to It's All Your Fault
  • (00:42) - Updates
  • (02:01) - Today’s Topics
  • (02:49) - Is High Conflict Situational?
  • (11:44) - Things to Avoid with an HCP
  • (12:05) - Four Things to Know to Avoid
  • (12:33) - Don’t Focus on Emotions
  • (13:11) - Avoid the Past
  • (13:29) - Don’t Tell Them They’re an HCP
  • (14:19) - Non-HCPs
  • (16:00) - Watch for Patterns
  • (17:10) - One HCP or Two People in Conflict?
  • (21:36) - Conflict Influencer
  • (31:06) - Questions
  • (41:25) - Wrap Up
  • (42:03) - Reminders & See You in September!

What is It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People?

Hosted by Bill Eddy, LCSW, Esq. and Megan Hunter, MBA, It’s All Your Fault! High Conflict People explores the five types of people who can ruin your life—people with high conflict personalities and how they weave themselves into our lives in romance, at work, next door, at school, places of worship, and just about everywhere, causing chaos, exhaustion, and dread for everyone else.

They are the most difficult of difficult people — some would say they’re toxic. Without them, tv shows, movies, and the news would be boring, but who wants to live that way in your own life!

Have you ever wanted to know what drives them to act this way?

In the It’s All Your Fault podcast, we’ll take you behind the scenes to understand what’s happening in the brain and illuminates why we pick HCPs as life partners, why we hire them, and how we can handle interactions and relationships with them. We break down everything you ever wanted to know about people with the 5 high conflict personality types: narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, antisocial/sociopath, and paranoid.

And we’ll give you tips on how to spot them and how to deal with them.

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you with the most challenging human interactions, those involving someone with a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm here with my co-host Bill Eddie.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Hi everybody.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute where we focus on training, consulting, coaching classes, and educational programs and methods, all to do with high conflict. Welcome back everybody. Thank you for joining us and listening today. It is our last episode of this season, which was kind of an abbreviated season. It's summer at least over here in the northern hemisphere in the us. We're both kind of ready for a little break. Bill. I know you're going to do some traveling soon.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yep, that's right. Got a road trip planned and who knows what else, but yep.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Well you deserve it to go. You deserve a lot of time off. I just looked at your schedule from last month and it was absolutely jam packed. So time to take a break and I'm going to hit the road a little bit too myself. Take some time.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Good. You deserve it too. I might add. You deserve it too.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Oh, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
We've been doing a lot flying all over. Speaking of hemispheres being in more than one,

Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, we've been really busy. We're grateful and tired. You can be both right at the same time. So we'll look forward to rejoining with live episodes or new episodes I should say in early September, first week of September, but don't go away. We'll have lots of episodes in the meantime that we're replaying some of our top listen to episodes and downloaded episodes, so we hope you'll keep listening come back in September. So today we're going to talk about two items. Number one is whether high conflict is situational. We get this a lot as this question. Is it just kind of a one-time thing like people are just upset because they're getting divorced and they're going to act high conflict. We're going to explore that and is it one person? Is it two people? Does it always take two to tango? So we'll discuss that. Then we're going to launch and give you all the new information about conflict influencer.com, which is our brand new website, our brand new concept that we're introducing to the world and it has launched and we are really excited to share it with you.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
So we'll be talking about that. So first Bill is high conflict situational. So I was reading something on social media, I think it was on LinkedIn by someone who'd heard one of our speakers do some training and thought it was really great, learned a lot from it and then said something about high conflict being situational and I think the person was a mediator. And so the question is does high conflict just show up like I'm upset today so I'm showing up high conflict or is high conflict something that's longer term? Can you just become high conflict?

Speaker 2 (03:24):
My beginning analogy is just think of somebody who drank too much last weekend versus somebody who's an alcoholic who drinks too much, many weekends, maybe decides I really need to cut back. I'm just going to have one tonight, but can't stop themselves. So think in terms of three kind of levels. So there's someone that doesn't drink too much, there's someone that drank too much like last summer or something like that for a day and they go, oh wow, I'm not going to do that again.

Speaker 1 (03:59):
And everybody else remembers it forever. Remember that time? Well,

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Everybody remembers that. And then someone who's an alcoholic who can't stop themselves unless they get into some kind of ongoing treatment. So with high conflict, I think of that also, first of all, think of conflict. Conflict's part of life. We disagree. Two people have different points of view. They have a discussion, they have a conflict and they arrive at a good conclusion. They go, oh, you're right about that part. Then there's somebody who engaged in high conflict behavior last weekend and for some reason or other, like you said, maybe they just found out they're getting divorced and they're just yelling and screaming and I can't believe this is happening. Or someone lost their job or something happened and they had an extreme reaction. Now we generally define high conflict as four key characteristics, blaming others all or nothing thinking unmanaged emotions. Emotions and extreme behavior.

Speaker 2 (05:11):
So someone could have that last weekend where it's all your fault, you messed up our project, now rebuild the whole darn thing and all or nothing thinking and they're yelling and they're upset and maybe they do something. It's probably not that extreme, but do something that's out of character for them once. So they do that once it was last weekend. They don't have a history of doing that kind of thing. They often take responsibility. They're good at looking for alternate solutions. They don't usually yell and scream and stuff like that. So to me, that's an ordinary person who was high conflict last weekend and the situation some project fell apart or something

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Like that, lost a million dollars.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
You understand having an extreme response but not as a pattern of behavior. Then we talk about high conflict personalities or high conflict people who have a pattern of preoccupation, of blaming others, a lot of all or nothing thinking unmanaged emotions either shown or hidden, but drive their behavior, getting revenge, punishing somebody or clinging to somebody. I can't let go of this relationship and so that's driving my behavior, but on the surface I look reasonable and I tell everybody else what a jerk he or she is and I do it calmly, but inside I'm like I'm going to punish that person and they may engage in extreme behaviors and this is the thing I want to get to. So comparing alcoholic, someone who drank too much last weekend and ordinary drinking, same ordinary conflict, high conflict, all your fault and high conflict personalities, it's always someone else's fault.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
But here's a couple of things tricky about this. The environment really does matter so that someone who may have a pattern of high conflict behavior may not show much of that much of the time. And when things are going well, even in a relationship, things are going well. Let me back up. High conflict behavior usually comes out in close relationships. That's the pattern of behavior, family, husband, wife, parent, child, all that stuff. But some people things are pretty secure, they're stable, things are going generally well, but they have high conflict personality that's kind of on pause and then like a divorce. And you see this pattern that you saw signs of before and often people we talked to when we wrote dating radar, Megan, we really found this out is a lot of people said there were warning signs before,

Speaker 2 (08:27):
But I went ahead, got married anyway, et cetera. And so the situation may bring out high conflict personality tendencies that were quiet for a period of time, but it's a pattern of behavior or it's not a pattern of behavior. And sometimes there's an extreme situation where someone really acts out of character. But here's the thing, extreme behavior that 90% of people would never do. I think that's what we see with the high conflict personality. So even one incident could demonstrate there's a pattern of high conflict behavior supporting this extreme behavior. I don't know if I should use this example, but

Speaker 1 (09:20):
Go for it.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
There was a mayor, I'll just call him Mayor Bob. Mayor Bob, before he became a mayor, flew back and forth across the country as a member of Congress and did okay or whatever, or at least it seemed like did okay, decided wanted to come home and be mayor in his hometown. About a year before he ran for office, there was an altercation at the airport and it hit the news front page news, Congressman Bob knocks down airport employee because he was impatient to get his bag and the employee said, you have to wait like everybody else. And he said, don't who I am. And I think they said yes, but you have to wait like everybody else. We don't have the bags. And he knocked her down. So half the people in the city that commented on it said, you got to give him a break late at night. He traveling across country, he is tired, he is irritable,

Speaker 1 (10:27):
The excuse train.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
It was the situation. So that was the argument. This is a high conflict situation, otherwise ordinary guy and half the city said that's terrible. There's no excuse. And anyway, I thought to myself, 90% of people, probably 99% of people won't do that. And I fly a lot and I'd come back and I'm tired and you fly a lot, Megan, and you come back and you're tired. We don't engage in that. To me, this somebody that had a pattern of high conflict behavior that was starting to come to the surface and I thought if this guy gets elected, he's going to be difficult. Well, guess what? He got elected. He was difficult. Within eight months he resigned because they were about to throw him out of office. He did have a high-conflict pattern of behavior. So in my mind that's kind of where the single incident can tell you there's probably a high conflict personality here. That's my comment. One more thing, of course, go for it.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
And that is you don't have to diagnose anybody and high conflict isn't a diagnosis, but if you see they have a high conflict pattern of behavior or personality or pattern of behavior, then there's four things you need to know to avoid that with an ordinary person you can engage in First is don't try to give them insight into their own behavior conflict. People don't reflect on their own behavior and you can't make them do that. It just makes things more angry and worse. You need to focus them. Look, let's look at what to do now

Speaker 1 (12:20):
And it'll make the conflict be heard. If you do

Speaker 2 (12:23):
Right, you're escalating things

Speaker 1 (12:25):
And you'll become a target.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
Absolutely. So not only they don't get the insight you want, but now you're a target of blame, right? Absolutely. The second thing is don't focus on emotions. Don't have an emotional argument. Don't even tell them that you really make me angry. Keep that to yourself because emotions are a real vulnerable spot. They don't grieve and heal loss the way everybody else does. So if they're a high conflict person, they had this pattern, they're not going to do well. You focus them on emotions, they're going to get more difficult, more upset, more blaming, and you'll be at a bigger target of blame

Speaker 1 (13:03):
And the conflict will get bigger

Speaker 2 (13:05):
And it grows. That's why we talk about keep the conflict small so it grows also the past. They're often stuck in the past that they're like, I was right to do what I did. You were wrong to do it. And guess what? You can't win an argument about the past with a high conflict person because they can't see it any other way than their way. So arguing about the past, opening up emotions, trying to point out their behavior to themselves doesn't work. The fourth thing is don't tell them they're a high conflict person. That also makes the conflict bigger

Speaker 1 (13:45):
Or a sociopath or a borderline.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yes,

Speaker 1 (13:47):
Or a narcissist or a covert narcissist or a malignant narcissist.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
Any label. And the thing about labels is, I mean you might actually be right, but it doesn't help if someone's a covert narcissist. You point this out to them now, they hate you even more

Speaker 1 (14:06):
And they're never going to have the insight that they are and then they think you are.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
Yes. So it doesn't help

Speaker 1 (14:12):
And they'll tell everyone about it.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
Exactly. So anyway, so if you recognize the pattern, avoid these things. On the other hand, if somebody drank too much last weekend, you might say, Hey Joe, that was a really fun wedding, but I would suggest that you not sit at the bar in the future at the weddings. And they might go, you're absolutely right, I need to stay as far away from that. And they change their behavior and they have the insight you wanted them to have and someone that just drank too much last weekend can get that. Someone that just ordinary conflict can get it. But someone with a high conflict personality can't get that insight

Speaker 1 (14:59):
Using the phrase you used was, Hey Joe, I suggest you don't sit at the bar. Using those words is going to tell you a lot. Their response will tell you a lot because the high conflict brain does not like to have suggestions about behavior and you're the defensiveness probably pretty quickly. But if it's someone who is able to absorb feedback and not take it as criticism and become defensive about it though, okay, you're right Bill, I guess I should. Yeah, so that's a test, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
And sometimes if you're not sure is this a high conflict person or they just had a high conflict moment, but they're generally reasonable person if you want to find out, give them that feedback and see what happens to you,

Speaker 1 (15:47):
Right?

Speaker 2 (15:50):
They punch you in the face. How dare you say that. Probably a high conflict person if they go, well, I'll have to think about that. Probably not a high conflict person.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
Kind of circling back then to the mediator who said, some days they just show up high conflict, whether they do or not as a professional, use the skills that we teach because they're going to work on everyone. These tools work for all conflict, but they're necessary for high conflict. And I think you can tell fairly soon, fairly early on, if you continue to see the blame, the extreme thoughts, solutions, proposals, things like that through a mediation or meeting or whatever interaction it is, if you're paying attention to those cues, you'll start to see that this is probably a pattern no matter what, use the same tools, the same skills. So if it's mediation, take our new ways for mediation training so you really understand how do they help people get to agreement that are typically running into brick walls because the method or the system might not work for 'em, but new ways for mediation can really help and all of our models and methods.

Speaker 1 (17:10):
And then the next part of it before we move on to conflict influencer is there's just kind of this misnomer out there about whether it's one high conflict person driving the conflict or if it's just two people who are in conflict. And I think the misnomer is that we as a human species, I guess think that it takes two to tango. You've got two people who are causing this conflict, causing the problems and they aren't I guess in so doing then they're missing that they need to flip what they're doing in order to help this person who may have this high conflict personality get through a situation or help the other party get through the situation.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
It's an interesting question, and I asked this at a lot of my trainings and I remember asking this a week ago, I had like a hundred judges and 40 lawyers and they said, how many think it's one person in your high conflict case? How many think it's two people driving the high conflict case? And they came out about four to one that it's one person

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Driving the high conflict case, which is probably the most extreme I've had. It's usually two to one way or the other way, but I think that it may be things are changing so it's becoming more obvious. It also may be judges see a lot more where there's one high conflict person, but I know in family law there's a tradition for judges assuming everyone's equally difficult. And so I've had panels I've asked like that and they say it's majority or two way. So it really depends. But the real point is it's not always one or always both. And so you can't make assumptions. And I like teaching lawyers this because most lawyers figure that their client's, the reasonable client and the other client on the other side is the problem, but their client may become the problem and they may have their own relationship problems. So I guess a big thing out of this, and I think you were pointing at that, is you use the same skills with everybody. If you're not sure, then focus on the skills that we teach, give statements that show empathy, attention and respect. And that really calms people and especially high conflict people, they can't do that themselves and they often have pushed everybody away so no one around them has empathy anymore. So if you have empathy as a mediator, et cetera, you can really often calm down people and make progress

Speaker 1 (19:59):
Or any personal interaction or relationship. And I think a lot of people hear that they need to learn these skills and they try so hard to use that one perfect phrase, that one perfect ear statement. And then I kind of help, I want 'em to kind of come around this corner of, think of it as you're removing the fight by using your statement instead of saying defending yourself or trying to give the person insight or trying to give them an explanation or whatever it is. You're removing that and in the absence of that, then you come in with an ear statement, something that does connect with them and gives them nothing to fight back against and helps them bring down their reactivity and have a better experience. Right?

Speaker 2 (20:51):
And that way it's not too high conflict people fighting because one person's not preoccupied with blaming, maybe accepting some. I can see my part as I did this too soon or whatever. Like you said, our skills take the fight out of a fight and the people that are stuck fighting are the high conflict people and that's why these skills work because you can't fight. We're like, jello, you can't fight with jello.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
Yeah, I would jello.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
I don't know if I want to be jello. I'm not sure about that.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
I think I'm going to write that one down. Bill. We're keeping that the new Bullism, you can't fight with jello, I love it. Or whipped cream, whatever, which is also kind of a nice segue into talking about conflict influencer. Yay. We've been working on this quite some time and we want to introduce all of you listeners and viewers to our brand new conflict influencer. You've heard us talk about it some already over the past few weeks. And what this really is is kind of we've been helping people for a long time, both professionally and personally in personal life and professional life, but at High Conflict Institute we've been focused mostly on helping professionals through giving training, consultation, whether it's to management or an individual consultation, helping a team coaching, things like that. We realized that there's just a great need out there and over the past five years since the pandemic, I can say this because I take these Zoom calls and phone calls from organizations all over the world who are seeking training because of conflict and particular high conflict unequivocally, they say conflict has increased in the past five years.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
It increased during the pandemic with expectation that it would decrease each year after the pandemic, but it hasn't. The aggression and conflict has just stayed at that constant level or I don't know if it's gotten worse, but it has not decreased. We hear this up through today, which is July, 2025. So what we realize is while we train a lot of professionals and we have no idea how many, we trained tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, I don't know, through books and all kinds of things. However, ordinary everyday people need this help need the skills. So that's what we've built Conflict influencer specifically for people who want to need some help, who needs some support. And it's not one-off support. It can be if a person needs a coaching session to learn how to set limits better in their relationship, we have it. If you want a consultation, we have it.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
Bill does tons and tons of consultations. I do a few, but those are for those bigger one-on-one cases or situations that are just really challenging. Lots of coaching and classes. So all the new ways for families online class plus coaching available right there, new ways for couples and families, our new brand, new course to help couples keep a relationship together and help their children grow and learn personal relationships skills as well. So all of these things that we've been doing for a long time now we're putting them on one website. It's special just for individuals, people who are going through personal situations. One of the most important things I think about it is what we've noticed in the trajectory of the journey of high conflict is it's not generally a one-off time, right? You're married to someone, you have someone in your family, you have a boss, you have a coworker, you have a neighbor.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
These are longer term relationships and high conflict can be tricky and it can take a long time sometimes to learn the skills or to, even though the skills are pretty simple, they're hard to put into practice. So we want to help you learn the skills and then build capacity to use those skills so it's not just a one-off. You can stay, come and go as you please. Maybe you need to have a decision facilitated. We'll help you with that. Also, I think one of the most important things we'll do with this is have an online community. As I've taught this conflict influencer class for the last year and change the feedback we get is that we need support. So I've taught this class in a group setting on Zoom and the support that they give to each other because everyone in this class is in there for high conflict reasons.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
They're in really difficult relationships. They're struggling. They want to learn, they want to just understand and do it differently and do it better. And they learn from each other, but they need support and to grow together. So we're really seeing that need and we're going to feel that need. I think that's really the most exciting piece of all is we're going to be there to help people through their whole journey. If you're co-parenting right bill, it can be might be 15 years of co-parenting, depending what up. And so we'll be there from day one to day 15 years, whatever or when you need. So that's the main premise of it is everything in one place for all kinds of conflict that we're particularly good at. High conflict, we want to help everyone. And going back to the original tagline we had at High Conflict Institute, bill that you came up with was changing the culture of conflict.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
And that's what our vision with conflict influencer is in the rest of the world, right? Outside of just the professional world, but everywhere, let's see if we can do conflict and relationships differently. Just learning a few skills, not rocket science, but let's see if we can influence the world. Let's start a movement. And that brings me to also questions we get about conflict. Influencer being a term that's used now in social media, there's influencers here and influencers there, and they do all these things. That's not necessarily who we are, what we are. When I thought about the term influencer for this, it was to recognize that in high conflict in particular, it can feel tricky and difficult to stand up and guide a situation or lead or even survive a conversation. And it seems impossible. That's a word we hear a lot. We hear that people dread these conversations, they're exhausted by them and it's just too chaotic.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
So how about we learn a few skills so we can influence this situation, this person, it seems more possible as the feedback we've received. It doesn't feel as imposing and threatening or impossible, I guess just not threatening. So it, we've built this in a way that professionals can, you can send your clients to us to this website. We're going to put a link in the show notes. You can go on there and we'll send you an information. You can even be an affiliate, but it can be almost like a bootcamp for people who we can help get them skilled up. We can provide them support. If you're any individual that is seeking help like this and support, we have it. So it's conflict influencer.com. It's the one place you're going to come for everything. New ways for families, new ways for couples, new ways for life, new ways for work, coaching, pre-mediation, we have it. Questions, bill.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
Well, first of all, I want to give credit where it's due and give you credit not only for coming up with the name since I love coming up with names,

Speaker 1 (29:16):
You're good at it, but you

Speaker 2 (29:17):
Came up with the name, but also with the concept and really building more resources, more skills and more community for people. And I think that's such an important message that the skills we teach any individual using those can influence a conflict. We were talking earlier, you've got someone with a fighting personality, a high conflict personality, and here's you and you can reduce the conflict with ear statements and making proposals and using Biff emails and all of that. But what we've also learned is it takes practice. And one of the biggest things, two things from practice, one is they learn the skill better. Like playing baseball, singing a song practice really helps. But the other thing is it gives people confidence. And I'm just so I guess pleased at the end of a consultation session where I may have practiced a conversation, someone's going to talk to their boss or their spouse, and we've practiced a conversation and they say, now I've got words, but I also feel more confident. And I think you did some looking at feedback, some summary or something that people were saying that they have confidence from learning these skills and learning about the personalities helps them know what they're dealing with and that they can deal with a difficult person either to steer away from them or to maintain a relationship with them. Anyway, I'm going to give a lot of credit for that, but I also want to ask some questions.

Speaker 1 (31:05):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
First of all, so what you're saying is high Conflict institute.com is designed for professionals, professional training, profess professional consultations, professional, some things there's continuing education for, and conflict influencer is for individuals wanting to help themselves, learning these skills, getting support group, getting coaching and such. So now I have a trick question for you. Let's suppose there's a professional that says, I'm actually having troubles in my family. Let's say my sister and brother are really difficult. Where should they go

Speaker 1 (31:50):
If it's for personal stuff, go to conflict influencer.com. That's a great question, bill. Okay. Yeah. So it's for anyone, and you may have taken a new ways for work leader training with us on high conflict institute.com, but you have something kind of in your personal life that you want to understand and get support. I think that's a big piece of it is getting that support because when you're in it, it's a personal relationship. It's just a lot harder than in professional world because you have that emotional tie. You have history and all that background and emotional hooks. So to have the support on conflict influencer side can really, like you said, increase the confidence and help you make decisions about your relationships. Just feel

Speaker 2 (32:40):
Supported. So in many ways, is this for me or is this for helping clients? And that's where High Conflict Institute would be for helping clients. And conflict influencer would be for helping yourself.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Helping me. That's right. Exactly. I kind of also look at it this way. For those listeners who know what we do on the High Conflict Institute side, we might provide new ways for families training for counselors or for coaches to help your clients. And we're going to keep doing that forever. We want you to help as many clients as you can without, we also recognize that you're not going to be able to help all the clients in the world. So we wanted to have this website for those who don't have access to a new Ways for Families, a licensed counselor or new Ways for Work coach or something like that. So it's to kind of expand the services, scale it just make it accessible. I come from a rural background and in a community where there weren't a lot of services, and I traveled to many places like this, and I see the internet gives us the ability now to go everywhere. So online classes, whether anyone can go on and take these classes themselves, or you can take coaching or a class with coaching, all kinds of coaching, whatever you need, helping make decisions, analyzing your decisions, learning to make proposals, all of those. So yeah, it's just a way to expand our services direct to the person.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
Great, great. Now you've been running for the past year, a conflict influencer class. How long does that usually run, and what kind of skills do people get from that? And I'm sure there's a cost involved.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, well, there's definitely always a cost involved, but we do get feedback from people that they're grateful that we keep our costs reasonable. Again, I do like to make things accessible to everyone. There's also a place for people who want more handholding or a higher level of services. So there'd be a whole place for that. If you want handholding for a year long, and I shouldn't even say it handholding, but just really more services than most, then we have that available too. So the conflict influencer class, I've kind of experimented around. So I started with six weeks of 90 minutes per week, and it's been interesting to see that it's both the professionals or the people with personal coming in for personal reasons, the mes and also professionals who have come into it because we've opened it to everyone and they've said, I wish I'd known about all of this so I could have helped my clients much better in the past.

Speaker 1 (35:52):
So what we have a conflict influencer certification for professionals. That's kind of an aside, and I don't want to confuse people too much, but the class has been really, really a wonderful experience for me personally. Just because like you said, with the consultations, you're getting that sort of immediate feedback. And because we're seeing each other week after week, a group of about 15 to 20, typically I can see where I need to explain something better or where I haven't, there's gaps in what I'm talking about. But what they're getting is skills. They're learning how to use Biff and they're using Biff as a perb,

Speaker 1 (36:37):
But how to have those conversations. That's the number one request in this class is to learn how to have those face-to-face or even over the phone or Zoom conversations because people get stuck and they feel stuck. And once they learn how to stop from just reacting, that's one of the biggest pieces is stop yourself. If you feel hooked, if you feel that in your gut and you just get feel spicy, just stop. That's your cue. And now what am I going to do? And okay, I'm going to be assertive. I'm going to be conflict assertive. What's that mean? That means if it's writing, I have to use Biff, Biff response. If it's a verbal conversation, I need to use some ear. If someone's escalating, complaining, blaming, going to use a little ear and then pivot into, maybe that's enough. But then I need to pivot into helping them focus on making choices or analyzing options. All the things you teach about in the cars method and just putting the teachings from your core cars method into practice. What's it look like? How's it feel in reality? Build that muscle memory, learn how to pivot, learn how to set a limit, how to impose a consequence and to not be afraid of it.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
So we do those things in six weeks. It's never enough time. We just have a class last, we were doing a lot of role playing and it's supposed to be 90 minutes, and so some people dropped off at 90 minutes, but we went on for another 45 minutes.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (38:17):
Yeah, we don't normally do that, and I'm going to try not to do that in future, but we we're still testing things out a little bit, and it's just interesting to see that the need really for role play is there and to really practice these skills. So the class is meant to be where they're going to learn the skills, practice a little bit, and then you can go into the coaching labs and fine tune those skills, get as much practice as you want, come into the online community conflict influencer community, and you'll be able to talk to your colleagues and peers and friends that you make. These people are making friends with each other.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
That's great.

Speaker 1 (38:53):
They have a common understanding because once you've seen high conflict and experienced high conflict, first of all, people are typically surprised that other people understand what they've been through.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
Everyone feels isolated and alone, and this so much opens out It's so similar.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
Yeah, exactly. So to come in there and they're developing friendships, relationships, and helping each other out, and they come up with things that I haven't thought about and they help each other with things they've learned and experienced, and it's just a really great community. So I'm excited about it. It's live, it's ready. If you want to know about it, the link is conflict influencer.com. You can google that, put it directly in your browser bar, and we'll be there. Lots of opportunities. It's a very clear website. I think it's been my most fun website build ever. So I don't want to give a shout out to Sierra Lynn Designs and I'll put her link in the show notes if anyone's ever interested in making their own website about anything, because I've worked with a lot of web developers and she's phenomenal in every way.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
Fantastic.

Speaker 1 (40:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
One more quick question, and is where will the articles be? We've got like 50, maybe a hundred articles on the High Conflict Institute website right now. Will there be a division of them? Will they all go to Conflict Influencer? Will they stay where they are? Where should I tell people to look?

Speaker 1 (40:23):
Well, I'm going to tell you, bill, you're wrong. There's over 400

Speaker 2 (40:27):
Oh, oh my goodness.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
Some of them are blog posts from days of old where you were writing a blog and articles and the blogs might've been about, Hey, I was in Illinois last week and I talked about dah, dah, dah. So those are kind of going away. We don't need all of those, but the professional articles will be on the professional website. The articles for Personal Life will be on the Conflict influencer website, and some of 'em will be on both because they'll touch both.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
Excellent. I want to point out articles are free because like Megan said, we like to have a full range, so things are accessible and affordable, and we have a good reputation for being reasonable so people can come to our website and get free information.

Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah, we love to help and we love to make a living while doing it and just be reasonable.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
Two things. Two things have we can't help if we don't make a living. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (41:23):
Exactly. So anyway, thank you all for listening. Come visit us@conflictinfluencer.com. Say hi. We'd love to see there. Nothing's changing on the High Conflict Institute side. We're going to continue to provide the quality training and consultation and everything else we do there. Bill will continue to write his amazing articles and his brain never stops, so don't worry about that. No changes there. This is an addition that is, I think, going to be very valuable to people. So come see us. This is our last episode, as I said earlier for this season. So thank you for listening this season. We'll have new episodes in September, but a few replays between now and then and all the links are in the show notes. Until September, keep learning and practicing the skills. Come visit us@conflictinfluencer.com. Give us like wherever you are, and we would love to have reviews on Apple iTunes or wherever you listen to Spotify. Be kind to yourself and to others. While we all try to keep the conflict small and find the missing piece. It's All Your Fault is a protection of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts at True Story fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.