Conflict Fluent: Dr. Emily de Schweinitz Taylor on Learning the Skills of Peace

Peacemaking tips from Emily Taylor

• Build your conflict fluency. Notice your default move in conflict, then practice the others — avoid, accommodate, compromise, compete, collaborate. Fluency is having all five available.

• Listen deeply, then share too. Connection is reciprocal. After you've truly listened, gently offer your own perspective. Real growth comes from the exchange, not from one person always accommodating.

• Ask for the kind of conversation you need. Sometimes you need advice; sometimes you just need to be heard. Naming it up front — "I don't need you to fix this, I just need to get it out" — prevents a lot of friction.

• Teach it early, and treat mistakes as practice. Whether with your own kids or yourself, treat conflict as a learnable skill and a mistake as a chance to improve — not something to be ashamed of.

Conflict Fluent

We can't expect peace — real harmony, understanding, human flourishing — to come out of coercion, domination, and selfishness. It just doesn't work that way. And I think we know it, but we often get impatient, or we get afraid, so we try a stronger, quicker approach. And then we bear the brunt of creating resentment.

That's Dr. Emily de Schweinitz Taylor, and it's a good summary of everything that follows. Peace isn't something you can force. Push harder to get there faster, and you usually end up further away.

Emily is a certified mediator, a developmental psychologist, an author, and a mother of five. She holds master's degrees in international policy and conflict resolution and a PhD in developmental psychology, and she hosts the podcast Conflict Coach with Dr. Emily Taylor. But what makes her worth listening to isn't the credentials — it's that she treats conflict the way most of us wish someone would: not as a disaster to survive, but as a skill we can actually learn.

She came to this as an avoider

Here's what's disarming about Emily: she didn't start out good at this.

"I came into peacemaking and conflict resolution as an avoider and an accommodator," she told us. Her idea of making peace was to go quiet, self-sacrifice, keep the harmony at her own expense. Looking back from her forties, she saw the cost — relationships she didn't pursue, tensions she sidestepped, a roommate situation she solved by simply moving out instead of working it through.

That regret became fuel. If conflict was a set of skills, then the skills could be learned — and better late than never, but better still to learn them early.

The five approaches, and why one isn't enough

Most of us have a default. We do the one thing we know how to do in conflict — avoid, or give in, or push to win — and we do it every time, whether or not it fits.

Emily's book Conflict Fluent is built on the idea that there are actually five approaches: avoid, accommodate, compromise, compete, and collaborate. Each has its moment. The problem isn't using any one of them; it's using only one of them.

"You do what you know how to do in conflict, and it's not working all the time. You've got to switch it up."

Being conflict fluent means having all five available and knowing which to reach for — the way a fluent speaker chooses the right word instead of repeating the only one they know.

Peace you can teach a three-year-old

The most surprising thing Emily shared came from research out of the University of Waterloo in Canada. When parents directly help young children negotiate with their siblings, three-year-olds can learn to mediate almost as well as a six or seven-year-old — far earlier than most of us assume.

That research changed how she parented. Rather than let her young daughter grow up conflict-averse and have to rebuild her whole approach in her forties — the way Emily had — what if she simply taught her the skills now, while she was young and, as developmental psychologists say, still pliable?

It also pointed to a cultural blind spot. When a toddler mispronounces a word, we gently correct them and move on. But when a child fumbles a conflict, "we tend to shame — oh, you did that wrong." A mistake in conflict gets treated like a family travesty instead of a learning opportunity. Emily wants us to flip that: to treat reconciliation as a skill kids get to practice and improve, so that by adulthood it's second nature instead of something they suddenly have to figure out.

Help people find their own answers

Emily's podcast, Conflict Coach, exists to show something most people never get to see: what effective listening actually looks like. Millions have been to therapy, she points out, but almost no one has watched a session that wasn't their own.

The key principle of her coaching is self-determination — helping the person figure out what they want to do, within their own values, rather than handing them an answer.

"If I tell you the answer and it doesn't go well, in the end you're going to blame me, because I'm the one who gave it to you."

So instead she listens carefully, reflects back what she keeps hearing, and helps a person name what was already inside them. "I keep hearing you mention this — is there something special about that?" Then they decide. Her job isn't to have the answer. It's to strengthen a person's confidence that they can find their own.

The part we get wrong: it takes two

Here's the insight that reframes a lot of well-meaning advice about listening.

Good listeners, Emily has found, often think listening is the whole job. It isn't. "That's only half the source of connection. We have to have an exchange."

Real connection — whether you're bridging a divide or repairing a family relationship — comes from both people listening and both people sharing. After you've listened and summarized what someone said, the harder, more valuable move is to offer your own perspective without turning it into a debate: "Here's what I'm concerned about. This has been my experience." Friendship is reciprocal by nature. One person listening while the other only talks doesn't create it.

And when you're not sure what kind of conversation you're in, ask. Emily will literally request permission: "I'm trying to figure out how to help one of my kids. I don't want advice right now — I just need to get it out." Naming the kind of conversation you need prevents a surprising amount of friction before it starts.

Positive peace and negative peace

Late in the conversation, Emily drew a distinction worth carrying with you, one that comes from the peace scholar Johan Galtung (and echoed by figures like Martin Luther King Jr.).

Negative peace is simply the absence of harm — no violence, no open conflict. It's what people often mean when they say "it was a time of peace": nothing was on fire. Positive peace is more than that. It's the presence of harmony, understanding, and flourishing — not just the absence of the bad, but the presence of the good.

It's a useful measure for our own relationships. A quiet house where no one is fighting isn't the same as a home full of genuine connection. Peacemaking, at its best, isn't just stopping the harm. It's building the good.

Don't force it

We'll leave you where Emily began.

Peace doesn't come from coercion, domination, or the quick, forceful shortcut. Those breed resentment. It comes from relationships — from the patient, learnable, two-way work of listening and sharing until something new can be built between people. It's slower than we'd like. But it's the only thing that actually works.

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