What conflicts we believe to be confronted with depends on our judgments. As long as we make no judgment we will not notice any conflicts. However, we cannot stop the judgments that we do automatically. They appear even subconsciously, without any active effort from us. We can try to overlook those judgements. Or take a closer look and try to evaluate where it comes from and why we came up with it. Then we can consciously prove it wrong and make a new one. If we conclude that there is an inconsistency somewhere, that something doesn’t line up, then there are different ways to deal with this. How we proceed depends also on our personality, on the way our character ist composed.
With little confidence in our own ability to think, we often explain a conflict with our lack of knowledge, our incompetence to understand the facts of a matter. We can leave it at that and simply believe what is said. Assume that both sides of the conflict are somehow right. Deny the existence of the conflict. It might still get difficult when we no longer know how to act, because different expectations demand contradicting actions. In that case it seems most obvious not to act, if possible, and first ask an authority what to do.
A pragmatic solution is to always behave the way the immediate surroundings demand. This behavior is what we can often observe with kids. They know the rules at home, in Kindergarten or school, and at the grandparents place, and they behave differently according to the rules wherever they are. This way, many conflicts never arise, because kids do not demand the same rules to be valid everywhere. And when rules change, they can adapt to it. Very frequent changes however, or inconsequent enforcement of rules, can overwhelm even kids. And then they end up in a conflict, because they no longer know how to behave.
In both cases previously described we do not insist to defend our own judgments. We are either too young to push against the world with our own judgement, or we have not learned to trust our own judgment. Possibly we experienced that we are rewarded for not doing so. We might even got punished for standing up to our judgments, expressing them or acting based on them. So we stopped doing it to avoid conflicts. However, the growth of a human does include to make personal judgements and to stand up for them. As teenagers we usually begin to live based on our own judgments. During this period we have the strength to oppose our parents and the world und use our own judgment to draw our own image of how we think the world is working. Here and there we will get in a conflict when doing that, and we learn to distance ourselves, separate our judgments from the views of others and stand more on our own.
It is this separation that enables us to build trust into our own power of judgment. Based on how we judge we will shape our interactions with the world, and doing so we can experience success and failure. Based on that experience we learn to expand our image of the world. With each failure we are called to adjust our image, so we can achieve better results in our next attempt. In that process we constantly make judgments, which we use to make concepts that we can add to our experience. If we are active we will notice a learning curve and build trust into our ability to judge and to think.
If we get into a conflict now, we will expect that we can solve it. We are convinced that we can find the truth, and in our mind we want to draw an image of the world which represents reality. If something is true it must be possible to connect in our image, so that a coherent overall picture evolves. In this process we constantly keep learning. So we will need to question and discard old prejudices, which are part of our image. Many of us fail to bring their image closer to reality because they only want to add stones on top and refuse to replace stones at the foundation. It can be a lot of work to do that, because sometimes the stones further up no longer fit the new foundation and we need to rebuild large parts of our image.
Still, it always pays of to solve conflicts, even if we need to turn our entire image of the world upside down. Even if we need to reconsider many judgments we already made. A worldview that leaves us with unsolvable conflicts is only standing in our way. We should not cling to it. We have only our comfort and our convenience to loose, and we can gain so much. We can discover a completely new world and start a new life.