Anatomy of Conflict

Ryan McLaughlin
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Daily

You've already lost something to bad conflict skills. A relationship. A promotion. A friendship. Sleep. Maybe all four. You just called it "drama" or "bad luck" instead of what it actually was: a skill you never learned. Anatomy of Conflict fixes that. Each episode, mediator Ryan McLaughlin breaks down the science of why humans get stuck in conflict — and gives you one specific, research-backed tool to get unstuck. Marriages. Boardrooms. Family dinners. Hostage negotiations. The tools are the same everywhere. Every episode hands you one move you can use tonight.

  1. Aug 21

    It's 9:30 at Night and You're in a Fight. Who Do You Call? | Jill Nagle

    It's 9:30 at night. You're in it with your partner, your neighbor, your sibling. You already know how this goes, because you know this person and you know yourself. A therapist is booking three weeks out. There is nothing to call.Jill Nagle is building the thing you'd call. Mendful is a platform for human-forward, AI-supported conflict resolution on demand — her line is that it should be as common as calling a rideshare. She's trained 13 conflict resolution coaches across seven countries, has another cohort starting in October, and isrolling the service out at $60 an hour.We get into it:— What "solving" a conflict actually means. Jill's answer is a state change, not an agreement: get the nervous system out of the tree, get underneath the story about who's wrong to the feelings and needs beneath it, and the details usuallywork themselves out afterward.— Why she treats the deal-making part as Act Three. She studied screenwriting, and her instruction to her coaches when parties finally start talking to each other is to step back and stop doing technique at them.— The DIY problem. Why wouldn't someone just prompt ChatGPT with "give me a nonviolent-communication answer to this"? Her answer: it can't hold two people at once, and it doesn't know what a pause or an interruption means.— My two-year forecast, and what she pushed back on. Mediation's value has four components — information, procedure, regulation, legitimacy. AI takes the information one to zero. If you're the retired judge who's seen it all, you'renow competing with something that has also seen it all. What's left is whether two nervous systems can be regulated by a third one, and whether people still want a human in the room for it.— The AI she's building anyway: Mendy, through her sister company Paravox, able to sit in a session and hand off to a human on request — with no mandatory AI anywhere in the product, because she's watched people hear "AI" and leave.— The thing she named that I haven't stopped thinking about: going to healers and therapists for years and noticing that right when she was about to break through, the practitioner would get anxious and start doing their modality to her, on her, at her. What Mendful teaches first is the opposite of that — spaciousness, so a nervous system can settle enough to get to the point.My read, for anyone practicing in this space: the informational moat is gone. Get to the top of your game and tell people what you actually do, because if they don't know you have it, they can't buy it from you.Jill's platform and practitioner training: mendful.world (click Training —there are recordings of the one-hour intro session in there).Anatomy of Conflict is hosted by Ryan McLaughlin of Flannel People Mediation.More at flannelpeoplemediation.com.

  2. Aug 4

    I Use Tarot Cards in Mediations. I Can't Tell You Anything Spiritual Is Happening.

    I bought an Oracle deck and I've started pulling cards in mediations. I can't tell you anything spiritual is happening. That's not why I use them. When two people are stuck — really stuck, the kind where they've said the same sentence to each other four times — a card puts an image in front of both of them that neither one owns. Nobody has to defend it. Your brain goes from one groove to another groove, and sometimes that jump is the spark you needed. I've been careful about it. I don't want to be seen as a freak. I want to be taken seriously. So I've done it lightly, and I wanted to talk to somebody who does it all the way. Brennan O'Connor — Soul Coach OC — has been meditating since his early twenties and picked up tarot a few months ago. He's certified in several energy-healing modalities. He also says this: "the biggest thing I know is that I don't really know anything." He's watched people in his own field decide everything is true, and he won't do it. We get into where "spiritual" starts and where it stops. Priming versus synchronicity — my mom died on October 27, so my sisters and I clock 1027 everywhere, and I still can't tell you whether that's meaning or manufacturing. Say "red motorcycle" three times and you'll see red motorcycles tonight. He tells me about waking up and seeing the spirit of a baby lying between him and his wife, and finding out a week later she was pregnant. Then he pulls a live reading for me, on a week I wouldn't describe on tape. Justice. Card 11. The part I keep chewing on: it didn't give me an answer. It gave me a question. Before that I didn't have a question — I had "how do I get through this week." Brennan O'Connor — Soul Coach OC  Email: Brennan.OC@gmail.com Instagram: @soulcoach.oc Web: soulcoachoc.com Tarot readings, past-life regression, energy healing, 1:1 soul coaching. Ryan McLaughlin — Flannel People Mediation  Divorce and family mediation in Minnesota. 250+ five-star Google reviews. Web: flannelpeoplemediation.com Email: flannelpeoplemediation@gmail.com Phone: 763-316-8323 Free 15-minute consult: calendly.com/flannelpeoplemediation/free15consult

  3. Jul 31

    Nobody Leaves Because of the Fighting

    Steph Paquin is an LMFT in Minneapolis who mostly sees couples. Her claim: the marriages that end aren't always the loud ones. Not explosive, not infidelity, not one event — but emotionally quiet. Her description of the evening: manage the kids, make dinner, sit on the couch, scroll. No micro-connections, no greetings, not a lot of curiosity. Her line is that it's the absence of connection, not the presence of fighting, that predicts who initiates. Women are usually the ones who call. Men call when there's been an ultimatum. And women's tolerance for inequity, she says, has changed a lot faster than the marriages have. I floated a $30,000 two-week couples intensive at her. She said "yes, and" — then said two weeks of tools is close to oversaturation, because humans need repetition and application is the part that decides it. Steph Paquin, MA, LMFT — thetissueclinic.com. The research she's drawing on is nearly all heterosexual couples; she names that early, and part two is our next convo.

  4. Jul 28

    We Got Divorced, Then Started a Company Together

    Chris Koepsel and Rebecca Tierney met in law school, got married, had two kids, and got divorced. They now run a company together, with the mission of helping families waddle and wiggle through some of the edgiest hard stuff humans navigate: divorce. I went in wanting the secret sauce. How are y'all managing to work together post-divorce? What I got was a diagnosis. When you split up, everyone tells you to just be good co-parents — but the only relationship you've ever had with that person is the one that was unhealthy enough to end. You're being asked to run a functional partnership on a foundation that already failed. What they describe instead is a conversion: from a relationship built for intimacy to one built for boundaries. Ally is where they like to land. Not friends. Not family. Ally. We also get into why litigation land teaches you the exact behavior you're trying to unlearn, why men white-knuckle a divorce while women project-manage it, and whether any of this work survives AI. Chris and Rebecca run Redefining Family — divorce coaching, co-parenting coaching, and mediation, entirely out of court. redefiningfamily.com Follow Ryan and check out Flannel People Mediation at flannelpeoplemediation.com for future collabs in and around divorce mediation.

  5. Jun 26

    Women Have an Invisible Line in Their Marriage. Most Men Don't Find Out Until It's Too Late.

    Women have an invisible line in their marriages — and most of them don't even know exactly where it is. But once they cross it, it's over. Dr. Sonja Benson has spent nearly 30 years watching the same pattern play out: she's been saying something's wrong for years, he hasn't moved, and one day she stops pursuing. Ryan McLaughlin and Dr. Benson break down why women initiate roughly two-thirds of all divorces, what "burned-out pursuer" actually means, and what discernment counseling is — the decision-making process designed for couples where at least one person isn't sure they want to stay.

  6. Jun 25

    Can Astrology Make You a Better Mediator?

    Your sun sign is the least interesting thing about you. Your moon sign is how you actually feel. Your Mars sign is how you conflict. Emmy Jane Carden — mediator in Minnesota and Texas, astrology student for two decades — shows us live how to read a natal chart and what it tells you about a person before they say a word. This one changes how you think about intake.

  7. Jun 22 ·  Bonus

    Why the Next Generation of Experts Won't Stay in Their Lane

    Think doubling down on a single niche is the only way to perfect your craft? In this episode of Anatomy of Conflict, we completely flip the script on traditional professional advice for mediators, therapists, and facilitators. We dive into the massive competitive edge of becoming intentionally "poly-skilled"—proving that adjacent obsessions, from building custom AI tools to studying neuropsychology, are actually the secret weapon for sharpening your core practice. By breaking out of rigid professional silos, we expose how a broad, interdisciplinary surface area of knowledge gives you a compounding advantage in empathy, pattern recognition, and high-stakes problem-solving. Stop letting conventional wisdom keep your expertise in a box, and discover why expanding your world is exactly what makes you the most valuable person in the room.

  8. Jun 19

    The Question That Ends Most Founder Fights

    Attorney Cody Blades has one question she asks every client before any negotiation starts: if there were no restrictions, no court, no opposing party — what would you actually want to happen? It sounds simple. It isn't — most people answer it once, then spend the next three conversations contradicting themselves, and catching that contradiction becomes her actual job. Ryan and Cody dig into why that's the real product, not the asset purchase agreement, not the negotiation math — the part where a client says "I don't care about owning the business" and two weeks later won't let go of it. It's the same move a good therapist pulls, naming your own inconsistency back to you, which is exactly why a calculator that does 150%-down-to-the-middle math was never going to be the whole job. Cody Blades represents founders and business owners in Minnesota at blades.law.

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About

You've already lost something to bad conflict skills. A relationship. A promotion. A friendship. Sleep. Maybe all four. You just called it "drama" or "bad luck" instead of what it actually was: a skill you never learned. Anatomy of Conflict fixes that. Each episode, mediator Ryan McLaughlin breaks down the science of why humans get stuck in conflict — and gives you one specific, research-backed tool to get unstuck. Marriages. Boardrooms. Family dinners. Hostage negotiations. The tools are the same everywhere. Every episode hands you one move you can use tonight.

Information

  • Creator
    Ryan McLaughlin
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    27
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Ryan McLaughlin
  • Show Website
    Anatomy of Conflict