Kathleen: Before we start, we just want to make sure we’re clear here. While this podcast talks about sobriety, mental health, and addiction, it is not meant to replace professional medical advice. Welcome to Sisters in Sobriety. I’m Kathleen.
Sonia: And I’m Sonia.
Kathleen: We were brought together in marriage and bonded through our sobriety journey.
Sonia: Join us as we talk sobriety, addiction, and everything in between. You’re in for quite a ride.
Kathleen: Welcome to Sisters in Sobriety. Today we’re joined by Anna Lecat, an intimacy and conflict consultant, global speaker, and author of the book Loving Conflict: Creating Collaboration Where Others See Division. Her work centers on something many of us in recovery are still learning in real time: emotional responsibility. So many women in sobriety describe conflict as one of the most triggering and destabilizing parts of healing, but Anna reframes conflict not as a threat, but as a doorway. Welcome.
Anna Lecat: Thank you so much for having me. I’m very, very excited to talk to the two of you.
Kathleen: We are so excited you’re here. For listeners meeting you for the first time, how do you describe what you do?
Anna Lecat: I travel the world, meet many different people, and do everything possible to persuade people that it is okay to conflict, as long as we know how to do it gently. So I am actually persuading people to fight kindly. In my life, over many years of being a global CEO and running multiple businesses, I am now on my third immigration. I have had many conflicts, internal and external, and I have learned that once I face the conflict, once I have that difficult conversation, things only get better. We get more trust, more intimacy, better relationships, and life is just better.
Kathleen: I couldn’t agree more. I think that is very true. What drew you first to studying intimacy, conflict, and emotional responsibility?
Anna Lecat: My main value is relationships. That is my priority. My personal relationships are my absolute priority before anything else. Ever since I was a little kid, I have been learning about people: how they relate, how they stay attached, how they fall in love, and how they love each other well. This obsession with loving well and being loved well is what drives me every day to study, investigate, research, take classes, and work with people. I also deeply believe that when people are loved well, which means they are deeply seen and cared for, they do not need to wage wars. There is this deep belief in me that people who go to war are people who are not loved enough. So I think that in my little life, if I can touch enough people and teach them how to be loved well and how to love well, maybe there is a small chance that there will be a little bit fewer wars.
Kathleen: I say this in my practice all the time. If we could learn this, if we could learn emotional responsibility, there wouldn’t be conflict in that way in the world. There might be disagreements, but there wouldn’t be war anymore.
Anna Lecat: I agree with you.
Sonia: When you talk about being loved well, does that go beyond romantic relationships? Because I think our natural go-to is, “Oh, she’s talking about romance.” But you’re talking about more than that, aren’t you?
Anna Lecat: I’m talking about that and more than that. First of all, I am talking about romantic relationships, being deeply loved and adored. But we can also receive that from other people and give it to other people: our parents, our children, our friends, our sisters-in-law, our coworkers. So yes, it goes beyond romantic relationships. I do think romantic love uplifts us so much, makes us better, and then we can carry that energy everywhere else. But I also know people who get that same uplift from dear friends. I certainly also have a very deep relationship with my parents, where I receive a lot of uplift and give it too.
Kathleen: What do you think people misunderstand about conflict the most?
Anna Lecat: We are taught not to conflict. We are taught to avoid it, to be nice to each other. I think especially women are taught to avoid conflict because it is often dangerous for us. Aggression is physically more dangerous for us than it is for men, so we are taught to stay away, to avoid, to calm down the situation. Because of that, we are not taught to face difficulties early enough. The first time we feel that something is yucky, we do not know how to go in, dig, and ask questions. We wait until it escalates, and then it is too late. It starts when we are little kids. We are taught not to fight. We are told, “Be nice.” Instead, we could ask: “What’s going on there for you? What are the skills for talking to somebody who is doing something you don’t like and would prefer them to stop?”
Kathleen: You describe conflict as a tango: tension plus connection. Can you explain that?
Anna Lecat: I’m a tango dancer. I have been dancing for many, many years, and I actually dance both roles. I know how to lead and how to follow. When I do something, I get obsessed. So I traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, because that is where tango is from. I went many times, studied with master teachers, and went really deeply into the philosophy and culture of tango. Now I travel all over the world, and I can dance with anyone. Once you get a good enough skill of connecting with another person, another body, another culture, another way of thinking, you can create something beautiful together. Because I lead and follow, I can take anybody into the dance as long as that person is also listening and creating with me. Together we can create something that is bigger than both of us individually. The skills of listening carefully to myself first, then to the other person, suggesting something gently, seeing how they respond, and then following their response — that is how tango works. It is exactly how any conversation works, especially a difficult conversation. That is what I do in my workshops. I take the skills of tango into conversations. I teach through tango, through the metaphor of tango. I teach people in corporations and at big events how to relate to each other without speaking first. We use nonverbal communication first. We relate to somebody we do not know, and we experience in our bodies that it is possible to connect and deeply feel somebody else without talking. Then we carefully layer on the words.
Kathleen: Your life and your work have spanned so many different cultures: Ukraine, China, the U.S., France. Is that nonverbal style of communication universal, or is it culturally specific?
Anna Lecat: Thank you. I love this question. I love cultures. This is my third immigration. I went to China from Ukraine when I was 17. Then I moved to the U.S. and lived in San Francisco for 12 years. Now I have been living in Paris for five years. I speak Mandarin fluently, and I really adopted China fully because I was so young. I needed to understand the culture to survive and thrive there. The same thing happened again in California, and now also in France. Now I lead workshops in Mandarin, in French, and in the States. It is very interesting. When I work with event organizers, they often say, “Well, you’ve worked everywhere, but you don’t really know this culture. We are different.” I can tell you, every culture thinks it is unique and that nobody else is like that. Even if you know every other culture, you don’t know theirs. I respect that, and I do think we are all unique. However, we are all humans. The fundamental desire to be loved and seen, the fundamental fear of not being loved, the fear of not being lovable, the fear of death, and the fear of losing loved ones — these are universal. There may be different representations of fear. People may show fear differently in different cultures. They may show love differently. But the fundamental want and desire are there. So when we drop language and start dancing, or when we do eye gazing in my workshops, something happens. For example, in Beijing, before we did the workshop, they told me, “Men in China will not do eye gazing. It is so against our culture. It is considered impolite.” I said, “Okay, just let me play and see what happens.” It was amazing. These Chinese men looked at each other. We start with two minutes, then we rotate so almost everybody in the room looks into someone else’s eyes for two minutes while we listen to tango music. They were doing it. They were crying. They were experiencing everything there is to experience when you look into someone else’s eyes for a long time, especially if you don’t know them. I lead it as a meditation. I tell them to think about how this person was when they were five years old while they look at them. Those kinds of experiences are so heart-opening. They are not culture-specific.
Sonia: One thing that does seem universal across a lot of cultures is what you mentioned about being taught not to fight and not to have conflict. How do you help people start believing that conflict can be a place of collaboration and not division?
Anna Lecat: We practice with small, difficult conversations first. It is through practicing and then looking back at the results that people slowly understand. When we get good enough at something, we start loving it. Then they start daring to do it more often in their lives. Simple difficult conversations are things like being in a restaurant and not liking your dish, and sending it back.
Sonia: I can’t do that.
Anna Lecat: That’s it. I think that is the best first step: do it the next time. It is about learning the skills. It is about saying, “This is what is going on with me.” It is not about them. Use the kindest voice possible, soft eyes, and body language that communicates that you are not fighting. You are asking. You are requesting something. Then make very clear requests so the other person can win with you. When they do it, you reward them. So: softness in you, clear request, overwhelming reward. If you do it with your waiter multiple times and you see that when you reward them, you receive so much dopamine and oxytocin, you feel good. You remember it in your body: oh, this is how it feels to face a difficult conversation. Then step by step, we take that up and up, until we get to the most difficult conversations, which are in your family. You know how Ram Dass said, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your parents.”
Kathleen: Yes, he did say that.
Anna Lecat: I would like to say to anybody, if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with my parents.
Kathleen: I think this is good, Anna. I like your spectrum of conflict, from the waiter example all the way up to the most difficult conversations with family. On the weekend, I had to go back to a hairdresser because I didn’t like what she had originally done to my hair. I was going to cancel the appointment, go to someone else, and avoid conflict. Then I was like, no, I’m not going to do that. I also teach people, as a couples therapist, how to conflict. But I didn’t think of it in the same way as when I teach couples how to conflict in a relationship. I went in and said to her, “I need to have maybe a hard conversation with you. Is that okay? Are you open to receiving my feedback on the last appointment?” I first asked her if she was open to receiving it. She said yes. I stayed with “I.” I didn’t make it about her. I said, “For someone else, it might have been great, but for me it wasn’t. I didn’t feel this. I didn’t like it in this specific way.” Now it is better because I went back to the same hairdresser. I gave my feedback in a gentle way. She took it. We actually had a great hairdressing appointment. She thanked me profusely for coming back in and being honest with her. She said, “I didn’t take it personally.” I know this seems like such a trite example, but these small conflicts matter. It is how you handle it. I also told her the things I liked about what she had done with my hair the last time. Then I explained what didn’t work for me and why. It wasn’t about her skill. It was about my own comfort. She did a great job.
Anna Lecat: This is such a great example, and it is so easy to do. I think one important point is that you helped her be better. We forget that when we are afraid to go and complain to somebody about their service, we forget that it is kind to offer feedback. We forget that they are trying to do their best. They did their best in that appointment, and now they are going to do even better. We receive kind criticism from our friends and experience it as, “Oh, you are helping me be better.” But we tend not to want to spend that energy telling people outside our small circle of friends and family. Why not?
Sonia: I also sometimes look at it like, when you are raising a small human, you have a responsibility to model those things. Sometimes I can think, well, I can avoid this hairdresser thing. But with a child watching, you just taught my niece how to handle conflict.
Kathleen: People mess up her hair all the time.
Sonia: Yeah, they do. It’s a curly hair thing. I think it is a hairdressing nightmare. Anna, since this is Sisters in Sobriety, and since we are doing examples, do you think people drink sometimes because conflict feels unbearable? I used to do this. Before I called my mother, I would always pour myself a glass of wine. Over time, that glass of wine turned into a bottle. That is what I would do. I would sort of laugh it off as wine culture, like, “I’m going to have a glass of wine if I have to talk to my mom.” Do you think alcohol can sometimes play a role in people avoiding conflict?
Anna Lecat: I think so. When we have difficult conversations, I recommend not taking any substances that we think will give us more courage. In fact, for all my work, I ask that people are sober. For workshops, I ask organizers not to serve cocktails or alcohol, which is really tough because they may think, who are you to tell us how to organize our event? But I have seen that people do not want to face their big emotions. So they escape in different ways. Not only substances, but work too. There are many different ways to escape.
Sonia: People do try to escape from their big emotions. I think many women don’t realize they are drinking to numb big emotions such as anger. Why do you think anger might be such a hard emotion for women to sit with?
Anna Lecat: Anger is the hardest emotion to sit with for anyone, men also. There is such stigma around anger. We can show sadness. We can show joy. We can show jealousy. There are all these other emotions that are okay to show. But anger is never okay to show, especially for a girl. We are socialized like that. When we are little and angry, our parents shame us in every culture. I don’t know a culture where this is not the case. So we do not learn to show our anger in a way that helps us. Then we do things to escape it. I think we need to bring anger back. There is a great book called Good Anger that talks about the history of how anger became stigmatized. In Chinese culture, I learned that when somebody displays anger, it is important to slow down, stop talking, watch them, and listen carefully. In anger, people disclose their deepest fears and their most important values. We are angry about the things we care about.
Kathleen: I think that’s something really good to remember. If you can slow down and get curious with the person who is getting angry, what is beneath what you might hear? What do they care about? How can someone tell the difference between healthy anger that signals a boundary and anger coming from old pain or trauma?
Anna Lecat: I think both are important to notice and express. It is just important to ask for consent. Is now the right time? In relationships, it is important that we train each other to sit in front of each other’s anger, make space for it, and listen to it. Where else are we supposed to express it? For example, when I am angry, I will say, “I am feeling very angry right now. Can we go deeper into this? Are you okay exploring this with me now?” Most of the time, big emotions are about old wounds. They are about something that happened when we were three, not this particular situation now. Even boundaries come from our past wounds. So I might say, “I am feeling angry right now because of what happened. However, I think it probably comes from when I was four years old and my brother didn’t want to play with me.” What I am looking for is tears. I know that my anger protects my heart. What I am looking for from the other person is enough care and love so I can break through the anger and get to tears, so they can see me in my most tender self. But I cannot show that until I express anger. If I am angry and something triggered me, it is very difficult for me to go right away to, “Oh, this is actually what is tender in me.” So I am asking: can I please express my anger and then go there?
Kathleen: It’s interesting because to be able to express your anger, you need someone who can receive it properly. Receiving anger can also be based on old wounds. For myself, I am not great with anger. It has taken me a long time to adjust to anger coming toward me because, from my childhood, if there was anger, I would shut down. I learned to shut down and not receive the anger. It is still hard for me to receive anger from people. I have to really notice what is happening in my body. Am I getting tension in my body? Can I breathe into that? Is this about this person expressing their anger in front of me, or is this my natural reaction? What would you say to the person receiving anger? How can they receive it?
Anna Lecat: Thank you so much for sharing about yourself. You said it right. You know your boundaries. You know it is hard for you. You are working on it, and you know you are becoming a better partner to everyone around you. You face your old stories. I don’t know what happened to you in the past, but the more people feel comfortable showing up fully in front of you, the deeper your relationships will be. While it is hard, and it is hard for me too, I know I am a better partner once I go through all that. So: feel your body. Always be in your body. Be grounded in your body. Come back to it. Ask yourself: what am I feeling right now? Then express that to the person who is angry. You can say, “Okay, you are angry. Can I please tell you what I’m feeling? I am back to being six years old when I was yelled at, and that’s how I felt then. I feel like that again now. Can we please pause? I need a hug, and then we can go back to how you are feeling, because I need this care now.” Care for your body at all times, and then go back. “Okay, now I’m full again. Now I can take more. Tell me more.” It is a dance.
Kathleen: So expressing yourself as well. Not making it about you if someone brings something up, but saying, “Okay, I feel like my six-year-old self getting yelled at. I’m just going to take a beat.” The person receiving the anger is also responsible for managing themselves.
Anna Lecat: Yes. We are all responsible for managing ourselves and expressing even big emotions in a way that cares for the other person. It takes time to learn, and that is why we practice with small things. It is a skill. I also think that when we are talking about a relationship between two people, only one person needs to be working on it. We don’t need both people to work on it.
Kathleen: What do you mean by that?
Anna Lecat: You mentioned that the other person also needs to manage themselves. Yes, it is great if they are managing it. But I don’t think it is necessary for both people to be doing the work. Only one person could be doing it, and it still works. When I started studying Nonviolent Communication, I remember someone asking the teacher, “I’m doing all this work, but my wife is not here. She doesn’t know that she should be doing Nonviolent Communication.” The teacher said, “It takes one.” You change your ways. You change how you react. You change how you request and how you reward. Then everything changes. Maybe at some point the other person will want to learn too. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe at some point they will ask, “What happened? You’ve changed in the last several weeks.” Then there may be an opportunity to share the resource with them. But we should never not do something just because the other person is not also doing the work.
Sonia: That brings me to people pleasing a bit. When I was married, I was very clear. I would say, “When you raise your voice, it makes me feel like I am six years old and my dad is yelling at me. I need you to be a little softer with me.” He refused repeatedly. In response, I started people pleasing more with him. If I felt something, I would squash it down and just say, “Okay, whatever you want,” instead of getting into conflict, because I knew how the conflict would go. How do you not fall into people-pleasing behavior as a conflict resolution strategy? I did, because the other person was unwilling to change, and that was my default.
Anna Lecat: The fact that women develop people-pleasing strategies because there is so much violence against women is understandable. I am glad we have that. One of the ways of surviving is avoiding violent conflict. If this is the only way to stay safe, more power to us. I am only talking about difficult conversations when we are safe. When there is any chance of violence or aggression, physical, mental, or emotional, all bets are off. This work is not for those situations. Those situations are for professionals to look at. I am never going to say to women, “Do not people please,” because I am sure they are doing it because they need to stay safe.
Sonia: Maybe I did it to stay emotionally safe. I don’t think I was in a physically unsafe situation. I knew I was dealing with somebody who just wasn’t going to change. I wouldn’t say he was terribly unsafe in any other way. Kathleen, what do you think?
Kathleen: I totally agree with what Anna is saying. This work is not for unsafe situations. But I think sometimes we have been in many unsafe situations, whether in childhood or earlier relationships, and then our go-to is people pleasing, even when we are no longer in an unsafe situation. I see that a lot in my practice. Women and men who were not physically, emotionally, or psychologically safe in childhood learn how to adapt. They learn to withdraw or people please. Later in life, they might be in a totally safe relationship, emotionally, physically, and psychologically, but they still will not voice their needs. They will not have healthy conflict because that adaptation is so present. For you, Sonia, because I know you so well and I knew your ex-husband very well — and obviously, I wasn’t in your marriage, so I don’t know if there was psychological abuse — I think because I know your childhood, this is an adaptation for you: to people please.
Sonia: For sure. Any sign of conflict, I am more comfortable people pleasing. I am not going to push the envelope. I may mention, “Hey, it would be great if you could be softer,” but if somebody doesn’t react the way I would want them to, I am not going to push that further. What do you think, Anna? Do you think there are some situations where it might be a safe environment, but the go-to is still to people please? Maybe that is something to look at.
Anna Lecat: Absolutely. I think it is not in personal relationships that one needs to look at first. It is better to do it everywhere else. Get obsessive about facing difficult conversations everywhere else in your life until you develop the skill and know that you are very proficient at doing it. Then you go back to the moments that trigger you, the moments that remind you of something in the past. Slowly, carefully, with consent and with a conversation beforehand, you start introducing it in those moments. So first the hairdresser, then the waiter, then the Uber driver. Then slowly, people you work with, your sister-in-law, and then your romantic partner. If you get flooded when your romantic partner raises their voice and you start using your adaptive behavior, then that is not the place to practice.
Sonia: Yeah, you don’t want to be practicing on that every single time. That is actually a great way to think about it. My skills were so weak that he was not who I should have been practicing on. I should have been practicing on waiters.
Anna Lecat: Yes, because as soon as you shut down, you do not have your cognitive functions available to make clear requests. In your case, you start people pleasing. Other people start being defensive or offensive. That is not the right time. Reframing conflict is also very important. When we think about hairdressers or waiters, we think it is conflict, and conflict means uncomfortable or unpleasant. Think about it as a game. How can I make this the most interesting, most useful experience for me and this person? What am I going to find out about myself and the other person? Remember that in this moment, with the waiter or the hairdresser, I am doing it so I can build skills for an important conversation in a high-stakes relationship. I am also training this person in front of me to have these conversations too, to be cool with them, and to become proficient with them.
Sonia: I think that is really true. I love that. I think I am going to apply that to my whole life, starting with all my relationships and working my way up. If the most common nervous system patterns are fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, what does staying present look like when you are flooded emotionally?
Anna Lecat: I meditate every day so that I can be ready in those moments. I do a meditation where, if I meditate at night, I bring back the moments from the day when I got flooded. Then I practice calming myself down while bringing the memory of that flooded moment in. I do it almost every day. I process my day by calming myself down a second time, and that gives me skills to be a little bit better the next time it happens. If I lost it with my kids — I have three kids — I will remember that. At night, it is actually super exciting to me because I know I am going to process it. So I don’t get angry with myself. I know that at night I will do it. Then I meditate, bring the moment in, get flooded again, and learn how to calm down my nervous system while thinking about it. That reminds me the next time. Another thing is that I am constantly checking in with my body. As a dancer, in tango, we always need to feel our axis. We always need to be grounded because we are giving and receiving somebody else’s weight all the time. Right now, I am sitting here talking to you, and at the same time, I feel my seat touching the chair. My legs are on the floor, and I feel them. I am also checking my neck. I am feeling how my neck is doing because I try not to collapse. I want to be straight. It is constant. I am here with you, and I am here with me at all times. That is my work, and that allows me to stay present because I know what I am feeling right now. If I get scared, sad, or overwhelmed with joy and love, I feel it earlier because I am constantly here, grounded with myself.
Kathleen: It sounds like a combination of mental and emotional fitness from daily meditation. I call it mental fitness because it builds the muscles of the mind, emotions, and psychology to withstand different things in life. It sounds like you have that practice, and then when you are in relationship with someone, whether in a conversation or something else, you are balancing being grounded in yourself and being present with them. Did I get that right?
Anna Lecat: Thank you. Yes. And there is something else. When I am with somebody and they are getting flooded, if they are getting angry or upset, most of the time it is not about me. This knowledge is with me at all times. First, I know they are doing their best with the resources available to them right now. If something is going on with them and they are losing control, they are doing their best right now. Then: it is not about me. If they got angry, it is probably because of what happened when they were three years old. It is not about me. I did not do anything wrong. So if somebody is angry and yelling, I look at them and recognize the five-year-old in them. That is when compassion comes in. This trick of recognizing the five-year-old in someone has been practiced in me for many years. Especially in heated discussions and difficult conversations, if I feel I am losing it or taking things personally, I go to: how were they when they were five?
Sonia: Is that also why so many of us interpret anger or conflict as rejection? Is that rooted in something that happened to us in childhood, or is it normal for us to see it as rejection?
Anna Lecat: When somebody is angry with you, you feel like they are rejecting you?
Sonia: Yes. Anybody else? Is it just me?
Anna Lecat: I think different people have different stories about anger, and it comes from what we decided when we were little and somebody got angry with us. Some people think they are unlovable and will never be loved again. Some people think they are in danger and need to run. There are different strategies. What we need to remember is that it is not about us. This person is in pain right now because their fundamental fear or fundamental value was touched. They are in pain because someone is expressing anger. That is very big in our culture. Something is going on with them, and we can find out. I want to hug them.
Kathleen: I can see how, when you think of it as their five-year-old self, it can bring compassion. It can really bring compassion to see that this person is having a reaction based on their own situation. When you look at them through that lens, it can bring compassion instead of defensiveness or fear. Again, we are not talking about physically, verbally, psychologically, or emotionally abusive conversations. We are talking about conflict in healthier settings.
Anna Lecat: Correct. Even in situations where I was in danger, if I could not run or call for help, my third step was to understand what was going on here so I could have a conversation and find a way for both of us to return to cognitive functioning from being flooded. I think the skill of staying curious about someone, even if we are getting flooded, is important even as a survival skill.
Kathleen: What would you say to someone listening who is scared of having hard conversations? What would you want them to know?
Anna Lecat: It is okay to be scared. It is scary. It is uncomfortable. And it is going to be better once you go through it. Don’t do it right away. Don’t try it at home right away. Try it outside, with lower-stakes relationships first. Get good at it. Once you are good at it, it is a superpower.
Kathleen: I think that is a beautiful way to end. Thank you, Anna, so much. It has been such a pleasure. I learned so much. I took notes today because I really learned so much from you. Thank you.
Anna Lecat: Thank you so much. It was wonderful to talk to both of you. You are such a great combination, and there is so much connection between the two of you. It is beautiful to watch.
Kathleen: Thank you. That’s so nice to hear.
You can find out more on Anna’s website at annalecat.com.