The interactions we avoid

And by 'we', I mean you!

In the spring of 1976, Sweden’s most beloved children’s author published a fairy tale about a woman who paid 102% of her income in taxes - and somehow, it helped unseat the government.

I read it decades ago as a political science undergrad, and I still can’t decide whether I admire it - for the way it challenged a consensus-driven culture or quietly resent it, because maybe it didn’t really challenge anything at all.

The story is called “Pomperipossa in Monismania”. It’s about a children's book author named Pomperipossa, who works hard and writes successful books and lives in the kingdom of Monismania, a country she loved dearly:

"No one in the land needed to be poor, everyone got a piece of the welfare cake, and Pomperipossa was full of joy that she had been able to contribute a good portion of the cake as they baked it and spread the wealth around. Oh the sweet aroma from a well baked cake!"

The country is ruled by what Pomperipossa thought were wise men that did all their best to build a good community in Monismania. Unfortunately, one day, they introduce really complex and absurd tax laws and Pomperipossa discovers that she now owes more than 100% of her income to the state.

This story looked like the kind of tale Astrid Lindgren was known for: peculiar characters, made-up places, a touch of whimsy. But beneath that, it was something sharper: a protest against the Swedish government.

Just like her protagonist Pomperipossa, Astrid Lindgren herself had discovered that, thanks to a complicated tax code in Sweden at the time, she in fact owed the state more than she earned. And while she was, and remained, a supporter of the Swedish model and the values of the social democracy - like public welfare, equality, social justice - she felt that this was the point where she had to push back. Not against the ideals themselves, but against the rigidity and the blind spot, that even a well-meaning system can fail to see when it’s hurting the very people it was designed to protect.

And instead of just writing a letter to the tax office, she chose to spark a difficult conversation publicly. She didn’t stage a rebellion or public outrage, but she made it impossible for the Swedish people to keep looking away. At a time when open confrontation wasn’t socially accepted - and still isn’t fully welcome now - she found a form that could slip through.

Her story was published in Expressen and spread fast, and some say it helped tip the scales in that year’s national election, when the Social Democrats lost power for the first time in over forty years. Of course, there were other reasons - economic stagnation, political shifts. But Pomperipossa became a symbol for the moment when the consensus cracked, just slightly, and someone from inside the system said, in public, that this had gone too far.

What stayed with me, all these years later, was not (so much) the slowly growing absurdity of a tax policy in one of the most textbook-like welfare-state systems, but the way Lindgren chose to critique her government. And while I admire the elegance of what she did, another part of me hesitates. Was it a bold move? Or was it just a shy gesture echoing the old figure of the court jester - the only one in the room allowed to tell the truth, precisely because they masked it in humor and absurdity? I wonder if something was lost. If Lindgren gave up some of her force by choosing fable over an open confrontation.

I have a personal bias: I like open confrontations. I like fights. (Having three sisters, what is a girl left to do if there are only so many good snacks on the table?) I’ve spent most of my life training for them - with bodies moving fast across a mat, with a katana, and lately, mostly with gloves in a ring. I like the moment when everything gets sharp and narrow, but also messy, a quickly changing riddle to solve. So yes, I move toward intensity. But with all that training and the ease it’s given me when it comes to direct conflict, I am struggling with the fact that most people don’t move toward confrontation.

The majority of us grows up without real guidance on how to handle conflict, especially the everyday kind: tension, disagreement, misalignment. We’re taught, mostly in subtle ways, that conflict is something to avoid, because it allegedly disrupts connection, and we are at direct risk of being disliked. So instead of learning how to stand inside friction with clarity and care, we learn to sidestep. While we learn to have strong opinions or clear boundaries, we’re also trained to believe expressing them comes at too high a cost. Like being told to stand firm, but only if no one notices.

And while this dynamic affects everyone, the ways we learn to navigate conflict additionally tend to break along socialized lines. Even in early childhood, different expectations for girls and boys begin to shape different strategies. Research in developmental psychology has long shown that by ages 3 to 5, children already exhibit gendered patterns of conflict behavior. In my own childhood, my sisters and I rather used negotiation, compromise, or at times quiet withdrawal to manage tension, while our cousins - “the boys” - tended toward more physical or overt tactics like assertion, confrontation, and aggression.

Over time, those patterns get reinforced everywhere. Expressions of strength, directness, dominance, visible anger, are rewarded in certain people and punished in others. When you are always praised for cooperation, accommodation, and emotional caretaking - and these qualities aren’t wrong, but when they’re over-rewarded and treated as the default - they can leave people without access to the more direct tools of clean conflict.

But just because direct confrontation is discouraged, it doesn’t disappear. Instead it mutates. Psychologist Nicki Crick coined the term ‘relational aggression' to describe how social tension often plays out in more indirect forms: exclusion, rumor-spreading, silent treatment, subtle sabotage. These are the forms conflict takes when we’re not allowed to express it openly. Cold shoulders and withdrawal of belonging instead of raised voices.

Though relational aggression can often be observed among girls, it isn’t a female trait, but simply a strategy developed in environments where social standing is fragile, and directness isn’t allowed or even punished. And even though it’s often first learned on the playground, it doesn’t end there. It follows people into adulthood, into friendships, partnerships, teams, and leadership roles. Without a proper training in conflict literacy, without tools to navigate tension head-on, without practice in standing our ground and still staying in relationship, we lose something vital. We lose the ability to set clear boundaries without guilt, the skill of staying present when something’s off and the chance to repair instead of rupture.

I am a strong believer that it’s not conflict that destroys relationships but its absence.

I’ve often wondered whether the German preference for directness is a strength - or just a habit mistaken for one. We are raised to value clarity, to speak precisely, to avoid vagueness. The language itself pushes us there, grammatically dense, logically structured, no space for illusion. And culturally, there’s a long tradition of respecting what is said plainly, even when it’s hard to hear. We say the thing, we face it, we insist that truth is a kind of discipline.

What doesn’t seem to be a discipline though is staying in the tension. Clarity, after all, is not the same as contact. We are often quick to disagree, but often not able to remain present while doing it. I’ve sat in too many meetings and other professional interactions, where the confrontation happened early and then ended, just as quickly, with a withdrawal into formality, abstraction, or silence. The moment of intensity passed, and nothing changed. So, while we have the language for conflict, we don’t really seem to have the stamina for it. We rarely stay long enough to find out what it might become, if held with a little less certainty and a little more care.

I would really like to understand, what part of that is human and what part is cultural or socially learned? Looking at how other cultures navigate friction differently, the first thing I notice is: they might be less directly, but not necessarily less consciously.

Japanese, for example, is regarded a high-context culture, where meaning lives between the lines, and much of what is communicated isn’t said outright, but understood. Not because people are intuitively attuned in some mystical way, but because the framework is already known through tradition, hierarchy, timing, and form. It’s not about saying everything. It’s about knowing what can be left unsaid, because the rules of the setting already shape how something will be heard. Clarity comes more through protocol, less through performance.

And from what I observe, the French, too, lean toward high-context - but differently. Their kind of complexity has edges. There’s a long tradition of debate, so disagreement isn’t impolite: it’s expected, even welcomed, as long as it’s delivered with form. The aesthetic of the argument matters. It’s not enough to be right, you should also carry your position with a certain poise, a rhythm of thought. The idea is that the structure gives shape to disagreement, so it can be heard, not just reacted to. But the problem is, it can also become a kind of armor. Something that protects the form, while the substance slips by unnoticed.

Italy, as one of the few exceptions, isn’t one or the other, but oscillates constantly between high- and low-context culture. People will tell you exactly what they think, but you still need to read the tone, the rhythm, and who’s interrupting whom to really get the message. (Half the meaning is in the words, the other half is in the eyebrows, the hand gestures, the dramatic sighs, and whether someone is waving a fork while making their point.)

Denmark is technically low context, like Germany: people value clarity, plain speech, no unnecessary drama. But beneath that directness, there’s a quiet commitment to keeping things hyggelig, unprovocative, comfortably neutral. So yes, they’ll tell you the truth, but preferably with a smile, and preferably not in front of everyone

And before I get carried away comparing the Swedish rather low-context, consensus-prone culture to assembling IKEA furniture… I wonder, whether one can say, that the lower the context, the more comfortable people tend to be with direct conflict? In places where language is expected to carry the full weight of meaning, people usually learn to name disagreement without flinching. But that doesn’t mean they’re good at staying with discomfort - they are just more fluent in stating it. High-context cultures know just as much about conflict, but they’ve just hidden the knowledge in subtler places.

Lindgren’s Sweden sits quietly in that pattern, low-context, but it is still highly consensus-oriented. Swedish culture has long been known for its preference for consensus and a quiet aversion to open conflict. It feels like a social instinct, a shared leaning toward harmony over disruption.

I have seen it in Swedish workplaces, where meetings are often careful and calibrated, and where disagreement, though present, tends to move around the edges rather than through the center. Even when strong opinions were in the room, the emotional current stayed smooth.

There’s a phrase in Swedish - dålig stämning - which translates, more or less, to “bad atmosphere.” It refers to the social discomfort that arises when tension becomes too visible. And culturally, there’s a shared understanding that this atmosphere is best avoided. Not at all costs, but when possible. And I’ve often wondered what happens when a real difference needs to be voiced. When something uncomfortable enters the room, and everyone feels it, but no one names it. The water stays still, but something essential gets lost beneath the surface.

This isn’t a criticism. I just wonder about the tradeoffs, that every culture has. In spaces like leadership, long partnerships, or friendships that have weathered years, I’ve seen how the absence of open conflict doesn’t always mean peace. Sometimes, it just means depth has gone missing.

Why am I writing about this? The course, I love to teach the most at the moment, is called How to fight for your mission without getting hurt. But people constantly ask me to change the title. It seems too much, too aggressive and too close to violence, many companies, agencies and even participants say. Couldn’t we call it “how to stand up for what matters,” or “how to protect your values,” or something that doesn’t carry so much weight? While they’re not wrong, they’re not right either, and that conversation is already part of the fight: The one for the words and for how much heat we’re willing to hold without pretending it’s not there.

Because if we take the fight out of it, we also take out the shape, the pressure and the edge, and it becomes about staying agreeable, and not about handling what happens when agreement breaks down.

One of the reasons I teach this course is that I’ve watched too many people in positions of power, CEOs, athletes, politicians, understand and name a problem clearly and even address it professionally, but then disappear from it the moment the discomfort of the people involved begins to surface. Not because they’re weak or insecure, but untrained. If we never learn how to stay in the discomfort without tightening around it or stepping out of it, if we are only trained for clarity, but not for contact, we’ll naturally think the job ends with the statement. But the job doesn’t end there.

To manage situations, when the room tightens, we have to be fluent in what a fight feels like: where it starts, what signals it gives before it rises and what kind of language lives there. What kind of fight we’re in and how it’s paced. We need to know what choices we have, what we’re capable of doing, whether it makes sense to cut through or to open up or to draw a boundary. We also need to be familiar with the signs of when the fight over, especially because it often still feels like it’s happening. That’s often when we overdo it and push past what we needed to achieve. And we absolutely need to know how to lose a fight without collapsing.

The thing is: Most people don’t fear the conflict itself. They fear being inside one and not knowing what to do. They fear not being able to recover if it goes wrong. And so they try to never let it happen. But the ones who know how to fight, have a choice: and when they choose not to fight, it’s not from weakness, it’s a strength.

And if they choose to step into the fight, it’s not about dominating the space. It’s about situational awareness, openness and allowing themselves to trust and feel safe, while not to know what’s happening next - and being okay with it. Because a fight is something we let unfold, moment by moment and signal by signal.

Like in boxing, we learn to see the shoulder tighten, the weight shift. We feel where the rhythm skips and what our opponent is planning and what is important to us right now. And if we’ve trained enough, we don’t panic when the hard hit comes. We don’t need to rush or dominate; we just allow ourselves to be inside the thing without breaking it or letting it break us.

That’s what fighting is. Not a fixed strategy or a performance: it is an unfolding story of interaction that shows us what’s real.

And while parties should be left when they’re best, conflict rewards the ones who don’t grab their coat too early.

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I’m Lena. An entrepreneur, writer, performance coach for pro athletes and politicians, and (depending on the day) a mild training addict… or the one reading body language like it’s a spreadsheet. I write about leadership, movement, Aikido, Kenjutsu, boxing, and the quiet disasters that make us better at all of it. There may be sword metaphors. And pancake metaphors. Or the devastating absence of both.