Excellent book about how to recognize high conflict versus healthy conflict. We need conflict to move forward but high conflict is dangerous and leads to extreme divisiveness. The author gives examples of high conflict situations and how people were able to extricate themselves from it. The most important tools include having curiosity about others, not making issues binary, acknowledging their complexity, and recognizing and avoiding 'fire starters' who use high conflict to their benefit.Publisher's description: High conflict is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side. Author and journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict--and how they break free. People do escape high conflict. Individuals--even entire communities--can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.