When you grow up in a Midwestern town like Kansas City, you know the signs that a tornado is coming before the sirens ever start to blare.

The atmosphere shifts. The hair on your skin becomes raised. Things get still. The sky darkens. It’s silent. Too silent. The hail starts falling — tap, tap, tap — on your roof. When a tornado touches the ground, it sounds a bit like a train from hell rattling the walls of your home.

Tornados are incredibly cool to watch on YouTube or in films like “Twister.” But in real life? They are beyond scary.

Most locals are already making their way down to their basements or storm shelters before the sirens begin to wail. They huddle under the basement stairs, and listen to the radio until receiving the all clear.

Most locals, that was, but me.

As frightening as tornados were to me as a young child, they paled in comparison to the evils that awaited in our dark, musty basement.

By the age of six I was convinced that something lurked there.

Something old.  Something sinister. Something from another world. Something I wanted nothing to do with.

This created a major conflict for my mother. She needed to get to the basement. She wasn’t going down to the basement until I went too. And I wasn’t going.

One night, as the winds picked up and the radio warned that a tornado had touched down in the area, the conflict went from stressful to explosive. No matter how much she tried to convince me that I’d be safer in the basement. No matter how calmly she explained that there was nothing waiting in the shadows to devour my soul, I resisted her.

The basement was the only thing keeping me from being swept up by something truly dangerous — a town flattening tornado. However, I didn’t see it that way. The tornado was an unknown horror to me. The basement? I had a good idea of what was coming there and my irrational fears told me I should take my chances with the tornado.

Eventually my grandfather arrived in the middle of the storm walked in, picked me up, and carried me to the basement — me kicking and screaming the whole way down. This happened more times than anyone in our family cares to remember. Yes, I was the difficult child.

Many of us react to conflict the same way I reacted to the choice between my basement and the tornado. Any rational person would choose the basement over the tornado. But my irrational fear of the basement actually put me in the path of something that could truly hurt me. My grandfather had to carry me, kicking and screaming to the only solution that would save me.

The smog view of conflict convinces us to choose conflict styles like avoidance, accommodation or competition as a form of protection from conflict or the people we are in conflict with.

Avoidance: “If I pretend it’s not there, it will go away!”

Accommodation: “If I give them everything they want, maybe next time they’ll give me what I want.”

Competition: “The only way to win this conflict is to be me the last woman or man standing. So, it’s fight to the death.”

Can you see the fear in each of the styles? The fear of getting hurt. Of damaging a relationship. Of losing something important to us.

Unfortunately, each of these styles, when employed from the smog view of conflict, don’t make us safe. In fact, they can have devastating consequences to our relationships. In an attempt to save us from conflict, the conflict styles we employ from a smog point of view actually make conflict worse.

That’s why collaboration or problem-solving is so important to dangerous love.

As scary as a tornado is, the basement seemed even more dangerous to me. But, the basement was the only path that put me out of harm’s way. Confronting conflict feels dangerous. Reaching out to others we are in conflict with, at a time when our instincts tell us to create more distance, is frightening — just like that scary, musty, ominous basement.

But when we face our fears, engage in us-preservation instead of self-preservation and choose to be committed and creative in finding solutions that meet all of our needs in conflict, the irrational danger we felt melts away and we realize that the things that scare us the most are often the very things that can save us.

My 12 year old daughter Emi taught me that lesson this week. She had been struggling 
with one of her best friends, let’s call her Marissa. Marissa was being mean. Inconsiderate. She was constantly hurting Emi’s feelings. Emi tried, for a while, to ignore her. But avoidance didn’t stop the meanness. She tried to do everything that Marissa wanted her to do, but accommodation didn’t stop the meanness either. Finally, she resolved to write Marissa a letter to tell her that she wasn’t going to be her friend anymore. Emi was going to tell Marissa everything that was wrong with her. Yes, it would end the friendship, she reckoned. But at least the conflict would end.

What happened next was one of the great examples of dangerous love I’ve seen. Emi got out a piece of paper and started writing the letter. But as she wrote, her desires began to change. Instead of writing the letter announcing that she would no longer be friends with Marissa she, instead, wrote a letter telling her how much she loved her. She wrote down all of the things that she liked about her. She told her that while she was hurting and things were hard, she was committed to finding a way for the two of them to stay friends.

The next day Emi got a folded-up letter from Marissa.

It read:

“Thank you for being my friend. You are such an awesome person so keep doing what you do. Thanks for being my BFAFM [best friend always and forever more]. You are so kind. I don’t know what I would do without you. Since the day I met you I knew you would be my best friend. Thank you again, Love Marissa”

When faced with the choice of the scary tornado of conflict or the musty, ominous basement … she chose to face her fears and respond to Marissa with love and kindness. As it turns out, Marissa wasn’t so scary after all