Expectations change how the same experience feels.
More quotesThe first email contains one chilly sentence. The reply contains two. By the fourth exchange, legal has been copied in and two adults are arguing about the meaning of “as previously stated”.
Each believes they merely matched the other person’s tone.
That is what makes escalation so efficient: each person privately labels their retaliation proportionate. I judge my response with all the context of what you did to me. You experience only the force of my response. Then you add your own context and return the favour with interest.
“Who started it?” sounds forensic but often produces two origin stories and another hour of grievance archaeology.
To stop the cycle, somebody usually has to do something that feels unfair: respond with less force than they experienced. Not surrender. Not pretending the disputed issue vanished. Just removing the extra emotional charge that their own perception quietly added.
In a customer dispute, that might mean acknowledging the inconvenience before correcting the facts. In a negotiation, it can mean restating the shared objective when the other side adds a condition. In a team, it may require moving from rapid messages to a slower account of actions, dates and consequences.
People resist because under-reaction feels like letting the other bastard win. Yet matching perceived force is how both sides lose while maintaining an impeccable sense of justice.
A neutral record can help: what was said, what changed, what each party needs next. Motives come later. The summary is sent to the six people now copied into the exchange. Two of them immediately dispute line three.