The meta-conversation technique blew up for me once. A buddy and I got into it and I went in that direction of how do we know if something is good or bad, right or wrong, and it had him feeling incredibly frustrated and distraught, questioning whether his friends have fundamentally different values than he does. I recognized in that moment he seemed very emotionally vulnerable and so I switched out of my head exploration and opened up deep abkut some of the emotional struggles I had been facing. I think very often conflicts are not about the actual conflict we discuss, but about tangential, or even unrelated, things.
That actually sounds like a true philosophical situation, where you both questioned some deeply held beliefs. This can have epistemologically and existential repercussions for the individual, especially if you are emotionally invested (and we always are at some level)
Perhaps, I'll think about that a bit more. I think I was seeing it more as me using theorizing as a defense mechanism to avoid opening up emotionally and connecting with my friend on a deeper level. I've noticed in my life that I can often dive deeper into theory, hypothetical situations, and general philosophy as way to distance myself from how I'm actually feeling in the moment and from saying that to others.
Oh yea, as a general rule of thumb I have found that if any party is getting emotional (defensive, frustrated, hurt, etc) then the conversation will have to pivot to feelings.. something about the pre-frontal cortex going offline when we get into a certain state.
I've seen this state called different things, like "Exiles" in IFS therapy, "below the line", "tilted", "triggering painful spots", I usually call it "defensive".
(Aside... a thing I've learned is not to ask if someone is feeling defensive (if they are, they'll say no). Instead I think the better move is to ask if they feel like I'm not listening, or not understanding their position. This lines up with the internal thoughts of feeling defensive.)
All this to say, rational conversation is possible when two people are in a rational state but there are other states of being.
(Aside.. I find that rational communication techniques like NVC are actually devilishly hard to put into practice all the time because they go out the window when we get tilted.)
(Aside... EFT couples therapy is designed around communication in an emotionally vulnerable state as opposed to rational, and supposedly has pretty good empirical results)
