Fighting is for Losers

A "fight" is a way of addressing a conflict in which the outcome is determined by the ability of one party to make another party lose. Many games are thus a kind of fight. The "winner" is the one who loses the least...who makes the other lose more.

This is fine for some kinds of games. But when the playing field is an intimate relationship, the relationship loses.

In many intimate relationships, when a conflict arises, the impulse is to fight. When the parties fight, they make each other lose. They are successful. Each becomes a loser and the relationship is the poorer for it.

When the parties to the relationship recognize they are fighting and stop, they at least quit doing harm. But they are often afraid that if they don't fight, they will lose. The core issue becomes each party's ability to not fight without feeling like a loser.

Many believe they cannot stop a fight on their own. "What if the other doesn't stop?" they ask, as though it is obvious that the only thing they can do is to fight back. To be sure, there are things we can do that will address the conflict which are not a form of fight. These things are far more effective but they can be hard to find and do when we are "in the heat of battle."

But none of the more effective things will occur to us when we are still fighting. If you don't want to be a loser, stop fighting.

New Intro for Just Conflict

Justice is a quality of relationships in which the fundamental needs of all of the parties are met. Conflict is a condition in a relationship when any party becomes aware that needs are not met. By naming, addressing, and resolving conflicts we create justice.

Some believe that to resolve a conflict each of the parties must acknowledge the same facts, value the same ideals, and be committed to the same outcomes. If that were true, then many conflicts would be impossible to resolve. Conflict resolution would require uniformity and it would make diversity the enemy of justice.

In order to resolve conflict and create justice each party need only see the perspective of the other parties and see how that perspective is valid for the other. From that place of mutual recognition and validation the parties then must only discover their common needs and agree to work together to meet them.

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You have personal experience resolving conflict. You no doubt have had relationships in which it became clear to you that circumstances were not right for you. You may well have felt as though you were the victim of an injustice. You may even have decided to address the conflict and to invite the other into a conversation about the distress you were feeling. You may have had the privilege of having the other agree to address the conflict with you and the two of you may have been able to hear each other well enough that you both decided to adjust the choices you were each making such that you both got more of what you need. You may have resolved the conflict, at least in part.

If you have had this experience, then you know that the relationship was actually made safer and more satisfying by the work of resolving the conflict.

Nevertheless, few of us see addressing conflicts as a way of strengthening our relationships. This success rarely means that we look forward to addressing conflict. We flinch. We shy away from addressing conflict for at least three very good reasons.

• We don’t know that the other is interested in even acknowledging the conflict, much less addressing and resolving it.
• We don’t know what will happen when we acknowledge the conflict and this act of naming the issue may actually make things worse.
• We don’t know that we have the skills to resolve a conflict with this much complexity and this much intensity. We may be in over our heads.

Each of these concerns is perfectly valid. Nevertheless, if we allow them to interfere with our efforts to resolve conflict we are delaying and denying justice.

We know we cannot make others change. One of the central premises of this book is that we don’t have to. All we need do is to change ourselves. If we define resolution as making others be different we are certain to fail much of the time. But when we recognize that we are the only one we need to change, we discover how immensely powerful we are.

We cannot know the outcome of our efforts to address and resolve conflict. While we are committed to an outcome that is more just than the current circumstances, we never know precisely what that is going to look like. We act in the faith that attention to the process will result in a more satisfying outcome. It is this necessity that we act in faith that makes conflict resolution a spiritual discipline.

But, while we cannot change others or determine a specific outcome, we can enhance our own skills at naming, addressing, and resolving whatever conflicts arise in any of our relationships. This is the central focus of this book…to become masterful at resolving conflict.

DV Assessments

From time to time I get a call from a person asking for a “domestic violence assessment.”  They assume that this is a standard practice and they just need to find someone who can do this on them to satisfy the Court, a GAL, or their attorney.  When I ask them what they mean by the assessment they have very little idea and don’t usually know why they have been asked to obtain one.
I want to be very clear about what I am able to do and not able to do to help these folks. 

Ruling in but not ruling out:

There is no universally accepted notion of what constitutes “battering.”  Indeed, the definition in criminal court is rather different than the one in civil court.  It is possible, however, to listen to a person’s report of the events in a relationship and determine whether those events fall into the realm of what most people mean by battering.
What we cannot do is to listen to a person’s report of their own behavior and, on the basis of that report, determine that battering is not occurring.  We don’t know what we don’t know.

Assessment of skills and perspectives:

We can listen to a person’s report of their own behavior and, on the basis of that report, identify the strengths and weaknesses they have when it comes to addressing and resolving conflicts in interpersonal relationships.  We can say how much they demonstrate avoidance or bullying and whether they can tolerate hearing the other’s viewpoint when it is different from their own.  But this doesn’t mean that domestic violence has or will occur.

Is the RW for couples?

I just heard this question about the audience for the Reconciliation Workshop and want to make the answer more widely available.

Mark,

Can you please clarify whether the Reconciliation workshop is for therapists or for couples (wanting to resolve their conflicts)? Thanks!

Randy

Randy,

The Reconciliation Workshop is very focused on helping a person find a solution to a persistent problem. Therapists may certainly do the workshop as an exercise in personal development but the therapist will be participating as a person who experiences conflicts in significant relationships. Couples may attend together but the focus will not be on the relationship but on the experience each has of the conflicts which arise for each. They may easily end up focusing on different conflicts in the relationship or even discover that the relationship issues are a derivative of other conflicts. For example, while they may choose to attend because of bickering between them, one may decide to address a persistent conflict with the boss at work because job stresses are the source of discord at home. In any event, they will each be in a different small group during the workshop.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Words for Tiger and us all

Nike just produced an advertisement which is of Tiger Woods facing the camera and hearing these words from his now deceased father.

Tiger, I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was, I want to find out what your feelings are, and did you learn anything.

-Earl Woods

I find this to be an astonishingly good model for strong parenting.

How to Resolve Any Conflict

We all resolve conflicts every day. Many of our conflicts are so small we hardly notice them. Some are ones we address all the time and are very skilled at resolving. But there are some conflicts which arise over and over in our most significant relationships which never seem to be adequately worked through.

Because they keep coming up—and because they are in relationships which are important to us—we do everything we can think of to try to resolve them. When we can’t we often decide that they are irresolvable. “Since I have tried everything,” we reason, “and it still isn’t fixed, there must be nothing I can do about it.”

In thirty years of working with people in high conflict relationships I have found that there is one simple shift that opens up a vast array of possibilities for addressing and resolving conflict. This shift is to let go of trying to change the other and to focus instead on changes we can make in ourselves. When we are centered in our own experience, clear about what we need, doing what we can do to generate the qualities we need, without any expectation or demand that the other change, we discover we are immensely powerful and creative.

Nevertheless, while this shift in perspective is simple and creative, it is not easy. There are some good reasons this shift is hard to make.

We don’t know we are trying to change others. We know we can’t change others. Even if we get them to change their behavior in the short run, they can always change back. But just because we can’t control them doesn’t mean we don’t try. If you are trying to address a conflict with someone and they are resisting you, you are trying to change them.

The problem is not in wanting others to change; of course we want that. The problem is in trying to get them to change. Even trying to get the other to understand me is trying to change them unless the other wants to know what is going on with me.

We don’t know why we should change. We see the other as responsible for the problem so it is the other who should change. We aren’t to blame. But when we think of responsibility only as whose fault it is we generate a fight. A fight is when we try to make each other lose.

If the only way I know to win is to get you to change, all you have to do to make me lose is do what you are already doing. What could be easier? The reason for me to change is not because I am bad or wrong the way I am, but because I am not getting what I need the way things are. We change because we care about ourselves.

We don’t know how to use our emotions constructively. With these persistent conflicts our emotions can overwhelm us. We can feel flooded by them and they sometimes inspire choices which get us the opposite of what we need. We think of these as “negative” emotions. But emotions are data and energy. They are information about what we need and the energy to act to create what we need.

Emotions arise because there are important qualities missing from our lives. When we act to create those qualities for ourselves, we not only create what we need, we create what everyone needs. This is not a zero sum game. Everyone can win.

We don’t know what would be a better choice. While it is simple (though not easy) to shift from trying to change others to changing ourselves, knowing what to do can be quite complex. Most of the conflicts we are trying to address are complicated.

I may have a conflict with my son over the tidiness of his bedroom. I want him to be free to care for his own things and to learn to take care of them if he wants to be able to find them and have them be safe. And I don’t want to live in a pig sty. Part of me wants to allow him to experience the consequences of his own choices and part of me is worried about vermin. When I can clearly hear from each of these internal perspectives and know what each is trying to create for me, I can then know how to act towards my son in a manner that supports his ability to care for himself, his property, and his relationships with others.

By letting go of the goal of changing the other and simply working to transform ourselves all conflicts can be resolved.

A Breakthrough Approach to Conflict Resolution

An interview with Dr. Mark Lee Robinson about the applications of Creative Conflict Resolution to large scale conflict.

What makes your approach to conflict resolution a breakthrough?

I am not entirely comfortable with that term “breakthrough,” but it is true that the perspective I bring to this field does allow experts—people who have wrestled professionally with the problems of conflict resolution—to shift to a point of view which they find to be significantly more accessible to creative invention. Some aspects of the shift are complicated but there are two that are central and straightforward. One has to do with what we mean by conflict and the other has to do with what we mean by resolution.

You have changed the definition of those terms?

Not so much the definition as the focus. We normally think of conflict as something which arises when parties that have opposing interests invoke strategies designed to dominate each other. For example, we may have a problem when someone in the office is not reloading paper into the copier when it runs out, but we decide not to say anything to him because we “don’t want to start a conflict.” Or we know there were deep hostilities between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda stemming from the colonial era, but we speak of the conflict starting in 1994 when Hutus began “cutting down the tall trees.”

Are you suggesting that the conflict started before the violence?

Exactly, and, while that seems simple, the implications of that shift in focus are huge. On the one hand we have the conditions in which tension between the parties arises, and on the other hand we have the choices each party makes in addressing the tension. Any observer of conflict is looking at both the conditions and the choices, but something important happens when we use the term conflict to refer to the conditions and speak of the choices we make as strategies or tactics for addressing the conflict. Conflict is not the choice but the conditions which evoked the choice.

Those conditions are not going to be managed away. They cannot be prevented. When we look at the conditions as the conflict it becomes absurd to speak of “conflict management” or “conflict prevention.” We can manage a fight or we can prevent war, but we will not substantially and durably resolve the conflict unless we address the conditions out of which the fight arises.

If conflict refers to the conditions which existed before the fighting starts, what does it mean to resolve a conflict?

At its simplest, a conflict is the condition in which the other is not as I want the other to be. As a result, what seems to be the desired outcome is for the other to change to be as I want the other to be. We therefore tend to look for ways to resolve the conflict by getting the other to change. Almost without exception, resolution is conceived of as happening when we have seen a desired change in the other. As a member of the office community, the conflict will be resolved when I can get my office mate to reload the copier when he runs it out of paper. As a Hutu, the conflict may be resolved for me when the Tutsis no longer control the best land for coffee production and treat me fairly in dealings with the bank.

The only way to resolve a conflict is to get others to act in ways they see as contrary to their own interests?

Right! That doesn’t seem very likely, does it? The bind is a consequence of this common way of thinking about resolution. It leads some really smart people to conclude that there are some conflicts which just can’t be resolved. But let’s adjust the focus a bit. Since we can’t make others change, what if we focus instead on getting ourselves to change? What if resolution is when we work to create what we need without depending on or expecting that others will change? Two things happen when we make this shift. One is that it really matters who we think of as “us” and “them.” The second is that it becomes crucial to figure out what “we need” as distinct from what “we want them to do.” We have to become very clear about the qualities we are seeking to create.

We have to figure out what we need and then act together to create it.

Yes, and when we do that we discover how immensely powerful it is to act together to construct our common needs. When we act together to create the qualities we all need we are far more creative and effective than when we act alone. We have far greater positive impact than when we are trying to change others.

Iran’s development of nuclear weapons makes us unsafe and it destabilizes relationships in the Middle East. When all of those nations who see Iran’s actions as dangerous agree on the threat and act in concert to isolate Iran, we create greater safety by the fact we are acting together whether or not Iran persists in its activities.

But what if Iran does persist? Don’t we have an obligation to try to stop them?

We have an obligation to create greater security for all…but that “all” includes Iran. If we are trying to get Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions (which is trying to get them to change) we may decide we will threaten them with sanctions or even military force if they don’t do what we want. This will create a sense of fear in them and provoke a response of defiance. That won’t get them to give up their pursuit of stronger weapons. On the contrary, it will justify their conviction that they need them.

Look at how well our stance with Saddam Hussein worked in 2002. We believed he had WMD’s and he wanted us to believe he did. All he had to do was show us that he didn’t. But we were so threatening to him that he couldn’t. It meant he had to call our bluff and we had to call his. So we destroyed a country to make ourselves safe from an imagined threat. This is the logic of an approach to conflict which requires us to try to make others change.

If we work together with other nations who are similarly alarmed at the saber rattling of Iran and respond in a fashion which creates greater security, not only for Israel but for the people of Iran, then we take away the reason for militarization. We work with others to create what we all need. This doesn’t mean that those in Iran who have the power to militarize will decide they don’t have to. We can’t control them.

When Iran is our “enemy,” we won’t do what helps Iran even when it helps us. We will “cut off our nose to spite our face.” But showing that we are committed to the security of the Iranian people will strengthen the hand of those cooler heads who understand that the resources going to arms can instead go to development which actually benefits the Iranian people.

It is clear that what we are doing is not as effective as we would like. And it is also clear that we can’t make others change. So how does this all fit together?

When the conditions of our relationships with others are such that we find ourselves having what seem to be competing interests, we can decide what we will do to address this tension. When we choose to do something which tries to change them—seeks to dominate and control them—we are committed to a strategy which creates the opposite of what we actually need. When we instead work with them to discover what we both need and work to create what serves all of us we actually build a stronger safer world. Addressing conflict can be marvelously creative.

When conflict means “fight,” we don’t see the creative potential. Then conflict is just a problem to be managed or prevented. But when conflict is an opportunity we discover the very tension which seemed dangerous and paralyzing can actually be powerfully transformative.

Nothing Israelis do which harms Palestinians will create stability and peace. Nothing Palestinians do which harms Israelis will benefit Palestinians. It is only when Israelis and Palestinians work together to meet their mutual needs that they will get what they need. Their interests are tied together. When each refrains from any action that is harmful to the other, and when both act together to meet shared needs—whatever the need may be—they are creating a more durable and stable relationship and the context for peace.

Everyone benefits. This is not a zero sum game. When we create what we genuinely need, we create what everyone needs. We can use the context of conflict to create justice.

Workshop feedback

I have developed a simple workshop which is an introduction to the material in the book Just Conflict and which lays out reasons to work at learning Creative Conflict Resolution.  Following a recent presentation I got the following feedback.

Here are some comments on the content of the seminar:

• The target for me personally!
• Complicated! How to keep it simple?
• Just Conflict – I’ll purchase the new book
• Very knowledgeable speaker
• Excellent theoretical model to help us understand conflict.
• Would have liked a little more focus on practical application to the workplace setting.
• Very understandable maps to conflict resolution.
• It makes perfect sense.
• Good depth, not just basic stuff
• Good content, good tools
• Very enjoyable
• Good – helpful when using examples from your practice or participants (good example from Bob)
• Great
• Very good material/complex
• Good – it may be helpful to have attendees submit cases or questions prior to event – would have been more helpful by using specific family and work examples.
• I found the content extremely helpful.
• Seems to be an approach I can easily apply.

Groundhog Day Release

The publicity team for the release of the book Just Conflict is preparing for a large campaign to begin next Tuesday. As it happens, that is Groundhog Day. While the timing was not coordinated with this odd holiday by design, it has a kind of synchronicity which connects with the 1993 film by Harold Ramis starring Bill Murray.

In the film “Groundhog Day” Murray plays Phil Connors, a weatherman for a Pittsburg TV station, who once again is on assignment in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania for the February 2 festivities. He is not pleased. Indeed, very little seems to please Connors. He is a smart and funny but shallow and narcissistic loner who manages to alienate everyone he relates to.

Without explanation Connors has predicted that a big storm heading across the mid-west will miss mid-Pennsylvania. He is wrong. It hits and strands him and his team in Punxsutawney for a second day. Except it is the same day. He wakes up on what ought to be February 3, but it is Groundhog Day all over again. At least it is for Connors. For everyone else it is the first time they have had this day.

Day after day it is Groundhog Day. No one changes but Connors, and it takes him a while to begin to adjust his own behavior. It is Day Four before he remembers to miss stepping in the slush-filled hole on his way to his moment on camera at Gobbler’s Knob, the park in the center of town where Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow and predicts six more weeks of winter.

As it turns out, both Phil’s are afraid of their shadows. In Connors’ case it is not his physical shadow but his psychic one that scares him. He can’t get close to others because he is not close to himself. The heart of the film is the exploration of his transformation, kicking and screaming much of the way, into a person who not only knows himself, but likes himself.

Along the way he does what we all do to avoid deep connection. He explores all manor of self-destructive behavior. He has the luxury and the curse of having not long-term consequences. No matter what he does today, he will get a fresh start tomorrow.

He also explores manipulating others for his own immediate desires. He seduces women, punches out an insurance salesman, robs an armored car, all with no lasting effect on his self-satisfaction. In the end he does succeed in breaking out of his predicament, but one of the marvels of the film is that it is not obvious what he did to release himself.

Considering what worked for Phil Connors makes Groundhog Day the perfect time to promote Just Conflict. We all share in Phil Connors’ predicament. In one scene where Phil is describing his situation to a couple of town drunks with the lament that it is the same day over and over, one of them responds by saying, “Yes, I guess that about sums it up.” We all, to some degree, have the same day over and over.

While there are many powerful lessons the film can help us learn, there are two which stand out. One is that it really is the same thing over and over. We can try to duck or ignore life’s problems but they keep coming back. While these problems are not as obvious for most of us as they are for Phil Connors, we all have patterns of conflict and we will continue to have opportunities to address them. Avoiding these opportunities just keeps us stuck.

The second lesson is the one it took Phil the longest to learn but which finally, in my judgment, set him free from the rut of the same thing over and over. In the beginning Phil tried a series of strategies which would either exploit the advantage his predicament gave him (carefully planning an armored car heist by observing the security lapses) or which attempted to get others to do something which would save him from his plight (getting Rita, his producer played by Andie MacDowell, to spend the night with him so he was not alone when the day reset). What these strategies share is the hope that we will save ourselves by getting others to change.

We all know we can’t change others. This was abundantly clear to Phil Connors. But it didn’t stop him from trying and it doesn’t stop the rest of us. It was only when Phil discovered that he couldn’t make Rita love him—that he couldn’t become so perfectly who she wanted that she would not resist him—that he gave up being dedicated to manipulation. Instead he decided to put the same dedication into being kind and considerate as he had put into getting others to do as he wanted. He dedicated himself to learning to play piano, not to impress others, but for the love of music.

When he transcends self-centeredness and becomes deeply centered in himself, he draws others to him. In the end, Rita falls in love with him because he is deeply connected with himself, not because he is who she wants him to be. This is a lesson we all need to learn. Deep and durable relationships come from authenticity. We can’t be authentically ourselves when we are trying to make others love us.

Phil is able to effect this transformation in himself by practicing acts of kindness and practicing his piano playing over and over, day after day. It is practices for self-discovery and transformation which Just Conflict hopes to teach.

New Presentation on CCR

I have crafted a new presentation of the Creative Conflict Resolution material in the wake of the publication of Just Conflict and had my first chance to try it out Friday, January 15 at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University. My biggest worry was that I had too much material but we ended exactly on time and I was able to get all of the information it at sufficient depth that I am pretty sure most of the attendees got most of the concepts.

The evaluations indicated a high level of satisfaction with the content and my skills as a presenter. Curiously the item that was most often named as the best component of the workshop—the Orders of Self—was also the component that was most often named as the least valuable. [Only about half of the participants completed that portion of the form.]

Most of the content of the workshop seemed to meet attendees where they were and move them forward. There were a couple of things I am saying that some folks found hard to hear.

• We don’t need to make others change to resolve conflict: Most of us know that we can’t make others change, especially other adults. But we don’t know that we can resolve a conflict we are having with them without setting out to change them. This was really hard for some folks to get.
• Being uncomfortable is not a bad thing: Of course we want to avoid feeling bad. But the presence of bad feelings, like the ones we often have when we are in conflict with others, are the source of energy which fuels transformation. Trying “make ourselves feel better” often results in missing opportunities for growth.

I will be presenting it again next Friday, January 22, 2010 for the St. Louis EAP Association at the Hyland Center. I am going to reorder two of the slides and I want to have a couple slides handy which are not in the presentation to refer to as issues come up in discussion. Otherwise I will leave it as it is.

With a fifteen minute break and 45 minutes of case presentation the whole event lasts three hours. Without those components it will comfortably fit into two hours and there are some parts that are especially relevant to an audience of psychotherapists which can be shortened or left out completely. The bare bones of the workshop could be done in an hour and a half.

The presentation begins with a consideration of the presence of conflict in our own lives. Each participant is invited to identify a personal conflict which they can hold in mind as we explore the concepts of the workshop. We then look at just what we might mean by “conflict” and in what sense the resolution of conflict is a creative act. We identify some of the ways that we are all resolving conflict everyday but also note that, from time to time, we encounter conflicts we can’t yet resolve. We flinch. We back off of addressing the conflict for some very good reasons but by doing so we miss the creative potential the conflict offers. This is roughly the first hour of the presentation.

In the remaining time we look at some specific philosophical and practical maps for understanding conflict and its resolution and then apply these maps to our current life situations whether in family, at work, or in international relations.

I will no doubt continue to revise and adapt this presentation. I am looking for more venues in which to present it.

History of the Center for Creative Conflict Resolution

The Center was formed in 1997 as a vehicle for the ministry of Rev. Dr. Mark Lee Robinson.  He is a pastoral counselor and a Fellow in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors.  Following his work with RAVEN, the Masters and Johnson Institute’s Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Program, and Sexual Trauma and Recovery [STAR], he took the Abuse Prevention Program he had created under STAR to the fledgling Center. While he worked with many kinds of client issues, the heart of the Center’s program for many years was intervention with criminal abuse offenders.  The concepts of Creative Conflict Resolution developed out of that work. It has since developed broader application to the conflicts we all experience.

In the context of intervention groups with abusive men Dr. Robinson found that he was addressing the same issues again and again. To standardize and simplify the process and to make it more cost effective he created a curriculum to address these issues. This class brought together into a simple sequence a set of steps that anyone could take that would help them make better choices when conflicts arose. This was called the Abuse Prevention Class. It became the first segment of a two part program. The second segment was first called the Treatment Group and then renamed the Practice Group. The content of this second segment was practice of the methods and techniques learned in the class.

The class was taught in two forms. The Abuse Prevention Class was specifically for men who were ordered into intervention by a court order either because of a criminal assault or because of an action of the Family Court. The second format was the Building Healthy Relationships program which was available to both women and men who were motivated on their own to learn the skills of Creative Conflict Resolution. The Abuse Prevention Program was discontinued in 2008 as Dr. Robinson devoted more time to the writing of Just Conflict. The Building Healthy Relationships program is ongoing.

Work with abusive men and with high conflict relationships led Dr. Robinson to work more and more with couples who, though divorced, have children and thus continue to need to be able to work together and to make durable agreements. Even though the level of conflict in a relationship may result in the end of the marriage, when parents divorce this does not mean the end of a relationship. They have to learn to work together if they are to create the best for their children.

In the spring of 2009 the Center announced the formation of Parenting Post-Divorce. This is not the same sort of structured program as Building Healthy Relationships since each family system requires individual attention. But the principles of Creative Conflict Resolution inform the interventions with the family or persons seeking help from the Parenting Post-Divorce program.

Because the principles of Creative Conflict Resolution apply to systems in conflict of all sizes there is application for the philosophy and techniques for organizations and corporations. That work is now offered through the Organizational Consulting program of the Center. Again, each system is unique and so what we offer is tailored to the specifics of a given situation.
The vision for the Center moving forward is that we will do more and more training in how to address conflicts in a variety of settings.

Development of the Philosophy of Creative Conflict Resolution

Almost all of the conflict resolution literature is about conflict between groups. This includes labor management issues, governmental issues, armed conflict, and war. Some material in the literature is about addressing marital conflict or other interpersonal issues between only two people. Most of this is about techniques for resolving conflict by improving communication skills. These include learning to use “I” statements, doing active listening, and taking “time outs” when the intensity of the conflict is too great.

These are all helpful tools and I support and teach them myself. But they are all geared toward working with the couple to teach them skills they can both use to address the mutual responsibility they have for the problems in the relationship. That is not the context in which I found myself working for much of my career as a psychotherapist.

Yes, I work with people in high conflict relationships. But there is another important dynamic at work. I often work with men and women who are perpetrators of violence against their partners or other loved ones. Doing traditional couples work with them is impossible for legal reasons but would not be safe in any case. Being forced to work with only one party to the relationship, and for that to be, in most cases, the person who had the most power physically and financially, meant that I was continually confronting the same set of issues. He was trying to get her to change when all he had to do to repair the relationship was to change his own behavior.

What this brought home to me over and over was the prevalence of a couple of cognitive distortions which make it seem impossible to resolve certain persistent conflicts. One of these is the belief that we can make others change and the other is the belief that the only way we can resolve conflict is for the other to be different. This line of thought says that it is both possible and necessary for me to make the other be different…to make them make the choices I want them to make.

On the face of it, nearly all of us know that we can’t make others be who we want them to be. Even with our children we can’t seem to make them do what we want, but with our spouses or colleagues at work it is not only impossible but inappropriate to the relationship. We all know this. But this knowledge doesn’t stop us from trying.

There are good reasons for this. Most especially we become aware of the presence of a conflict precisely because the other is not doing what I expect or what I think I have a right to experience. The other isn’t doing what the other “should” do. Obviously the way to resolve the conflict is to get the other to change.

One particularly vivid example of this arrived in my consulting room in the person of Gary. Gary was a successful businessman and community leader who was in a second marriage which was rapidly coming to an end. Though he very much loved Jennifer he was also very scared and angry and had given her an ultimatum. Either she cleaned up her behavior or in three months he would divorce her.

Gary had good reason to be upset. Jennifer had to travel for her work. She would get lonely when she traveled. She would go to the hotel bar, get drunk, and end up in bed with someone she had just met. Gary knew that she didn’t love these guys but he couldn’t tolerate this behavior and unless she got it under control, their marriage was over.

But Gary loved Jennifer and wanted to be with her. He knew she was not happy with herself and he was hoping she would be scared enough about losing him that she would address her acting out with alcohol and sex. The problem was, his approach wasn’t working. It seemed the more he tried to make her do what he knew was the right thing, not only for himself but for her, the more she seemed depressed and felt worthless. The lower her self-esteem, the more she acted out. Gary could see that he was creating the opposite of what he wanted and needed.

Gary resisted looking at what he could do the change himself. He wasn’t the one who was acting badly. He had not been abusive to her outside of being loud about his anger and hurt. She was the one who was abusing him.

He was considering writing a letter to everyone they knew to tell them about Jennifer’s behavior in order to shame her into changing. I let him know that I thought that was a seriously bad idea. He thought so too, but he was desperate.

Gary is smart and dedicated and he is willing to look critically at his own behavior. These factors work in his favor. Before the three months were up he had rescinded the ultimatum and he began instead to work at creating the relationship that he wanted to have with Jennifer. While from time to time he would try to get her to change, he would catch himself and let go.

He told her how he felt. He thanked her for her honesty. He consulted with her about what he might be able to do that would help her address the behavior she didn’t like. They set up ways to stay emotionally connected when she traveled.

She became able to talk to him about her feelings and they discovered that she was terribly afraid that she wasn’t loved and couldn’t be loved by any man. When she was away from Gary she got scared. These feelings were like when she was as a little girl and her dad left her mom and in the process abandoned her. When these feelings came up, Jennifer sought the comfort of any man she could find. But once she could talk about the feelings with Gary, he became the man whose love reassured her.

When he was angry and threatening to leave, he had been the man who reminded her that she was unlovable and his ultimatum only made it harder for her to not act out. Now that he was creating openness and honesty he became the man who supported her healing. He was even able to ask her to tell him when she began to feel shamed or controlled by him as he knew that would work against his own interests.

One of the primary reasons Creative Conflict Resolution is so effective is that it helps us let go of ways of understanding the problem that create the problem or make it worse, and replaces those ways of understanding with perspectives that support actions that actually create what we need. Gary couldn’t see a solution that didn’t include Jennifer changing so he assumed he would have to make her change. When he discovered that he could simply change himself—which, while simple, is certainly not easy—he was able to create the qualities that were missing for him in the relationship and, at the same time, create what Jennifer needed.

They remain happily and securely married now five years after Gary first came to see me.

Having a Committed Relationship

One frequent rough place in the development of an intimate relationship occurs when one party to the relationship wants to confirm that they have a “commitment” to each other or that they are truly “in a relationship.” This is tough for a couple of really good reasons.

One reason is that this may be the first time that have actually talked about the relationship itself. It is one thing to be in relationship with another; it is another to make the relationship itself the focus of shared attention.

When I was in graduate school I became close friends with a guy who lived across the hall in my dorm. His name was George. I went home to see my folks one weekend and as I was driving back to school I became aware that I was looking forward to seeing George. As I walked down the hall towards my room, George came out of his room and called out, “Hey, Mark! Good to see you. I missed you.” We had never before spoken about our friendship and so as we acknowledged missing each other we were moving to a new level of interaction.

In primary intimate relationships this transition is especially fraught with danger. Not only are we now talking about our relationship, we are using language that may not mean the same things to each other. Are we dating, going steady, hooking up, hanging out, going together…what? I had a teenage client mention to me that he was “going with” one girl but really wanted to “go with” another. I asked him what it meant to be going with someone. He didn’t understand the question. They didn’t actually do anything; it was just an understanding that their relationship was special and different.

Adults who are exploring an intimate relationship have this problem as well. Even if they say they are committed, what are they committed to? Relationships work much more smoothly when these expectations and agreements are very clear. But coming to this clarity can be very difficult.

Typically one party to the relationship is urgent that the understanding be clear and the other is less excited about having this conversation. In my experience, women tend to be more anxious about establishing clear expectations than are men, but I have certainly known couples where it was the man who was pressing for sharp boundaries.

Having the talk about what we mean to each other is hard because it is talking about the relationship instead of just being in it. Additionally, we each need some clarity about what we want from and for the relationship. Coming to this clarity involves a series of steps. At each one we can get hung up.

1) “This relationship is not so important to me that I am going to put energy into figuring out what I want it to be like. Whatever is fine with me.”
Not all relationships are so important that I am going to be willing to figure out what I want it to be like. This clarity takes time and attention and I am just not willing to do that work when the relationship is with someone I know from work, for example. Just talking about our relationship makes it seem like more than it is for me.

2) “I care about this relationship and want it to be clear and strong, but I’m not sure what that would be like.”
Even when I can say that this relationship is special in some way, and that it is more important to me than just a routine relationship with anyone, that doesn’t mean I actually know what I want it to be like.

3) “I know what I want it to be like but I don’t have the words to describe it clearly enough.”
Even when I can be clear about what I want, I may not trust that I have the words to describe what I want. I have been clear in prior relationships only to find that what my words meant to the other something was different from what they meant to me. I can’t trust that my words will convey my meaning.

4) “I think I can say what I want the relationship to be like but I am afraid that if I do my statement will be a source of conflict.”
Even when I know what I want and trust that I can communicate my wishes clearly there are still potential problems.
   a) “When I say what I want but what I want is not what my partner wants it will become something we will fight about.”
It may be that my definition for the relationship is so different from what my partner wants that she or he will be angry and perhaps even choose to leave the relationship.
   b) “When I say what I want and I am not always able to follow through on how I want to be it will be a reason to confront me.”
Even if we are both clear about what we want and we are pretty close in how we want things to be between us, I know that I don’t always act as I have intended. If I say how I want things to be, and then don’t do what I need to do to create what I said I wanted, I will be subject to criticism. A part of me wants to protect me by simply being vague.

For these reasons it can be very difficult for a couple to talk about what they want the relationship to be like. So let me offer a suggestion about a couple of topics the couple can address in trying to navigate these potentially treacherous waters.

1) Is this relationship sufficiently important to each of you that you want it to be special? Do you want this to be different from any other relationship you currently have?

2) If it is special for both of you, what are your concerns about being clear about how you want it to be different from any other relationship?

Be aware that as you have this conversation you are not going to name the same things. This is not a problem. It would probably be a bigger cause for concern if you only had the same concerns. You are different people. If you were totally alike it would be really hard for you to get along.

Be aware also that what you each want the relationship to be like is certain to change as you get to know each other better. If what you each want isn’t changing, you probably are not in a relationship with each other. Instead you are each in a relationship with who you want the other to be, not who the other actually is.

If you have trouble with this, you may want to review Discipline #10.

Gender Justice Roots for Just Conflict

What might it mean for women and men to have deeply intimate and just relationships when, for so much of human history, relationships between men and women have been shaped by dominance, gender inequality, and violence? 

This question arose for me out of thirty years of work in the domestic violence intervention community starting with my role as a volunteer on the staff of one of the first programs in the country to do intervention with men who batter.  This program is RAVEN in St. Louis.  I was the coordinator of counseling services there for over eight years in the 1980’s.

The parent group for RAVEN developed from the planning team for the 4^th National Conference on Men and Masculinity held at Washington University in St. Louis in 1977. That conference brought together men (and some women) who were interested in discovering how our understandings of gender shaped our relationships with other men, with women, and with our children.

The planning group continued to meet after the conference and formed what was first called Brothers in Change but which was later changed to the St. Louis Organization for Changing Men. We were a collective which allowed anyone who completed the training and volunteered at least three hours a week to be a member of the staff and to participate in the consensus decision-making process. That is, anyone who was male. Women were excluded from membership.

The broader organization had multiple goals and activities. There was a monthly public meeting that explored some issue of men’s identity, often through a film and subsequent discussion. There was a group exploring the roles of men as fathers.  And there was what we called the Childcare Collective which provided childcare at women’s events. The intervention program working with men who batter was not originally an activity of the collective. It mostly arose out of a concern to figure out why men would physically assault their women partners. Some of the men on staff had themselves been violent in past relationships.

I took the training to join the staff in the fall of 1979 and started co-leading one of the groups for men who batter in January 1980. In June of 1980 I went to my first National Coalition Against Domestic Violence conference and discovered how controversial our work was. I saw us as allies with the women who work with battered women. It never occurred to me that there would be women who opposed what we were doing. Still I found that I had great respect for the women who were not impressed or encouraged by our work. Their indifference and skepticism gave me a very helpful lens through which to see what we were trying to do.

A central concern for feminism in the 70’s (and which has continued to this day) is the problem of violence against women. Much of the activism of the day was about creating support services for the victims of that violence: victims of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence. The men who were attracted to Brothers in Change were primarily social activists who wanted to change the world. While we were not welcome to join the women in their work, we envied their zeal and the cohesiveness of their consciousness raising groups.

It was self-evident that the women who were victims were the victims of men. As men, it was our job to address those men, our brothers and at times ourselves, who perpetrated the violence. We saw ourselves as unwilling beneficiaries of men’s violence against women and we committed ourselves to ending it. While we would have enjoyed women’s thanks, it was clear we were not going to get applause for cleaning up the mess we were making.

So the Domestic Violence “Community” was actually two communities. There were the women who worked with women, and the men who worked with men. We didn’t meet together routinely. From time to time there was occasion to each present at the same event and we knew each other socially, but there was a sense that our work was different and that there was little reason to collaborate.

As men we knew that our work depended on the work that women were doing. Indeed, there is no “problem of domestic violence” in those communities where there are no services for battered women. On the other hand women considered that we were at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous. We certainly weren’t going the get the men to change and we might give their partners senseless hope which would lure them back into danger. There was no sense that we men were in a mutual relationship with the women. Some of us felt a sense of justice in this imbalanced relationship. We were atoning for thousands of years of patriarchal violence and oppression.

But by the 90’s the politics started to change. It became more and more important to model gender equality and that meant having men working at rape crisis centers and women co-leading intervention groups for men who batter. As this shift happened it also became more critical that we have a clear notion of what just and equitable relationships between women and men might look like.

This clarity has not emerged in the communities of which I have been a part. We have a pretty clear sense of what we don’t want, but we don’t have a clear vision of what healthy relationships are like. It was my wish to describe just relationships in gender neutral terms that helped prompt me to develop the ideas I present in Just Conflict.

In order to envision what healthy relationships look like in the book we consider the nature of power, kinds of relationships, forms of agreements, and tools to create and recreate accountability. In every instance it is important to take into account the effects of culture on our expectations. Nevertheless, just relationships are not shaped by the demands of gender. We must take seriously the trauma of abuse and discover ways of establishing a radical level of accountability if we are to build relationships which do not mimic the oppression that characterizes much of what is considered normal in this culture.

My personal efforts to answer these questions have resulted in the practical framework which is the vision of Just Conflict.