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.