Real Love

"Real Love makes sure that everyone feels a deep sense of emotional safety in a relationship of any type, something precious few know how to offer...if I take care of your emotional safety in a very conscious way, you will take care of mine; this is done through crystal clear agreements."

~ Steve Solomon

Steve is a former student of mine and had sent me this quote because it expresses a belief he has that was informed in part by his work in my program.  I found this quote in my email just after I ended a counseling session with a couple for which these issues are crucial.

Steve suggests there is something we might call Real Love which implies there is a kind of love that is less than fully real.  I might be inclined to say Deep Love or maybe Full Love, but the point is that what passes for love in some relationships is less than what is possible because it does not create “a deep sense of emotional safety.”

I have met with Pete and Sarah four times now.  They hope to marry some day but they are currently living separately and the fact that Sarah has moved into a house that is owned by a former lover, a guy who often drops by to say hi, drives Pete nuts.  That Pete calls Sarah multiple times an hour and drops by her work in retail has Sarah clamoring to establish some boundaries for herself.  Neither feels safe and I ended the session suggesting I meet with each separately before we meet again together. 

I am in total agreement with Steve that we create emotional safety through crystal clear agreements.  But to assume that if I consciously care for the safety of another they will necessarily take care of my safety smacks to me of co-dependency.  And any agreements we make, no matter how clear, will be things we will have to repair when we hurt each other.

Pete and Sarah have had plenty of hurt.  They have each had many relationships in which they were not safe.  They have a clear and conscious wish to create emotional safety for each other.  And neither feels safe.  They will only be safe to the degree to which they can each be responsible for their own safety. 

Trusting the other to be responsible for my safety appeals to my hurt child parts.  Those parts of me don’t know that I can care for myself and long for that care to come from another.  It is only as I become expert at caring for myself that I become safe with others and they become safe with me.

Shortened training in CCR

For more than 30 years I have worked doing group and individual therapy with people experiencing difficulties in establishing and maintaining safe and satisfying intimate relationships. Early on in my career I noticed that my clients identified many of the same problems. I began to look for the best ways to name and address the issues they showed me. As a result I developed a collection of short teaching modules that addressed the most common and urgent issues.

In the early 90's I had occasion to pull together these bits and pieces into a twelve-week class. Over the years I came to refer to the whole collection as Creative Conflict Resolution and the class itself as Building Healthy Relationships. The class changed a bit from time to time. I have always added new segments and tweaked the sequence of presentation.

Last year I pulled together the many parts and published them in a book called Just Conflict: Transformation through Resolution. I admit it is a bit dense.

In the year that has followed I have had a chance to step back from all of the material and have worked at finding a simple path through the forest of ideas and practices. The result is a paired down presentation that takes about fifteen hours to work through.

The Center for Creative Conflict Resolution is offering this training as the eight-week Building Healthy Relationships class or the week-end long Reconciliation Workshop. Either format has advantages and disadvantages. Both take the participant through a process of identifying a specific persistent pattern of conflict in a significant relationship and discovering what the participant can confidently do that will create what the participant needs in the context of the conflict without expecting or depending upon the other's change.

Both the eight-week class and the week-end workshop start at the same place. Each month on the second Sunday, I offer a free introduction to the material. I call it "What is Creative Conflict Resolution?" To learn more or to register online, go to the web site and the find the calendar in the sidebar on the right. Select the date of the introduction you want to attend.  You will find details there about time and place.  You may register online by following the prompts.

Mastering Family Stress

A couple of days before Christmas, Neal Conan of NPR's Talk of the Nation had a conversation with syndicated columnist Amy Dickinson (Ask Amy, Chicago Tribune) about the difficulties of having holidays with family members we don't get along with. Her advice mostly reduced to having a plan for how to engage in polite conversation which avoided the sources of tension in the relationship.

As the holidays come to a close it is time to start preparing for next year. With some attention to the issues we can approach conflicts with family and friends with confidence that whatever topics come up in the conversation we can handle ourselves and the relationship in a manner that creates peace in our world.

One way to hone your skills is to take the Building Healthy Relationships class or the Reconciliation Workshop from the Center for Creative Conflict Resolution. If you or anyone you know might be interested in becoming more masterful at naming, addressing, and resolving conflict, come to one of the free introductions. They are offered on the second Sunday evening of each month. Simply go to the web site and the find the calendar in the sidebar on the right. Select the date of the introduction you want to attend.  They are entitled “What is Creative Conflict Resolution?” You will find details there about time and place.  You may register online by following the prompts.

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.

Commentary on Northern Ireland

The power sharing agreement signed May 8^th in Northern Ireland between the Rev. Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionists, and Martin McGuinness, of Sinn Fein, is a huge step toward peace in a place that has been devastated by generations of bitter hatred, violence and bloodshed.

There are many reasons to suspect that the agreement will not hold. Among them;

· Each party remains committed to a political outcome that excludes the other;

· The two leaders are not co-equal in the agreement, and

· Even at the signing ceremony where Rev. Paisley and Mr. McGuinness were shaking hands with nearly everyone in the room, they didn’t shake hands with each other.

Still, this is such a huge step toward peace that it is almost universally seen as a tremendous coup for Tony Blair as he announced his resignation as the British Prime Minister.

“The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, as it has been known, has been one of the most intractable conflicts in the world. That the representatives of the most polarized parties to that conflict have been able to come together gives us reason for hope; and hope not just for other international hot spots like the Middle East and Africa, but even for our own work places, homes, and families.

Who among us has not thought, when considering a long-standing conflict with a family member or colleague at work, “That conflict just cannot be resolved.”

We may not yet see how or when a conflict may be resolved. But to say that it will not be, is to give ourselves permission to quit trying.

We can give thanks to the people of Northern Ireland that they have not quit trying.

Process Issues

Some years ago the work of Jay Rothman helped me to understand that any conflict is going to be a combination of both resource-based and identity-based issues. That is, any conflict, especially conflicts in significant relationships, will have certain aspects that are related to finite resources [time, money, attention] as well as aspects that are related to qualities in the relationship [trust, affiliation, status, respect]. This helps to explain why we sometimes seem to be making such a big deal out of such small matters as whether the toilet seat is up or down or whether the cap is back on the toothpaste tube.

In recent weeks I have been noticing a variation on the way identity issues arise in certain relationships. In some cases this variation is so striking that it may be seen to be a third set of issues. I am going to refer to this as process-based conflict.

Karen and Steve have agreed that they will be spending the kids' Spring Break at her parent’s place in Florida. They have decided that they are going to fly instead of drive. They agree that the expense will be worth the savings in time and the logistics of having three small children in a car for many hours. They have agreed that they want to spend as little money as possible. They have agreed on when they will leave and when they need to return by. They have agreed that Steve will make the arrangements by purchasing the tickets on-line.

Steve finds a great deal! They can each fly for only $200 but there is a two-hour layover in Atlanta. Karen doesn’t like that they are not flying non-stop and isn’t sure if they have to buy a ticket for the infant. She wants him to wait to make the purchase until they see if they can find answers and a better itinerary. Steve checks back the next day and finds that the special fare is gone. They can’t go for less than $300 a ticket. He is angry.

One way of looking at this conflict is that it is a combination of resource-based and identity-based issues. Steve wanted to spend less money and he thought they agreed that he was authorized to make the arrangements. Except that Karen also wants to spend less money and she wants Steve to make the arrangements. She just wants the process to include no change of flights and no purchase of a ticket they may not need. Neither of them has flown since they started having children and they are not clear about airline regulations. What they are missing is a clear process for how they will solve this problem. While the conflicts are related to resources and identity, they are more about confusion about the process for decision-making.

A similar issue came up for me very recently in a conversation with a group of folks from a local church about conflicts within the congregation. They had the usual sorts of things about whether to continue to have two services now that the membership has declined, but the more heated conflicts are coming up in their concerns about the style of the current pastor.

To be fair, they have always had conflicts with the style of the pastor, no matter who the pastor has been. That the issues seem to be larger now may be because the style issues are bigger, or they may be because the membership is declining more and the anxiety is larger, or they may be because the denomination is offering less support so they are feeling abandoned and betrayed and those feelings are spilling over onto the relationship with the pastor. In any case, they have a problem with the pastor.

And the pastor knows it. And the pastor wants to address it. It was the pastor who urged these people to attend the presentation that I was giving so that they could be encouraged to actually address the conflicts instead of hiding them. So everyone agrees that there are problems and everyone agrees that addressing the problems will be better than hiding them, but no one knows what to do about the situation. There is no process for addressing the concerns. The perceived conflict is around the absence of a process for naming the conflicts. They are searching for a way to do this that is clear, transparent, forthright, supportive, fair, honest, and faithful. That shouldn’t be too hard to do once they realize that this is what they need. What is hard is letting go of thinking that this is the pastor's fault or the denomination's fault.

So I am more and more seeing the possibility of conflicts being not only about resources and identity, but also about process; the process of decision-making but also even the process of clear and open communication.

What might it mean to "resolve" conflict?

I have been reading an article in Psychotherapy Networker about the program for marital therapy promoted by John and Julie Gottman. Much of what they say and do resonates very positively with the approach that I have found to be most effective. It feels validating to me to find that their scientific studies parallel my more anecdotal studies.

So I was particularly attentive to the contention that they make that there are some conflicts, perhaps even many conflicts, which are not resolvable. Resolution of many of the conflicts that arise in a marriage will just not be possible. Instead we have to figure out how to repair the relationship even when resolution won’t be possible.

I can’t tell for sure if I agree with them on this point as I can’t tell what they mean by conflict resolution. For obvious reasons, this is of great interest to an approach to Building Healthy Relationships which we call Creative Conflict Resolution. Let’s look at what this might mean.

We start with what is conflict. For the purposes of the Center for Creative Conflict Resolution, we define conflict in its simplest form as the “condition of others being different than we want them to be” or “of our not being who they want us to be.” We discover that the more common condition is “when we are not as we would have ourselves be.” And at its most profound level, conflict is “the tension between what is and what might be.”

I will save a fuller consideration of the implications of that definition to another post and move on to the question of resolution. If by resolution we then mean that the other becomes who I want them to be or I become who they want me to be then clearly most conflicts are not resolvable. We can’t make others be as we want them to be and we are not likely to abandon our own integrity for long and conform to their expectations of us.

If we set a slightly looser standard and define resolution as the other seeing my point of view, or my seeing their point of view, then we have a much larger chance of creating resolution. But does the other have to adopt my point of view? Do I have to see it their way? What if we just agree to disagree? Is that resolution? It certainly doesn’t feel like much of an accomplishment and isn’t very satisfying.

But what if by being able to see the other’s point of view and to accept its validity and by knowing that the other sees my point of view and acknowledges that my perspective makes reasonable sense to me given my own experience we have shifted the quality of the relationship? What if the issue of resolution is not measured by the way I subsequently behave or what the other chooses to do, but by the sense of connection that we are able to build with each other? Just as a conflict is a quality in the relationship itself, so is resolution a shift in the qualities of the relationship, not a shift in the people in it. This is not to say that the people may not choose to behave differently, but only that the task of resolution is the creation of connection, not the creation of uniformity.

That we are different is not really a problem. We are troubled when others are not as we want them to be, but having them be as we want is not necessarily an improvement. Indeed, the fact that we see things differently is potentially a great strength. When I see from two eyes instead of one I can get a sense of depth. For example, two parents may have a very different perspective on a curfew for their teenager. They had different experiences when they were each a teenager and they see the risks to their child differently. Ultimately resolution of their differences will rest on coming to an agreement about their curfew policy. But if one of them simply says, “Whatever, you are going to get your way anyway,” then they will have lost an opportunity to come to a robust agreement about what is in the best interest of their child.

So resolution of a conflict is always possible if it means staying with the differences that we bring to the issue until we have fully heard each other, fully feel heard by the other, know what it is that we are both trying to create, commit to what we are each going to do, and agree to how we will repair the agreement if it becomes damaged.

For more about this model, see Discipline #10 in the User’s Guide.