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.

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.