Conflict, Lock and Key

Conflict is like a gate, it is both the opening into the walled off garden of love, and the obstacle which keeps us out.

Which of these it is depends on whether you have the key or not.

Conflict is the smoke that points out the fire - the passion in your life. It also burns your life up with destruction. It depends on whether you know fire-craft or not.

Conflict reveals the hidden truth in both parties, or it broadcasts the lies far and wide. It depends on where you look: inside yourself for truth, or at the other person for blame.

If you avoid conflict, your life shallows out. It becomes calm in appearance it is mirror smooth, but then it just reflects your inner turmoil.

If you become habituated to the anger and blame, your life becomes a series of eruptions punctuated by tense terror, and things just seem to get worse and worse.

There is a third path, where conflict resolves into respectful differences. Sitting quietly, the calm hands you the two keys: the first unlocks your own truth; the second unlocks your curiosity about the other person’s truth.

Did You Marry a Friend or Foe?

I did a session this week with a couple who have learned the language of NVC, but were missing the starting point of the violence: the assumption that the person you are talking to is an enemy.

Obviously, we marry people we feel friendly towards. That happens to also be the starting assumption of any non-violent, compassionate communication.

It creates tons of slack - we listen using what I call the “Best Possible Interpretation.” If your new love says, “Jeeze, you’re such a bitch!” you assume they mean your are really assertive and you feel appreciated and respected. If they say, “I’m gonna take you out an buy you a new shirt” you think, “Oh goodie, a gift!”

The whole time you use LOVE as your guiding assumption of their motives, it’s really fun no matter what they say or do. We call this the Infatuation Stage - it’s stage one.

Then, when your relationship transitions into stage two, the Conflict Stage; you switch more and more of your motivation from LOVE to FEAR, and eventually, imperceptibly, your significant-other shifts from friend to competitor to enemy. This is accompanied by a shift from “Best Possible Interpretation” to “Worst.”

Suddenly, black becomes white, and white black. Now, if your love calls you a bitch, you assume they are being really, really mean. And if they say, “I’m gonna take you out an buy you a new shirt” you think, “They hate the way I dress!”

Each of the parties in the couple I was working with had pretty much changed everything that they were going to change to suit their partner. What was left was the actual difference that they had invited into their lives by picking this particular person. The other change they had made, was from lovers to competitors, and when things got heated, they made it all the way to enemies.

They both now know enough NVC to know that when their partner is angry, that’s just the frustration that comes when one of your needs isn’t getting met. But they couldn’t figure out what to do about that, because when your enemy is angry, it’s just a drag; it doesn’t seem like it would be fun to help them out.

So I took a turn “being” each of their partners. I said the same thing that their partner said that consistently made them angry, and when they responded angrily, I opened my heart and let my concern for my friend to spread through my body, and express itself through my words.

Same anger, same relationship, same issues. I just modeled what it feels like to be received as a friend, instead of an enemy.

They turned and looked at each other with renewed interest. Instead of issues and anger, the relationship suddenly came back into relief.

The relief that comes from relating with a friend.

Mediation Has Ruined Me

I’m finding fewer and fewer good reasons to justify being upset. I still get upset, but I’m noticing that in order to maintain it for any length of time, you have to keep giving yourself a pep talk about how wronged you were; and those talks are seeming less and less convincing to me.

I know most people are really good at those. Some people can take a tiny incident (some incidents are actually so tiny nobody notices it but themselves) and keep cheer-leading their hurt for years, decades!

I think being a mediator has ruined me for upset. Over and over I see people resolving their differences, discovering the moment of misunderstanding, uncovering the positive intention which was missed, letting go of the grudge and finding Love right there underneath.

My grudge-muscle is atrophying. Still all these people around me continue begrudging me and others as if it were normal. Well, it may be normal, but it sure ain’t healthy!

Finding the YES in their NO

Inside every “No” is a “Yes” waiting to come out.

Here’s how to find it.

Since all communication is an attempt to get needs met, and since all needs are life-affirming and always come from positive intention, when someone says “No” they are communicating something positive and life-affirming: a need of theirs.

Clearly, the thing you asked them to do (your strategy) doesn’t meet their need.

So here’s a multiple choice question about what you can do, given this new understanding:

1. Judge them for being uncooperative
2. Repeat your request louder
3. Explain in greater detail why your strategy is so good at meeting your needs
4. Get curious about what need of theirs is up


If you picked 1, 2 or 3, you’re in the majority. And what you probably will get most of the time is an argument with both people feeling hurt or dissatisfied.

If you picked option 4, you’re likely to hear the “Yes” inside their “No.”

Strong Feelings

While it is true, according to NVC, that our feelings are created by our needs (not by other people); the sensations that needs create are pretty subtle: warmth, heaviness, weakness, burning; nothing which even rises anywhere near the neighborhood of a toe-jam.

In the ideal case, you'd follow these sensations down to the need, and either experience the satisfaction, or experience the need directly (which inevitably resources you to get it met).

Step 2: Naming the feeling: Instead, we use our brain to come up with a name for that feeling: anger, or hurt or happiness. These names are not created by needs, and they take us one level away from the need itself.

Step 3: Beliefs about the Feeling Name: Many of us have beliefs about these feeling words: "It's dangerous to be angry" or "It's forbidden to be sad" or "I can't control my anger."

Step 4: Feelings as a result of the beliefs: These belief/thoughts often come with very strong feelings: "He had no right to make me angry" or "It's his fault I'm feeling hurt." These feelings about the thoughts about the Names about the sensations caused by our needs are so far away from our needs, they make it nearly impossible to know what we are needing!

And that's why it's so hard to know what you need!

The Mirror You Married

Stop looking into the mirror which is your spouse, and blaming them for the reflection you see.

You don’t do that in your bathroom cabinet, nor the full length one in the hall, nor even in the huge mirrors in public places.

In those you look and see yourself and you let the mirror be.

So why, when you marry a mirror, do you suddenly become so angry at it? You stay calm, of a summer’s day, when the pond reflects your life. Why not blame the water? Accuse the fish? Blaspheme the muddy bottom?

But put a mirror in pajamas, with admittedly foul morning breath, and you act like your own flaws which show up in your own heart when you see the love in their eyes deserves your derision.

Take a moment and reflect. Be kind to the mirror you married.

Take Your Love for a Walk

The couple I worked with last night love each other. Like so many couples who come to see me.

Like so many couples who come to see me who are about to divorce.

They come when the fighting gets intolerable. When so much of the space between them is filled with either shouting, or the silence of the fear of the shouting, that they can’t move anymore. Then they come to see me, and I sweep it all away, and there, sitting patiently like an old dog waiting to be taken for a walk, is their love.

How do we come so easily unhooked from something as powerful as love? And by what? A dirty dish? A few minutes late? An errant thought about what I was thinking that you were thinking when you didn’t say anything after I was silent?

And when they find it again, their love; there in my office. It makes them so happy. So why do we let it go so easily?

Maybe it’s like being blown away by a sunset. When you turn your head away, in that next moment, all you see is your own shadow.

Married But No Longer Friends

The couple I started working with last night asked me this touching question: “How do we become friends again?”

After all the fighting, the busyness of raising kids and work, this couple, like so many others, has become roommates who don’t really even have a friendship anymore. A gap has opened up between them which they don’t know how to bridge.

What would you suggest?

See my next blog entry for my answer.

If Your Marriage Isn't Sick, You Don't Need a Doctor!

And they lived happily ever after. That's what they seem to be promising when you first learn about marriage.

But in reality, what most people actually get is "tired of having the same old argument" instead. How did this happen?

If you are mentally or psychologically too ill to be married, then going to a therapist for your marital woes makes sense.

If your problem is that you are arguing, however, then you should go to an argument specialist, in other words, to a mediator.

Going to a therapist for arguments is like going to a cardiologist because you are sad. Yes, they help heal heart pain, but they treat illness.

Your marriage isn't sick, you're arguing because of differences you don't understand or know how to benefit from.

How Open Should a Healer Be to the Suffering?

How open should I keep myself to the suffering of others as their healer?

Each new man comes in unable to breath, chest reified into stone with their certainty about how wrong their wife is. 

They bluster their fear at these women who love them, thinking they are solving the thing they are creating.

The little girl in their wife looks out of the outraged woman's eyes, so sad and bewildered at the betrayal. Both girl and woman convinced by the silly mask the terrified man wears, writing epoch poems of injustice which are justified and just as off the mark as is his "logic.”

I watch them take pot-shots at each other, only half trying to hurt - really trying to help the other back to a better time.

Time. So much of it lost in the snake biting its own tail and rolling down the years.

I feel the weight of that lost time, and its heaviness feels like sadness in my heart. But perhaps it's just weight.

Maybe I'm misreading my feelings. Maybe the weight is just the love I feel: for the scared boy, for the betrayed girl, for the little bits of man-flesh that haven't yet turned to stone, for the angry woman fighting for her life; for myself, who volunteers to go into this nuclear reactor of relationships, over and over, with the tools to collect the radiating energy, and cool the fires down to one man and one woman who love each other but don't know how.

Violently Using Non-Violent Communication

Anything which can be used can be misused, and therefore anything powerful can be powerfully misused.

It's important to avoid the trap of using Non-Violent Communication as weapons instead of as tools. For instance, knowing that your partner (or anyone) has just spoken a judgment is not a license to judge them! That will just create an unmet need in them, which they will likely throw back at you as a judgment, and the only benefit you'll have gotten out of NVC is using it to have arguments at a higher level - about process instead of about content. But they're still arguments, and they will leave everyone's needs just as unmet.

And eventually you'll get the "You're doing that thing again, that NVC thing. Stop doing that to me!"

If you hear this or some phrase like it - sometimes the person says, "You’re not my therapist," what they are communicating is that you are using the techniques of nonjudgment from a judgmental place. The idea here is not to change your words or to change your partner. The idea is to change where you stand in the world, so you really see your partner as your equal and on the same side as you, and to communicate FROM there. All the techniques are aimed at helping YOU notice where  YOU are.

So if you notice your partner talking in judgments, you haven't caught them in a mistake, you've just noticed they have an unmet need and so now you're in a position to help them get it met.