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.

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.”

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.

Controlling Controlling Partners

It's been an interesting week. I've done two sixth (last) sessions, and two first sessions. It really shows how much can happen in just six weeks.

One of the couples I just finished with came in with a really popular issue: The Controlling Partner (and by implication: The Partner Who Feels Controlled).



In this case, the wife felt like her partner wanted everything his way. He was "always" correcting, suggesting, and judging. Occasionally, he would ask for input, and then he'd go ahead and do it exactly the way he wanted to. Sound familiar?

I put "always" in quotes, because it is a red flag that I listen for. It tells me that the speaker is describing their experience of what happened, and that their perception is distorted. Nobody does anything always.

It certainly was true that this husband knew how he liked things. It was also true that he really wanted to share the load, but he didn't feel met by his wife, so in the vacuum of her speaking out about what she wanted, he went ahead and did what he thought was what they both wanted. I call this the "Generous Controller." Most "controllers" are trying to be generous, though it certainly doesn't feel that way to their partner.

Even though the "controller" obviously has a lot to learn about how to cooperate, I want to talk about the judger - the one who calls their partner a controller.

In this case, we went over a few instances of his "control" and in each case; his behavior was motivated by a positive intention. As the wife went from example to example, she began to see her husband in a new light. Here was the man she had married because she liked how he made an effort to please her. She liked his proactive nature.

What she didn't like was not having input, but then whose responsibility is that? I will teach the husband how to seek it out, but I focused this session on having the wife notice how hard it is for her to advocate for her own needs.

We practiced some, and in every case, when her needs were expressed non-violently, he was completely open to co-creating a solution.

As so often happens, the "controller" in a relationship is the creation of the one feeling controlled. And keeping their focus on their partner not only created tension and judgment, it kept them from knowing what it was they needed.

THe Slippery Slope

Here's a quick test for how your relationship is doing. If love and peace and intimacy were moving forward, and conflict and judgment is moving backward, answer this question truthfully:

What direction is your relationship moving in, and at what speed?

When couples come to see us, they are often moving backward, in a viscous cycle. In this stage, communication easily slips into reactions to reactions to reactions. Each party sincerely believes that "as soon as the other person stops, I will." This is what seems fair because each party can name an incident which predates their reaction, that the other party did something wrong earlier.

Basically, the relationship has been reduced to the "he started it!" that parents and teachers hear from children so often.

But it does feel real. How can you respond lovingly to repeated affronts? Each partner can even name moments when they did try to forgive and forget, and got slammed anyway, so better to hold out for justice.

Of course, this strategy accounts for the backward motion of the relationship. Both parties are driving their part of the relationship looking only in the rearview mirror, waiting for their partner to rectify the past, before they feel safe to move on to new territory. But since both parties are using this same strategy, the relationship just keeps backing up over the same painful turf.

There comes a time when this backward motion develops a momentum. Even without trying, even little things seem to just slide back the wrong way. Worse, even when both parties decide to turn things around, it seems like the relationship is already careening down an incline too steep to stop, and so kicking and screaming, the whole family keeps sliding backwards down into chaos and conflict.

When I'm with a couple in this state, I can see the topography of their relationship like a hill that just keeps getting steeper and steeper. After a while it doesn't seem like it has anything to do with them, it is just the shape of the terrain.

And it is the shape of the terrain, but the surprising fact is that this particular terrain responds to us, even though it feels the other way around.

When you stop speaking in judgments and reactions, the ground levels out immediately.

Often by the end of the very first session (when I am translating their judgments into expressions of universal needs for them) both parties can feel the ground beneath them level out. Often during that first week at home they slide back down into their old strategy and blame the OTHER PERSON and the terrain slants back down again.

So let me make it really clear: when you feel the earth begin to slant away from your partner, when you feel yourself moving inexorably away from them, it's your point of view of the situation which is causing that.

The Princess in the Tower

Did you ever have one of those weeks, when the same message keeps getting repeated in nearly everyone you meet?

It used to be like that in the vegetarian pizza restaurant I ran in Boulder Colorado in the 70's. One night there'd be a pregnant woman at every table, another night would be teepee night, or out-of-towners night.

This last week, it's been the Princess in the Tower.

It happened with three different clients this week. Each was well versed in the most basic principle of Teamwork Mediation: "Don't judge your spouse - it tears the fabric of your relationship and guarantees you don't get your need met." Even so, all three were stuck in their judgments and the more they struggled, the deeper they sank into that quicksand.

They all knew it, and had made special emergency appointments so I could help pull them out, but they were all too stuck for the thin rope of words and reason alone, to save them. As they told their tales of woe, every word just sank deeper into the quicksand.

So I put a smile on my face and in my heart, and spoke in my best sing-songy voice, the one Kindergarten teachers and hypnotists use and said, "I'm going to tell you a story, a fairy-tale, about you."

If I do this just right, I will see their bodies relax - they settle down and let go of the struggle. I take out my big pad and start to draw the familiar picture of the crenulated castle tower. "Oh good," one of them said, "I love illustrated stories!"

"This is the story of Princess in the Tower. She is trapped in the tower, and is guarded by a warrior who stops all who try to enter. If there is even the slightest bit of war, anger or judgment in their hearts, he draws his sword, and slays them."

They like the tower. It is a picture of their plight. They think the guard is their husband, and that I am validating their powerlessness and victimhood.

Then I draw another tower, this time with a Prince trapped inside.

"And here is the Prince, who, just like you, is trapped in his own tower behind his own guardedness."

The second tower baffles them at first. Then they recognize his guard. He's the real problem. "Yeah! That's the guy who keeps screaming at me!"

But then who is the Prince in the Tower? They recognized the Princess - she is their soft, vulnerable side - the one who wants love, peace, connection.

"Just like you," I say, "the Prince feels trapped by his own guard, the one he hired to protect him, but who now keeps him locked away.

"However, the guard doesn't stop everyone. In fact, he doesn't even see the people who are pure of heart. They just pass through unchallenged. That was how the two of you met. Each of you visited the other so freely you didn't even notice the guard was there. You called that time: "infatuation". You thought it was the fairy-tale. But that was the time each of you was real.

"So what has changed? There are two answers. You know the first: he has. But if that is your only answer, then nothing changes. The answer to your dilemma is the second one: You have changed.

"Your judgments set off the guard's warning system, and so he draws his sword whenever you approach now.

"You've been arriving with war on your heart for so long - and so encountered the guard, that you've forgotten completely about the Prince, and now you think you're married to the guard, which is ridiculous. He's a hired hand. It would be like your mistaking the gardener for your husband, or the mailman. You're married to the man in the tower, who is just like the Princess that you are.

"Remember what it was like to love and be loved by the Prince? Feel that now. Feel it again, fully. Live it, for that is still what is real."

"But the castle walls are so thick!" one of them said. "And the habits so strong."

I pulled down my "Course in Miracles" and read them each the first few lessons:

    "1. Nothing in this room means anything.
    2. I have given everything I see in this room all the meaning that it has for me.
3. I do not understand anything I see in this room.
4. These thoughts do not mean anything. They are like the things I see in this room.
5. I am never upset for the reason I think.
6. I am upset because I see something that is not there.

"It is hard to see what is real," I say. "The illusions we construct for ourselves are so realistic. That's why they call them 'miracles.' It's a miraculous thing, to love another person without judgment."

They each left with the assignment to go find the Prince, and feel their love and compassion for him. "Lucky men," I thought. "They won't even know what I've done for them."

I wonder what miracle will come into my life next week?

Q4U: How have you been doing, visiting your Prince or Princess? Anyone out there getting caught at the gate with an impure heart?