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.

Speaking Quiet Truths

I took a painting class over the last month. It has changed the way I see. 

What used to be a “red box” is now at first one of a million shades of red, and then as the quiet looking deepens, becomes a gradation of purple-reds in the shadows, and a rainbow of yellow-reds where the sunlight etches into the painted wood grain. Colors have temperature now, and texture, thickness and contrast. A walk in the woods is like going to the Louvre. We live in a world painted by god in a pallet that changes even as we look.

Ayurveda has done the same thing for me to food. Fruit was sweet or tangy. Vegetables where bitter. Now that I eat for health, balance and energy, everything I eat is a piece of the life-force of the universe. It has color, and texture, properties which it will bring or remove from me, or add to my life. My hunger for food is now more like my hunger for truth or beauty. It is not about making the pain go away, it is a way to connect to my own essence.

The same is true about NVC. It has changed my relationship to thought and speech. I used to use words to carry my meaning, but that is like carrying fish from the market in a Rembrant. NVC has shown me that we live in a deep web of interconnectedness and although we can choose to just react to the situations we stumble into, the real gift is know how our deepest truth creates the very situations that many of us feel victim to. Knowing my part in creation empowers me to shape my life as perfectly as possible at my current level of self-truth-telling.

I worked with a couple yesterday that had a fight about their baby’s crying. They each reacted to the situation as though it was not a baby crying, but some creation of their spouse made just to annoy them. As we worked the moments through, slowly, sinking deeper and deeper through the layers of each of their internal truths, we came to the place where they could have been creators of connection and intimacy. As is so often the case, at this deeper level, they were in deep agreement about the very thing they had fought about for days.

I’m coming to think of “maturity” as sinking deeper and deeper into the truth of each moment, so that food, color, thought and feelings break apart into their composite parts and reveal the underlying beauty of each moment.

The Edge

Elise and I keep moving our relationship to a further edge. How many times have we gone beyond any known horizon with our truth telling? Those quiet conversations, usually in bed late, late at night, or early, early in the predawn morning.

The foundation of my home, is now, therefore, afloat, way out to sea. Grounded, I am, now in the deep waters of the soul. Mated there, soul-mated. 

I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. This is the closest locale there is to my own true epicenter. It isn’t a place. You can’t get there, the traveling was done in moments of truth-telling, and now the place I live is no longer a place. I live in Elise’s understand of who I am, and she lives in mine.

If she were to die (first - we will die), I think I would be set adrift. The journey would begin to unravel like my other, mundane memories, and I think all I would know is that I am not home, but I would not know how to get there from here. Half of here would be gone.

You Are a Self-Satisfying Needs Machine

When any situation falls short of satisfying you deeply, there is a fork in the road:
- The low road first asks and then demands that the other person change (regardless of how this might affect their satisfaction) so that you can feel okay.
- The high road steps outside the feeling of dissatisfaction and traces it back to its real origins: what this means to you: discovering what the missing satisfaction is about. Somehow, touching into the satisfaction which exists within you, even just momentarily frees you from the victim role - the idea that drives so much of our unhappiness - that other people are boorishly withholding our only chance at happiness.

Thus freed from the blind-puppy-lapping-at-its-bitch's-teat-for-survival view of relationship, two changes miraculously happen:

1.    We become not only relaxed and stress-free, we suddenly become amazingly articulate about what it is we actually want; and…
2.    The other person appears before us, as if by magic, with their own desires and needs, which we now have the resource and curiosity and actual desire to include in the conversation.

That conversation, by the way, is not only fun to have; it creates connection and intimacy, even if none of the issues are resolved!

Because although your mind would refuse to accept this thought anywhere along the low road - the issue (the laundry, the tooth-paste tube, whatever) that you were convinced needed to be resolved and were further convinced that only the resolution of that issue would bring about your happiness - was never what this was about at all.

Satisfaction, serenity, stresslessness - are available without the outside world changing one iota. You are a self-satisfying machine.

And as such, you can be a delight to be around for other self-satisfying machines.

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.

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.

Marrying My Wife's Needs

A few months ago, I decided to marry my wife's needs. I had been seeing my needs as good (okay, a pain when they were unmet, but mostly good) & hers as a pain (except when I met them, & then they were fun for me). I realized that as my skill for meeting needs increased, BOTH of our needs were becoming increasingly more fun for me. So I married hers, & now I have twice as many opportunities for satisfaction!

 

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.

When Is a Car, Not a Car?

A few months before Elise and I started developing Teamwork Mediation, I started to “get it” about being a mediator. Up until that point, I was doing the process, but I never quite knew if I was doing it right or not.

I remember the case which changed all that. I remember that the case involved a couple who were separating.
“This is a simple case,” he said. (They all thought that -  open and shut - finding for their side, of course.) “I bought the car before I met Janet, we have since broken up, and I want my car back.”

I turned to Janet. “And what is the issue for you?”

“Well,” she said, “first of all, it’s not a car.”

That was the moment I knew I had become a mediator. To a non-mediator, this probably sounds like a Zen koan: “When is a car not a car.” But to my mediator’s ears, this was exactly what I expected: difference.

Before I became a mediator, like most other people, I went around believing that while there were plenty of disagreements happening all the time, basically, there was a pretty good agreement about what Reality was.

But at this point we had been mediating for about six months, and that belief had been shattered so many times, I noticed that I had developed the ability to suspend my belief so completely, that even this didn’t phase me. I had become a mediator - unflappable by the relativity of reality. Einstein found it at the speed of light, I found it in small claims court: relativity.

Difference is such a double edged sword! We invite it into our life to make sure we get the benefit of all the different points of view, and then we cut ourselves on its sharp-edged difficulty. We want it all and we want it simple.

But to get it all, we have to deal with the complexity and contradictions. If you like the quiet life, and revel in your aloneness, who do you think you’ll be attracted to? Another hermit? Ney! (You’d probably never even cross their path, much less be attracted to them.) No, you’ll fall for some gad-about who swoops you out of your nest and teaches you to fly. It’s terrifying and exhilarating at first. And then you can’t get enough.

And then, although you love the soaring, and can’t imagine living without it, you also miss the quiet and the calm, and there begins the struggle: which of way is the RIGHT way?

And so whether you end up in small claims court, or divorce court, or just the court of public opinion, the clash of swords can be heard as you externalize the struggle which we all face within: the simple small life, or the large complex one?

Is difference a good thing, or bad?

I had become so comfortable with difference, I almost hated to ask, but this was small claims court, so ask I must: “Not a car?”

“No!” she spat. “A car has wheels, and this one is up on blocks. As car goes places and he just lives in this one in my driveway. He can have his ‘car’ back when he pays me his back rent for living on my property!”

There’s an old saying: “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a trolley car.” It came to mind in that moment, but I didn’t think it would help, so I kept it to myself.