Opinion Sur
A discussion of the importance of understanding emotions and psychology in conflict resolution; the need to build bridges and cross borders, not only internationally, but professionally; and the need for value-driven rules versus rule-driven values in both. Over the last three decades, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have been trained in community, divorce, family, commercial, organizational, and workplace mediation, as well as in allied conflict resolution skills such as collaborative negotiation, group facilitation, public dialogue, restorative justice, victim-offender mediation, ombudsmanship, collaborative law, consensus decision making, creative problem solving, prejudice reduction and bias awareness, conflict resolution systems design, and dozens of associated practices.
Among the most important and powerful of these skills are a number of core ideas and interventions that originate in psychology, particularly in what is commonly known as “brief therapy,” where the border separating conflict resolution from psychological intervention has become indistinct, and in many places blurred beyond recognition. Examples of the positive consequences of blurring this line can be found in recent discoveries in neurophysiology, “emotional intelligence,” and solution-focused approaches to conflict resolution.
While it is, of course, both necessary and vital that we recognize the key differences between the professions of psychology and conflict resolution, it is more necessary and vital, especially in these times, that we recognize their essential similarities, collaborate in developing creative new techniques, and invite them to learn as much as they can from each other.
Beyond this, I believe it is increasingly important for us to consciously generate a fertile, collaborative space between them; discourage the tendency to jealously guard protected territory; and oppose efforts to create new forms of private property in techniques that reduce hostility and relieve suffering.
It is therefore critical that we think carefully and strategically about how best to translate a deeper understanding of the emotional and neurophysiological underpinnings of conflict and resolution processes into practical, hands-on mediation techniques; that we explore the evolving relationship between mediation and psychology, and other professions as well; and that we translate that understanding into improved ways of helping people become competent, successful mediators.
Among the urgent reasons for doing so are the rise of increasingly destructive global conflicts that cannot be solved even by a single nation, let alone by a single style, approach, profession, or technique; the persistence of intractable conflicts that require more advanced techniques; and the recent rise of innovative, transformational techniques that form only a small part of the curriculum of most mediation trainings(1).
The present generation is being asked a profound set of questions that require immediate action based on complex, diverse, complementary, even contradictory answers. In my judgment, these questions include:
_ – What is our responsibility as global citizens for solving the environmental, social, economic, and political conflicts that are taking place around us?
_ – Is it possible to successfully apply conflict resolution principles to the inequalities, inequities, and dysfunctions that are continuing to fuel chronic social, economic, and political conflicts?
_ – Can we find ways of working beyond national, religious, ethnic, and professional borders so as to strengthen our capacity for international collaboration and help save the planet?
_ – Can we build bridges across diverse disciplines so as to integrate the unique understandings and skills that other professions have produced regarding conflict and resolution?
_ – How can we use this knowledge to improve the ways we impact mediator learning so as to better achieve these goals?
Locating potential synergies between psychology and conflict resolution will allow us to take a few small steps toward answering these questions. And small steps, as we learn in mediation, are precisely what are needed to achieve meaningful results. Why should we consider the possibilities of ego defenses or solution-focused mediation? For the same reasons we consider the potential utility of a variety of interventions – because they allow us to understand conflict and enter it in unique and useful ways.
The logical chain that connects conflict resolution with psychology is simple yet inexorable and logically rigorous, which proceeds as follows:
_ – It is possible for people to disagree with each other without experiencing conflict.
_ – What distinguishes conflict from disagreement is the presence of what are commonly referred to as “negative” emotions, such as anger, fear, guilt, and shame. (iii) Thus, every conflict, by definition, contains an indispensible emotional element.
_ – Conflicts can only be reached and resolved in their emotional location by people who have acquired emotional processing skills, or what Daniel Goleman broadly describes as “emotional intelligence.”
_ – The discipline that is most familiar with these emotional dynamics is psychology.
_ – Therefore, mediation can learn from psychology how to be more effective in resolving conflicts.
This logic alone should be sufficient to prompt a deeper assessment of psychological research and technique. Yet, considering the problem from a deeper perspective, we all know that no clear line can be drawn in life that allows us to separate our emotions from our ideas, or our neurophysiology from our behaviors. Quite simply, we are all emotional beings and must discover their inner logic if we do not want to be trapped or driven by them.
Deeper still, when we distinguish, simplify, or isolate different aspects of a problem, we disregard their essential unity, and with it, countless opportunities to resolve critically important conflicts and disagreements, simply by approaching them with a pre-determined, single-minded, particular point of view, no matter how profound or useful it may happen to be.
There is an equally simple, inexorable, and logically rigorous analysis based on a few simple philosophical assumptions that point us in a different direction. It goes like this: No two human beings are the same. No single human being is the same from one moment to the next. The interactions and relationships between human beings are complex, multi-determined, subtle, and unpredictable. Conflicts are even more complex, multi-determined, subtle, and unpredictable. Most conflicts take place beneath the surface, well below the superficial topics over which people are fighting and frequently hidden from their conscious awareness(2).
Thus, each person’s attitudes, intentions, intuitions, awareness, context, and capacity for empathetic and honest emotional communication have a significant impact on their experience of conflict and capacity for resolution. As a result, no one can know objectively or in advance how to resolve any particular conflict, as anything chaotic and rapidly changing cannot be successfully predicted or managed.
For this reason, it is impossible to teach anyone how to resolve a conflict. Instead, we need to develop their skills, improve their awareness and self-confidence, and help them develop a broad range of diverse ideas and techniques that may or may not succeed depending on inherently unpredictable conditions. Moreover, we have known since John Dewey that learning is accelerated when it is connected to doing. Yet we continue to train mediators based on a set of false assumptions.
The way we teach mediation often does not conform to the core values and principles we practice in the mediation process, or to what we know is successful in reaching people who are in conflict, or to what stimulates our learning, or even to how we would most like to be taught.
As I have described elsewhere, values are essentially priorities and integrity-based choices. They can be found both in what we do and what we do not do, in what we grow accustomed to and what we are willing to tolerate. They are openly and publicly expressed, acted on repeatedly, and upheld when they run counter to self-interest. In this way, they are creators of integrity and responsibility, builders of optimism and self-esteem, and definitions of who we are. They become manifest and alive through action, including the action of sincere declaration.
At a deeper level, we all communicate values by what we do and say, by how we behave, and by who we become when we are in conflict. While these values are often inchoate and difficult to articulate, beneath many commonly recognized mediation practices we can identify a set of values, even meta-values that, in my view, represent our best practices as a profession. Our most fundamental values appear and become manifest to others when we:
_ – Show up and are present: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually
_ – Listen empathetically to what lies hidden beneath words
_ – Tell the truth without blaming or judgment
_ – Are open-minded, open-hearted, and unattached to outcomes
_ – Search for positive, practical, satisfying outcomes
_ – Act collaboratively in relationships
_ – Display unconditional authenticity, integrity, and respect
_ – Draw on our deepest intuition
_ – Are on both parties’ sides at the same time
_ – Encourage diverse, honest, heartfelt communications
_ – Act always in accordance with our core values and principles
_ – Are ready for anything at every moment
_ – Seek completion and closure
_ – Are able to let go, yet abandon no one
While not everyone will accept these values, merely articulating, debating, and engaging in dialogue over them, considering how to implement them, and deciding to commit and live by them, will automatically give rise to a higher order of values – the value of having values. Practicing them over time — not solely in what we say or do, but how we say and do it, will initiate to the highest order of values – the value of being what we value.
By living our values, we become what we practice, integrating who we are with what we preach and do. This is the deeper message of mediation: that by continually and collaboratively searching for positive solutions to conflict, bringing them into conscious attention, living them as fully as possible, and developing the theories, practices, processes, and relationships that allow others do the same, we enhance our relationship to the mediation process as a whole and build a collaborative community of reflective, emotionally intelligent practitioners.
Thus, to be fully realized, our values have to be reflected not merely in our practice, but in all aspects of our personal lives, including the ways we ourselves handle conflict, teach mediation, and interact with those who wish to learn it. Yet many mediators’ lives are filled with intense adversarial conflicts, many mediation trainings are conducted in ways that do not conform to its core values, and many mediators interact with students in ways that undermine their ability to learn.
Applying these ideas to conflict resolution, we all know intuitively that mediators are not immune from conflicts, and that we will become better dispute resolvers by working through and resolving our own conflicts. It therefore makes sense for us to incorporate into the mediation training process the psychological components that will allow people to work directly on resolving their personal conflicts. At present, few mediation programs allow or encourage them to do so.
In the end, we are the technique. As imperfect as we are, it is who we are that forms the path to resolution, and that same path invites us to become better human beings, simply in order to become better mediators. This realization returns mediation to its human origins and essence, as an exercise not solely in empathy and compassion, but in creative problem solving, emotional clarity, heartfelt wisdom, and social collaboration.
Hopefully, these practices will encourage us to look more deeply and wisely at the world within, as well as the world without, and assist us in finding ways to translate our own suffering into methods and understandings that will lead to a better, less hostile and adversarial world.
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Notes: (1) For more on mediating global conflicts, see Conflict Revolution: Mediating Evil, War, Injustice, and Terrorism – How Mediators Can Help Save the Planet, Kenneth Cloke, Janis Publications 2008. (2) For more, see The Crossroads of Conflict: A Journey into the Heart of Dispute Resolution, Kenneth Cloke, Janis Publications 2006.
