Trauma Training Tip
It’s Wood Season – and so nature is supporting me to consider the dynamics of conflict and conflict resolution and polarization and community. How do we support ourselves and our loved ones to walk towards each other, so that ultimately we can walk with each other? I’ve realized that I can get confused about who I should stand in opposition to – and I make mistakes about who is “the enemy” and who is truly my companion.
The Wood season is the season of the sympathetic nervous system, the part of us that is always available to protect and defend us – and those who we perceive to be vulnerable. In the Self Protective Response, it manages the “Mobilize A Response” phase. Its emotion is anger. Its spirit is benevolence. When it is flexible, competent, and in a dynamic relationship with its “Fire brake” in our parasympathetic Ventral Vagus nerve, it is able to Mobilize A Response that is commensurate with the level of threat we are experiencing. . . sometimes we need a fly swatter, you know? Sometimes we need a high level of mobilization – like when playing a sport – we are aggressive and competitive, but we don’t need rage or violence.
In a recent On Being Podcast, host Krista Tippett and Journalist Amanda Ripley explore the nature of conflict. They distinguish “malignant” or intractable conflict and healthy, good conflict. Intractable conflict Ripley says, “rapidly becomes us versus them, is characterized by a sense of moral superiority and a sense of being increasingly baffled and threatened by the other side or person. Our normal cognitive biases get much more extreme . . . you literally lose your peripheral vision. . . . . The complexity of the question at hand is collapsed and we make a lot of mistakes.” I would add those mistakes feed polarization and steal relationship and community from us.
She goes on to say, “We journalists, can summon outrage in five words or less. We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters, and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we’ve reached our collective limitations … again and again, we have escalated the conflict and snuffed the complexity out of the conversation.”
Interestingly, she says “we need conflict to get better, to be challenged, to challenge each other. In fact, I think the U.S. needs a lot more good conflict, not less. There’s no better shortcut to transformation that I know of. We need turbulent city council meetings, strained date-night dinners, protests and strikes, clashes in boardrooms and guidance counselor offices.”
How do we support healthy, life-affirming, hopeful good conflict? The most important thing she says, is we need to complicate the narrative. When the narrative is yes/no; right/wrong; we can’t find relationship or our way through and beyond the conflict. We are blocked from experiencing that we are truly in relationship, one family, one community, one nation. How do we complicate the narrative so that we can explore the nuances, the dynamic tensions, the ways we truly are in relationship – and have good conflict – life-enhancing and expanding good conflict?
My favorite quote from Ms. Ripley – “I have overvalued reasoning in myself and others and undervalued pride, fear, and the need to belong.” Here’s some questions she recommends that may help us find the person behind the strong opinion and ways we may have oversimplified something that is actually quite nuanced and complex – and a way to walk towards each other so that we can ultimately walk with each other.
- How has this conflict affected your life?
- What do you think the other side wants?
- What’s the question nobody is asking?
- What do you and your supporters need to learn about the other side in order to understand them better?
- What do you want the other community to know about you?
- What do you want to know about the other community?
- What in my own position or group causes me discomfort? And what do I admire in the position of the other?
- If you woke up tomorrow and this problem was solved the way you want it to be solved, how would you know?
Chinese medicine teaches us that Wood feeds Fire. Throwing wood on the fire creates a bigger fire. If we can walk through conflict in creative and life-enhancing ways – we will find closer and more meaningful relationships on the other side. We don’t find our way into relationship by being perfect – we find our way by making mistakes and making repairs. We can deepen our connections in our families and communities by engaging in healthy, complex, nuanced conflict. Let’s do it!
Alaine’s Two Cents
Here is Krista Tippett’s interview with Amanda Ripley.
Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist – who sometimes describes herself as a “recovering journalist” – and a trained conflict mediator. She’s written several acclaimed books, including High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Here is her essay “Complicating the Narratives.” She is the co-founder of the company Good Conflict.
Check This Out!
This exercise was developed by Stanley Rosenberg, and is described in his book Accessing The Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve: Self-Help Exercises for Anxiety, Depression, Trauma and Autism.
The exercise uses the eyes to stretch the sub-occipital muscles at the back of the neck. It supports flexibility and spaciousness in the tissues surrounding the Ventral Vagus nerve as it emerges from the brain stem. It may help your autonomic nervous system to down-regulate, and you to find more peace and less anxiety.
It will also support flexibility and capacity in the Gall Bladder meridian, flowing through this area. Our Gall Bladder helps us to flexibly orient to our surroundings – and strategize a successful mobilization response. This exercise may expand the range of movement in your neck – and your ability to use your neck to support peripheral vision.
Living life in community requires us to cultivate capacity to see the nuances of life available in our peripheral vision. Relying exclusively on our central vision can only support rigid, narrow, and inflexible interpretations of the complex issues we as a world’s people are grappling with.
Clinical Curiosity
Where is your clinical curiosity carrying you?
Send me a question or two and I will explore them with readers in this corner next month.
Q.
My patient is a 45 year old man. He is a Veteran and was deployed several times to the Middle East. He is quite angry and volatile and is only coming to therapy because his Wife “made” him. He hates coming. I’d appreciate your help.
A.
So glad he has you!
Successful military operations have a chain of command that it is important to follow. There isn’t a lot of room for individual initiative for the sake of the mission.
Many people who are drawn to military service come from authoritarian family systems. They may not have been given opportunities as children to decide what clothes they wanted to wear, when and how their hair was cut, or whether they wanted to join ROTC or the school band. The structure and hierarchy of the military is familiar, and there is some comfort in it.
However, there may be a big backup of unexpressed “no’s” in him – not now, not me, not that, not ever. It was suppressed as a child and re-enacted as an adult.
I would suggest playing the “No” game with him. Invite him to say “no” to questions you ask – and to note what comes up in his insides as he declares his “no.” Will you uncross your legs? Will you walk over to the window and look out? Will you read the title of the magazine on the desk? Will you tell me where you were born?
Before you start you will want to help him find a resource state. Maybe he can find comfort in the chair by noticing his weight, or maybe he sinks more deeply in the chair when he looks at the tree outside the window. Make sure he has some access to comfort that he can use if his arousal goes too high. You will want to help him “tick-tock.”
The goal is to give him an opportunity to have the “no” that he has not been allowed to experience. You will be offering an experience of repair of a thwarted mobilization response. Help him track his sensations. Use his resource state to help him not go “over” his threshold of arousal. He may need some help contain his arousal when he finally gets to experience his NO.
Once he has an experience of a full “no,” he may be able to more readily access his “yes.” You will be giving him a very rich gift. I think he will come to appreciate it and you.