A (WIP) Guide to Conflict Transformation
"Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen." - Malidoma Somé
As my capstone project for Harvard’s Transforming Justice: From Classroom to Cellblock to Community class, I challenged myself to create a transformative justice (TJ)-informed approach to “conflict mediation.” At least, that was my initial proposal to my professor Kaia Stern.
Almost immediately into the process, I realized how woefully inadequate our current ideas of “mediation” are when evaluated with the principles of TJ. (If you’re unfamiliar with TJ, the most succint explanation I’ve found, paraphrased, is to address harm without enacting more harm, while building systems to prevent future harm.)
Our existing models of conflict mediation and/or resolution tend to fixate on responding to acute conflicts: it busies itself with identifying the what and maybe the why of the situation (versus the people involved), and measures success through creating some resolution all parties feel satisfied with (versus long-term growth of the people or relationships). This is by no means a knock on conflict mediation, but rather a learning moment for me that what I wanted to build was a framework for healing within the context of a conflict.
I’m still agonizing over what is the best language to describe this project. So far, I think “conflict transformation” comes the closest, though it’s not exactly that either. The term is currently being used to examine the structural process of moving away from destructive conflict systems and structures to creating ones rooted in peace and collaborative relationships. Whereas I hope my project can support in that larger goal, my focus in this work is about proactively caring for the individuals involved in conflict so they can heal in ways that allow them to avoid (or at least engage in differently) the same conflict in the future.
Too often, I’ve found that we externalize harm as a specific behavior(s): something done to us, or something we do, instead of recognizing it as an extension of how we care for ourselves. When I am still hurting (even if it’s not outwardly visible) and I either don’t know how to or refuse to heal, I am bound to harm others. For example, a BIG trigger of mine is when someone says they are “disappointed” in something I did. I have lashed out and ended relationships, personal and professional, over the use of this word in contexts I did not believe were appropriate, without so much a warning to the other party.
To me, TJ cannot be realized in conflicts if there is no guidance for those involved to heal themselves, distinct and separate from the conflict. For me, a necessary part of healing is to understand and honor how my responses have served me in the past, while allowing myself the space to reconfigure them for the future.
In sharing this Guide, I hope it can nudge everyone reading to reconsider the conflicts that come into your life a little differently. Please know this is very much a WIP, because my learnings of conflict and TJ and the spectrum of life in-between is (and always will be) extremely incomplete. I welcome your ideas and thoughts on how this can be made more useful, or examples of your own that could enrich this process.
Finally, a note that conflict transformation doesn’t mean you are not allowed to have boundaries, and certainly does not condone violence in the name of committing to relationships. You are always the best judge of your needs, and sometimes that includes turning away from others to love yourself.
Overview
If you’ve never seen the desert, you might think there is little to no life amidst the dry sand and rocks. But those who live there have learned to recognize all the many different kinds of life that exist in the landscape. They have learned…to find water in many different forms — forms that are not always recognizable to others.
— Small Seeds, Mia Mingus
This Guide to Conflict Transformation at the Workplace is designed specifically for small teams with some baseline knowledge of restorative and transformative justice. It addresses interpersonal disagreements, frustrations, and tensions that can be transformed into opportunities for relationship-building — not personal or structural violence.
This guide is intentionally named Conflict Transformation, not Mediation, because it seeks to transform how all participants in conflict relate to themselves and each other — not just to resolve the acute conflict. Too often, mediation fixates on the logistics of conflict but not the feelings, harm, or trauma it brings up in people. Instead of helping, this prolongs the conflict into perpetuity because the underlying reasons why the conflict has prompted these emotions are never addressed.
Instead, this guide is about healing for all affected by conflict so that the disrupted relationship can be repaired and, hopefully, improved. Here, the focus is not on what transpired (although that will be addressed within the process) but its impact on each individual. The work we’ll do together is to care for ourselves and each other so we can heal, and thus be able to reevaluate the conflict through different eyes and find ways to grow through it.
This guide is deeply rooted in the spirit of Transformative Justice. Watching the below video is highly recommended to establish a shared context for the rest of this guide.
🌞 Theoretical Grounding
What Is Conflict?
Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen.
— Malidoma Somé
Conflicts, broadly defined, are interactions between people that result in negative feelings. Conflict disrupts and deregulates us on several levels: mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. All types of conflict are meaningful and worthy of our time and energy to understand deeply, and engage in fully.
We are socialized to avoid, ignore, minimize, or “just move on” from conflict due to the discomfort it brings us. This discomfort is not born of conflict itself, but the fact that most of us lack practice in recognizing and acknowledging how we are responding to conflict, and moving through conflict with love.
Conflict brings up our most painful emotions: fear of abandonment, fear of annihilation, rage, panic, depression, isolation. Conflict also brings up our unprocessed traumas, structural and personal: ways we have been disconnected from ourselves, or parts of ourselves that have been made to feel unloved.
— Turning Towards Each Other, Jovida Ross & Weyam Ghadbian
This guide is meant to offer us tools to untangle conflict from the myriad of feelings it stirs up, so that all parties can more thoughtfully engage with conflict as an opportunity to practice self-love, compassion, and model how to nurture a continued relationship through conflict.
Conflict is a gift, if we allow it to transform us.
Conflict is not a problem, nor the result of something we’ve “done wrong.” It makes visible interpersonal dynamics that were not previously addressed in the ways they needed to be.
💗 Need is a word to remember, as we all participate in a society that asks us to detach from our own needs and instead align them with ones characterized as “correct” or “proper.”
Individuals shouldn’t “need” more than 8 hours of sleep
Men shouldn’t “need” to express their feelings to deal with difficult experiences
Family members shouldn’t “need” to ask for our consent before engaging with us
In instances of conflict, others may provide us with something generally accepted as “correct,” but does not fulfill our needs. Recognizing and remedying this disconnect is part of navigating conflict in a way that ultimately supports all parties.
What Is Harm & Trauma?
Harm is both an action and a response.
We can cause harm by undertaking behaviors — either intentionally or not — that result in others feeling negative emotions, such as fear, guilt, or shame.
We have been harmed when certain actions — done by ourselves or others — prompt negative emotions in ourselves.
Conflict does not inherently need to result in harm. However, it is challenging to separate the acute conflict from the negative emotions it stirs up in us. As we continue to practice transforming conflict through radical love and acceptance, we can also grow to be more able to accept and engage with conflict without causing harm, or being harmed.
Trauma responses are mental, emotional, physical, and/or spiritual responses we engage in to protect us against extremely negative experiences. When a particular event overwhelms the healthy coping behaviors we know of at that time, our trauma response is enacted to shield us from threatening feelings like extreme pain, fear, hopelessness, and loss.
Trauma is not inevitable in instances of conflict, and conflict does not need to cause trauma in order to be taken seriously. Too often, conflict becomes traumatic because more harm is allowed to occur due to how the conflict is being managed.
Harm is especially prone to be turned into trauma when we engage in moral binaries in conflict: that there is a “correct” or “incorrect” way, a “right” or “wrong” person. Quite the opposite, we humans are fluid and messy, and being in conflict with one another does not deem us unworthy of love and growth.
What if we could see ourselves less as innocent, but as harmed and harming, more or less honest, more or less able to be conscious when triggered, more or less manipulative, more or less willing to take responsibility for our own change, more or less caught in patterns.
— Letting Go of Innocence, Prentiss Hemphill
💗 We are taught that experiencing trauma makes us stronger, but that is a lie. Many of us have internalized trauma as the only (or best/most effective) way to instigate personal growth because we’ve seen such a pattern be modeled for us through literature, media, family, and friends.
In reality, trauma limits our imagination and sells us the belief that others must also experience what we went through to undergo growth. This leads to hazing, which further inhibits our ability to create meaningful relationships with others.
What Is Growth & Healing?
Growth is a series of changes we undergo as we become more able to care for our own mental, emotional, physical, and/or spiritual needs.
Healing is an act of growth as we develop ways to move through conflict, harm, and trauma while deepening the love we have for ourselves and others. By practicing healing ourselves, we can address the harm done to us without causing more harm.
You can only be the expert of your own healing, not of others.
— Fumbling Toward Repair, Mariame Kaba & Shira Hassan
The true goal of this guide is to help us heal our relationships. When we take stock of our needs and care for them, we can grow our capacity to help others do the same. This lowers the ability of conflict to disrupt our relationships, because we’ve already taken the steps to heal from the harm and/or trauma that tends to result from conflict. In order to heal, we must believe ourselves deserving of healing, and worthy of feeling peace.
💗 Growth through the existence or use of trauma is not radical but the status quo.
Every day, we participate in a society built on punishment. Likewise, trauma punishes us for having feelings and seeks to suppress them, while healing allows us to move through our feelings by accepting them (and by extension, ourselves).
What would it look like if growth occurred through acts of love and healing instead?
Our and others’ healing are also part of structural healing, which is the growth of wider systems to support collective healing efforts. In order to fully address conflict and its related (or resulting) harms and traumas, we must understand and change the contexts in which conflict happens. This way, we can direct our future towards structures that reward positive relationship-building while preventing conflict from escalating to harm and trauma.
Growth through love and healing is radical in that it is rarely seen — and certainly not prioritized — in our existing society. As imperfect humans, the only way to realize the healing we desire is to practice. This guide is an effort to reframe every instance of conflict, small or large, as a way for us to practice our values.
I [have] realized that [the concept of an] enemy always serve a purpose. The war relationship is a symbiotic one in which the enemy on one side serves some need within the enemy on the other side…Whenever I catch myself thinking of someone as an enemy I ask, “What in me am I trying to avoid or distract myself from?”
Inevitably I find my own impotence, my own frustrations, my insignificance, my sense that nothing I do will ever really matter. Ultimately I find my own mortality and the seeming futility of most human endeavor. I find my own self-absorption, my resistance to setting myself aside and truly caring about the other.
— I Have No Need For An Enemy, Troy Chapman
🌱 Values
No one is disposable
Conflict is an invitation
Relationships matter
Accountability is love
Trauma is not the same as growth
We are always allowed to change
We heal on our own terms
There is no “one right way”
🪜 Full Process Steps
The full Conflict Transformation Guide is available on my Notion, linked under the paywall. At some point I promise I will find a way to make this freely available to everyone via Studio ATAO’s DEI offerings or Resources Library. Until then, please respect that I’ve spent a lot of time building out this Guide by not sharing the link.
Weekly Memes
Just one themed comic this week 🥲 Shoutout to Jesse Szewczyk for creating some of the best cookie recipes I’ve ever had in his Cookies cookbook!
Personal Stuff from the Week
Listening to: Saving Light by Gareth Emery, Standerwick, Haliene (What a throwback. CW: bullying, suicide ideation)
Watching: Law & Order SVU x Organized Crime crossover episodes (I know…)
Reading: All my notes from the incredible Negotiations class I took during May term, Notion site coming soon!
Eating: All the goodies at the James Beard Awards in Chicago. (I didn’t win, but I did have a lovely time seeing friends + scheming how to keep pushing Awards leadership to listen to workers…)
Drinking: Licorice tea for my perpetually upset stomach, especially as my body attempts to eat itself once a month
Nice thing I did for myself this week: Stopped working at 5pm the other day! What a feeling!!!
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