Negotiating the Nonnegotiable (Daniel Shapiro)

    
Book by Daniel Shapiro: Negotiating the Nonnegotiable. How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts (2016)

Section 1: The Tribes Effect

Ch 1: The Hidden Power of Identity

The world exploded at Davos. It happened several years ago at the World Economic Forum's annual summit in the snow-capped mountains of Switzerland. I had convened a meeting of forty-five world leaders in a small room tucked away from the eyes and ears of the reporting press. These leaders had negotiated some of the world's most challenging conflicts, but none were prepared for what would happen next—a negotiation of the strangest kind that would reach beyond the halls of that summit to the epicenter of all our lives.
It all started innocently enough. As the leaders streamed into the room, a young staffer handed each of them a colored scarf and escorted them to one of six tables. I watched as the CEO of a Fortune 50 company made his way to his seat, followed by a deputy head of state, who greeted the CEO with a diplomatic nod. A prominent university president settled next to a security expert, while at a neighboring table an artist chatted with a professor. Soft music played in the background, and the mood was light.
As the clock struck one, the music quieted and I stepped to the center of the room. “Welcome,” I said a bit nervously, taking stock of this esteemed group, who looked at me in anticipation. “It is an honor to be here with all of you today.”
As the word “tribes” appeared on a screen behind me, I launched into the session. “Our world is becoming more and more of a tribal world. As global interdependence and advances in technology intertwine, we have more opportunity to connect with more people. Yet this very thread of connection—this emerging global community—also threatens fundamental aspects of who we are. It is only natural, then, that we tend to withdraw to the security and continuity of tribes.”The group appeared intrigued. I continued. “We all belong to multiple tribes. A tribe is any group to which we see ourselves as similar in kind, whether based on religion or ethnicity or even our place of work. We feel a kinlike connection to the tribe; we emotionally invest in it. This means a religious community or nation can feel like a tribe. A family can be so tightly knit that it feels like a tribe. Even multinational corporations can take on the feel of a tribe. Tribes are all around us.
“Today we'll be exploring the power of tribes. You and the others at your table will have the opportunity to get to know one another—by forming a tribe of your own at your table. You'll have fifty minutes to answer a small set of challenging questions to define the key qualities of your tribe. Please answer all these questions through consensus, not voting.
And be sure to remain true to your own belief system.”
The instructions seemed acceptable to everyone—until I passed out the worksheet containing the questions. The professor's hand darted into the air. “You want us to answer these questions through consensus? In fifty minutes? Come on!”
He was justifiably aggravated, as the participants were being asked to answer such morally divisive questions as “Does your tribe believe in capital punishment?,” “Does your tribe believe in abortion?,” and “What are the three most important values of your tribe?”
“I've facilitated this exercise dozens of times,” I assured the professor,
“and everyone is always somehow able to finish. So just give it your best shot, and be sure to have a response to each question by the end of the allotted time.” He nodded begrudgingly, and the participants set to work.
One tribe spent nearly thirty minutes defining and prioritizing its tribal values, while another got stuck on whether capital punishment should be legal. A tribe in a far corner laughed and joked like friends at a bar while a neighboring table became deeply absorbed in the task.

At the fifty-minute mark, the room went pitch-black. Ominous music began to play—a pipe organ droned a haunting scale of notes. “What's going on?” whispered an eighty-five-year-old venture capitalist. His head swung around as he heard a loud knock on a side door, then a loud bang. Everyone in the room went still, unsure what to expect. In barged a wide-eyed alien with pale green skin and flylike black eyes. It weaved through the tables, passing the gaping venture capitalist, and slowed to rake the professor's hair with its long green tentacles. “You measly earthlings,” the alien growled. “I have come to destroy the Earth! “I will give you one opportunity to save this world from complete destruction,” taunted the alien. “You must choose one of these six tribes as the tribe for everyone here. All of you must take on the attributes of that one tribe. You cannot change any of that tribe's attributes. And if you cannot come to full agreement by the end of three rounds of negotiation,” the alien snarled, “the world will be destrrroyyyyyed!” The creature then raised its arms wide, shrieked with laughter, and left the room.
•••
The lights came back on, and everyone looked around, bewildered. There were a few chuckles, and then the participants sprang into action, huddling at their tables to define their strategy for the upcoming negotiations.
Six barstools stood in the middle of the room, one for a delegate from each tribe. I announced the advent of round one, and the tribes sent their representatives to negotiate. This round was fairly amicable. The six tribes familiarized themselves with one another's key characteristics.
After a few minutes, the CEO of a Dubai-based company said, “We must start by talking about our negotiation process. How are we going to make our decision here?” It was a good, rational question, the kind that virtually any negotiation consultant would advise should be raised. But the CEO was drowned out by a magazine editor from the Happy Tribe, who, feeling pressure to advocate for his own group, complained, “Why is no one listening to our tribe?”
“You'll get your chance,” replied a representative from the Cosmopolitan Tribe. But round one ended before the magazine editor could say another word.
In round two, the emotional temperature of the room intensified.
These leaders were determined to save the world. The charismatic delegate for the Rainbow Tribe, a sharply dressed business executive, proclaimed,
“We believe in all colors, all genders, all ethnicities. Come to our tribe! We will accept you all!” He spread his arms in a welcoming gesture, and two tribes immediately joined with him. A venture capitalist crossed his arms, glared at the Rainbow Tribe delegate, and complained, “If we are all equal, why don't you join our tribe?”
In round three, a frenzy overtook the room. The delegates for this round included five men and one woman, all of whom argued about whether humanitarianism or compassion represented a more important core value. The men yelled over one another and over the woman, who became so enraged that she stood on her stool, her face flushed, and pointed her finger and shouted, “This is just another example of male competitive behavior! You all come to my tribe!” Only one tribe agreed to join hers.
Moments later the world exploded.

The Fundamental Force of Conflict

* The Tribes Exercise evokes emotional dynamics intrinsic to real-world conflict.
* It is hard to notice these dynamics when caught in them.

Key Dimensions of Conflict Resolution

This book provides crucial advice to resolve emotionally charged conflicts.
The world could have been saved at Davos if the leaders had addressed the key dimensions of conflict resolution: rationality, emotions, and identity.

While scholars often treat these dimensions as independent, neuroscience suggests they interrelate. Only by addressing all three can we hope to arrive at a satisfying resolution to an emotionally charged conflict.

Unlocking the Power of Identity

This book reveals a powerful method to navigate the complex landscape of identity. You can know facts with certainty, but you can never fully know yourself. The closest you can get is through reflection. The more you reflect, the more you know. So as you read this book, think about the role of identity in your toughest conflicts. You will come to see hidden forces fueling destructive relations, as well as new possibilities for resolution. At Davos, the leaders stumbled through this process. After the world exploded, they fell silent. I asked, “How are you feeling?” They all looked depressed, save one: the professor. He stood, his face red, and pointed his finger at me. “This is your fault!” he shouted. “You set us up to have the world explode—with all your questions we had to answer, with the short time frame you enforced.” He shook his head, repeating, “This is all your fault.” He sat down, crossed his arms, and glared at me.
I had expected that someone in the group might blame me in the event that the world exploded. I was an easy target—in many ways a fair target— but the professor's anger was more intense than I had anticipated. All eyes turned toward me.
“You're right,” I said. “I did anything and everything in my power to structure this exercise so that the world would explode. I gave you virtually impossible questions to agree upon. I gave you limited time to negotiate. I had the alien force you to choose one tribe over the others. So yes, you're right.”
The professor's face softened as I acknowledged my responsibility.
His arms uncrossed.
“But,” I continued, slowing the pace of my words, “at the end of the day, you had a choice. You could have come to agreement. You could have questioned me and resisted the rules. You could have. But you didn't.
You. . . had . . . a choice.”

The professor nodded, his cheeks flushed. I had revealed the truth he did not want to face: He and the other leaders had possessed full power to save the world, but had failed to do so. They had locked themselves into a narrow definition of identity and let the world go down in flames. The conflict had never been immutable, even if it had felt that way.

Ch 2: The Dual Nature of Identity

In Lewis Carroll's whimsical Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, charming young Alice encounters an enigmatic, hookah-smoking caterpillar, who asks her a seemingly simple question: “Who are YOU?”
Alice hesitantly replies, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
Alice stumbles around tricky questions of identity. Who is she, how did she become who she is, and how does she even know she is who she thinks she is? Her musing that she must have changed several times since the morning indicates her conviction that identity is fluid. But what troubles poor Alice is that, despite this belief, she feels a consistency in her lived experience. She knows she has changed but feels the same.
This paradox cuts right to the heart of conflict resolution. If identity is absolutely fixed, then the only way to resolve a conflict is to compromise your own identity or persuade the other side to compromise theirs. Conflict thus becomes a win-lose proposition. Yet if your identity is entirely fluid, you have no assurance that either party will honor an agreement. How can you be held accountable for your actions of yesterday if you are a changed person today?

A Way Out

Alice gets us out of this conundrum with an insight that proves essential for conflict resolution: Some aspects of her identity change—while others remain the same. Her identity is both fluid and fixed. In a conflict, however, it is easy to lose sight of this fact. When your identity is threatened, you hunker down in self-defense and conceive of it as a single, immutable whole. I call this the fixed-identity fallacy—and because of it, you demand the other party acquiesce to your perspectives, your sense of right and wrong, your values. If the other side holds this same egoistic assumption, both of you get stuck in an ever-escalating impasse, until your conflict feels intractable.
But this is an illusion. To assume from the outset that your conflict is insoluble is to bury the possibility of reconciliation deep in the ground.
While an emotionally charged conflict is hard to resolve, it is much more useful to direct attention toward those aspects of identity that you can affect rather than those that appear immutable. In fact, virtually all parts of your identity have a degree of fluidity, though some are much easier to change than others.
This chapter lays the groundwork for the remainder of the book, providing you with foundational tools to overcome the fixed-identity fallacy. Despite the pervasive impact of identity, disputants seldom know what it is or how to address it. Thus this chapter presents a framework to help you discover and leverage the most deeply significant aspects of identity underpinning your conflict.

What Is Identity?

Your identity comprises the full spectrum of persistent and fleeting characteristics that define you. These characteristics integrate to make you one: a unified whole that includes your body and mind, your neurological apparatus and position in society, your unconscious processes and conscious thoughts, and your enduring sense of existence as well as your passing observations.
Though these characteristics define you, you also define them. You are as much the object of analysis as the subject doing the analysis. This reciprocal relationship is vividly illustrated by M. C. Escher's sketch Drawing Hands, which depicts the hands of an artist drawing themselves.
When I asked my then-six-year-old son, Zachary, for his thoughts on this picture, he said, “He's making himself!” When it comes to identity, you make yourself too.



Core Identity: The Biography of Your Being

Your core identity is the spectrum of characteristics that define you as an individual or as a group. It includes everything from your body, personality, and occupation to your spiritual beliefs and cultural practices. The world would spin into chaos if no one had a core identity. Nations would have no constitutions or flags; businesses would have no brands; and people would have no names or personalities. Your core identity is the platform from which you synthesize your experiences into a coherent sense of self with both continuity and clear ideals. Should you feel confused about your core identity—unsure of who you are or what you stand for—decisions of all kinds become problematic.

The multiplicity of identity. 

Your core identity includes your personal preferences and personality traits as well as your identification with social groups. Do you see yourself as American, Japanese, Lebanese,
Hispanic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, Hindi, or atheist? As a student, parent, executive, liberal, or conservative? Because you belong to multiple groups, you have multiple social identities. A person may be Chinese American, Protestant, a teacher, and conservative.
In a conflict, you must decide which of your social identities to prioritize. You may feel competing loyalties based on your faith, ethnicity, political convictions, and national citizenship. Perhaps your religious identity feels most important to you, but you emphasize your national identity to fit in with your neighbors. Even in casual conversation with a friend, you must decide whether to discuss politics, religion, or work responsibilities, with each decision shaping the contours of your identity.
Just as you identify yourself as a member of specific groups, others pigeonhole you. If you are the only Chinese American executive at your company's meeting on cultural diversity, colleagues may make you feel very aware of that identity, whereas it may fall out of your awareness while you meet with a good friend at a café. But you are not powerless to social labeling—a lesson that Professor Henri Tajfel, founder of social identity theory, learned during World War II. He was a Polish Jew who studied in France and joined the French army during the war. A year into his service, the German army captured him and tossed him into various German prisoner-of-war camps for five years. The Germans repeatedly interrogated him: Are you a Jew? Where are you from? He revealed his Jewish identity, confident that the authorities would discover this information. But he realized that this identity was not entirely fixed. He decided to live under the pretense as a French Jew. Had the Germans discovered his social identity as a Polish Jew, he would have met certain death.

The Five Pillars of Identity

1. Beliefs are your convictions, principles, and morals.

2. Rituals include your meaningful customs and ceremonial acts, whether holidays, rites of passage, regular prayer, or evening dinner with the family.

3. Allegiances are the deep loyalties you feel toward a family member, friend, authority figure, nation, tribe, ancestor, or any other person, place, or thing, whether real or mythical.

4. Values represent your ideals, which can be explicit (“Our nation values liberty and justice”) or embodied in a memorable narrative (“I remember hearing about how grandfather fought day and night for this land”).

5. Emotionally meaningful experiences are intense events, positive or negative, that define a part of your identity. They comprise everything from the day you got married to the hour your first child was born, the moment your parent slapped you to the memory of mass violence conducted against your group.

Core identity is not completely fixed.

My ten-year-old, Noah, competed in a recent soccer match, scoring seven points for his team while the opposition scored none. So with only one minute left in the game, the coaches decided to switch him to the other team. Noah scored two goals for his opponents and ended up “losing” the game two to seven. He felt frustrated the whole evening, for in the course of seconds, his allegiance had shifted from one team to the other.
But Noah's core identity had not undergone a complete makeover. He was at summer camp and felt no strong attachment to either team. Had this been the World Cup and had he been switched to the opposing team, he would have struggled tremendously to redefine his allegiance. Core identity has some fluidity, but the deepest pillars of identity are extremely entrenched.
A group's core identity also can change. A company can redefine its guiding values but remain the “same” company, just as a political party can modify its essential beliefs and remain the “same” political party. In fact, groups are constantly negotiating the boundaries of their identities, deciding who is “in,” who is “out,” and even what it means to be “in.” It is as though there were a circle representing the group, and members negotiate what values, beliefs, and rituals belong within that circle. Political, religious, and social groups often keep their traditional social labels despite redefining the fundamental meanings of those labels.
While your core identity is often resistant to change, another facet of identity is more malleable and provides a powerful pathway for resolving even the most emotionally charged conflicts.

Relational Identity: The Hidden Source of Leverage

Your relational identity is the spectrum of characteristics that define your relationship with a particular person or group. When interacting with your spouse, do you feel distant or close, constrained or free to be as you really are? While your core identity seeks meaning in existence, your relational identity seeks meaning in coexistence. It changes constantly as you negotiate the nature of a relationship, which means that you have tremendous power to shape it.
To illustrate the concept of relational identity, look at the image below.
Before reading on, decide which square is darker, A or B.



The answer: They are the same. Despite the perception that square A is darker than square B, they are in fact identical. (If you remain in doubt, cover everything but squares A and B.) The optical illusion is a result of the fact that you perceive not the objective reality of the boxes but each box relative to the other.
This same perceptual dynamic holds true for differences of identity.
You have a core identity that remains distinct, yet what matters in reconciling a conflict is not just your core identity but also your relational identity—how you perceive who you are in relation to others, and how they perceive their relation to you.

Affiliation: How Close or Distant Do You Feel to the Other?

Affiliation denotes your emotional connection with a person or group.
Stable, constructive connections tend to produce positive emotions and a desire to cooperate, even in times of war.

The flip side of affiliation is rejection.

Neuroscientists have discovered that the anguish of social rejection registers in the anterior cingulate cortex, the same part of the brain that processes physical pain. Your brain responds to rejection much as it does to a punch in the gut: Once hit, you resist cooperating, even if doing so goes against your rational interests, and attempts to resolve your conflict become far more difficult.

Autonomy: How Free Are You to Be Who You Want to Be?

“Autonomy” refers to your ability to exercise your will—to think, feel, do, and be as you would like without undue imposition from others.

In everyday life, there are differences of opinion about how much autonomy is appropriate or to be expected, just as there are variations in how much affiliation is acceptable.
The race car driver wants to drive one hundred miles per hour on local roads because he loves to feel the rush of speed; families who live in the area want slow and cautious driving. A girl wants to wear a headdress to school; administrators demand everyone wear a standard uniform. The very same laws, policies, and norms formulated to hold the fabric of society together can also tear it apart at the seams, generating what Freud called the discontent of civilization.

The Bottom Line: Making One from Two

In a conflict, the core relational challenge is to figure out how to satisfy your desire to be simultaneously one with the other party (affiliation) and one apart from the other party (autonomy). Fundamentally, how can you coexist as both two ones and one set of two? Both autonomy and affiliation are intrinsic to any relationship, and your ability to keep them in equilibrium is paramount to harmonious relations. Children, for example, try to fit into their families and find their own independent voices as they mature. A romantic couple tries to balance the desire to cultivate their relationship while preserving some “alone time.”
In a merger, senior management seeks to create a singular organizational corpus as individual departments struggle to maintain cultural and political autonomy. Even more broadly, international organizations such as the United Nations work to advance a global ethos of peace and at the same time to respect the unique values of member states. At a deeper level, the ability to transcend the tension of autonomy and affiliation represents life's central ethical challenge—a point that Confucius understood well. It is told that he conceived of heaven, earth, and humankind as parts of a singular universe, a Great Whole. He observed that as we live our lives, we have the opportunity to pass through deepening spheres of existence. The shallowest is to live in the natural world, governed only by instinct. Once we discover our ego, we realize we have the autonomy to enhance our place in the world; we can self-actualize.
Eventually we come to perceive not only our own ego, but also the greater social order; we enter the moral sphere of existence and feel obliged to serve humanity. Finally, we realize that social order itself is but a part of the Great Whole, which transcends autonomy and affiliation in pursuit of the good of all.

Ch 3: A Way Forward

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.
I think it's in my basement . . . let me go upstairs and check. —M. C. ESCHER

How Do You Know When You Are in It?

The Tribes Effect is fundamentally an adversarial, self-righteous, closed mindset.

(1) Adversarial. 

The Tribes Effect causes us to view our relationship with the other side through an adversarial lens, magnifying differences between us and minimizing similarities. Even if we feel close to the other person, the Tribes Effect instigates a kind of relational amnesia, in which we forget all the good things about our relationship and recall only the bad.
At Davos, for example, the leaders walked into our workshop as colleagues with innumerable commonalities, but quickly became adversaries and stuck to a divisive disposition. Philosopher Martin Buber describes this as a transformation from an “I-thou” to an “I-it” relationship. The other is no longer a fellow human but a savage it.

(2) Self-righteous. 

The Tribes Effect breeds the self-serving conviction that our perspective is not only right but also morally superior.
Legitimacy stands on our side, and we prepare a rationale to defend it. Even when a warring group commits an act as violent as a massacre, “the butchers often have a clear conscience and are amazed to hear themselves described as criminals.” Indeed, in the Tribes Exercise I often observe each group contemptuously blaming the others: “How could you choose yourtribe over global survival?” Tribes rarely acknowledge their own critical role in bringing about the world's demise. Self-righteousness is easy to recognize in others, but less obvious in our own behavior.

(3) Closed. 

The Tribes Effect molds our identity into a fixed entity. In this closed system, we come to characterize ourselves and the other side as immutable. Rather than listening to the other side to learn about their concerns, we critique their perspective and condemn their character. But we dare not criticize our own perspective, for we fear being disloyal to our own identity.


What Triggers the Tribes Effect?
 

When our identity feels threatened, we tend to react with a rigid set of behaviors that neuroscientists call a threat response. This response can be simple, such as instinctually retreating when we see a snake slither before us, or more complex, such as the Tribes Effect itself, which aims to protect not only our body, but our mind and spirit.
The Tribes Effect triggers when a meaningful aspect of our identity feels threatened. This means that even a seemingly small disagreement can elicit a strong emotional reaction, a dynamic that Freud termed the narcissism of minor differences. The more alike we are—whether siblings, neighbors, or religious brethren—the more we will compare ourselves with one another and feel threatened by minor differences. At Davos, for example, delegates argued over whether “humanitarianism” or “compassion” represented a more important core value. While an outsider might perceive this distinction as insubstantial, insiders viewed it as an existential threat. Backing down to another tribe would have deflated their own tribe's significance.
This same dynamic leads marital couples to fume chronically over “trivial” differences, just as it leads brother to turn his back on brother during civil war. Humanity's infinite commonalities pale in comparison to a singular difference that takes on outsized importance. In short, the trivial can become more than a matter of trivial concern.While a threat to identity triggers the Tribes Effect, respect of identity produces harmonious relations. We feel the freedom to be who we want to be and enjoy our emotional connection with others. But when our sense of autonomy and affiliation feels endangered, protective emotional forces swoop in, and self-protection trumps collaboration.

Counteract the Five Lures of Your Tribal Mind

Overcoming the Tribes Effect requires a strategy much like that adopted by the Greek hero Odysseus. As he navigated his ship home after ten long years of fighting in the Trojan War, he met the goddess Circe, who warned him of a danger he would face on his journey: beautiful Sirens with enchanting voices who bewitched sailors, compelling them to steer toward the Sirens' island, where their ships would crash against the shoreline's sharp rocks and leave “heaps of bodies.” Before he set sail, Odysseus ordered his crew to put wax in their ears and tie him to the mast. If he begged to be released, they were to refuse his orders and bind him even tighter. With this plan in place, Odysseus and his men sailed safely past the Sirens.
The Tribes Effect, like the Sirens, draws you toward it. The more deeply you are enveloped in its emotional folds, the more difficult it becomes to resist its pull. In an emotionally charged conflict, this attraction originates in a powerful set of emotional dynamics, which I call the Five Lures of the Tribal Mind. The chart below provides an overview of them.

The Five Lures of the Tribal Mind 1. Vertigo is a warped state of consciousness in which a relationship consumes your emotional energies.
2. Repetition compulsion is a self-defeating pattern of behavior you feel driven to repeat.
3. Taboos are social prohibitions that hinder cooperative relations.
4. Assault on the sacred is an attack on the most meaningful pillars of your identity.
5. Identity politics is the manipulation of your identity for another's political benefit.

Section 2: The Five Lures of the Tribal Mind

Ch 4: Vertigo

The Disorienting World of Vertigo

The psychological force drawing the professor and his wife toward the Tribes Effect is something I call vertigo: a warped state of consciousness in which a relationship consumes your emotional energies. As the couple slipped into vertigo, a hypnosislike state overcame them; each fixated on the other's angry words, determined not to resolve the argument but to win it.

The word “vertigo” derives from the Latin vertere, meaning “to turn.”
You may know the term from Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo, which depicted it as dizziness brought on by a fear of heights. Modern medicine differentiates a variety of disorders in which people experience a spinning sensation. I have borrowed the term to describe the unique condition in which one feels trapped within a dizzying state of adversarial relations. The argument between the professor and his wife started benignly enough. But as egos were bruised, each spouse passed an emotional threshold and fell into the spiraling state of vertigo.

Picture vertigo as a tornado surrounding you and the other side. Its swirling walls prevent you from seeing anything beyond the boundaries of your conflicted relationship, just as the professor and his wife saw nothing beyond the frenzy of their squabble. Strong gusts of wind blow at you and the other side, heightening the intensity of your emotional experience and turning anger to rage, sadness to despair. Standing at the center of this tornado, you can see the sky above, a vivid image of your greatest fears for the future, while the uprooted ground beneath you reveals your painful past.
This tornado can keep you trapped in the Tribes Effect for hours, days, or even generations.

Obstacles

1. Vertigo Afflicts You Outside Your Awareness

2. Vertigo Diminishes Your Capacity to Self-Reflect

- You mindlessly reenact a conflict script.

- You suffer diminished capacity for self-conscious emotions.

- You stereotype the other party.

3. Vertigo Constricts Your Perception of Time and Space

In a very literal sense, vertigo warps your sense of time and place. Your focus narrows to exclude all else but the situation immediately before you —without your realizing that this is happening. The professor and his wife were so consumed by their conflict that they failed to notice either the onlookers who had gathered or the lengthy passage of time. Vertigo affects your state of consciousness to such an extent that while your world spins upside down, you still believe you are right side up.

4. Vertigo Fixates You on the Negative

- Past pain haunts you.

- Memories of a feared future consume you.

How can you have memories of the future? Aren't memories an artifact of past experience? Not always. In an emotionally charged conflict, you tend to imagine worst- case scenarios about what the other side might do to you in the future, such as to humiliate or attack you. If such an imagined scenario possesses sufficient emotional charge, it can imprint in your memory, until over time you may forget that it is something you invented. Consequently, your brain houses a freestanding memory as a frightening eventuality, and you experience the remembered narrative as though it actually occurred. Your feared future becomes a de facto past, and this “reality” pulls you toward the Tribes Effect. Now you have “proof” that the other side cannot be trusted.
Psychologically, a chosen trauma from the past is no different from a memory of a feared future; they have the same effect, because both involve incorporating an emotionally significant scenario into a current conflict. An ethnic group might conceivably go to war based upon a chosen trauma from five hundred years ago or one they fear will occur five hundred years from now. Strikingly, no member of the group actually experienced either event.
But to them it is a story that evokes an emotional response powerful enough to motivate a call to arms.Vertigo creates an echo chamber of negative sentiment. Because you immerse yourself in a closed system of noxious memories, trivial issues can magnify in importance. In the Tribes Exercise, for example, the world commonly explodes because a tribe feels excluded. When the planet's very survival is at stake, concerns about exclusion should not be such a significant matter. But within the distorted realm of vertigo, exclusion is a potent threat to the tribe's identity. The argument over the bedspread is equally trivial, but from the distorted vantage point of vertigo, the professor's identity felt battered, heightening the issue's resonance.

Breaking Free of Vertigo

 
 
Obstacle
 
Strategy
 

 
1. Vertigo afflicts you outside your awareness.
 
1. Be aware of the symptoms of vertigo.
 

 
2. Vertigo diminishes your ability to self-reflect.
 
2. Jolt your relationship out of its trancelike state.
 

 
3. Vertigo constricts your perception of time and space.
 
3. Expand your field of vision.
 

 
4. Vertigo fixates you on negative memories.
 
4. Externalize the negative.
 
 

Step 1: Be Aware of the Symptoms of Vertigo

First, learn to identify the symptoms of vertigo.
Are you consumed by the conflict? Do you view the other as an adversary? Are you fixated on the negative?

Second, stop. The moment you become aware that you are slipping into vertigo, take a breath. Then take another. Slow down. Wait until you regain perspective before continuing the discussion.

Third, name it. The simple act of naming vertigo can profoundly reduce its power over you. By giving it a label, you turn your abstract swirl of emotions into a discrete “it” to discuss and surmount, reactivating your capacity for self-reflection. When my wife and I recently got into an argument that threatened to lose its bearings, she said, “I feel like we're slipping into vertigo. Do we really want to spend the afternoon arguing?”
Merely recognizing the onset of vertigo helped us resist its allure. We agreed to discuss the issue at hand for a few more minutes and, should we not reach a resolution, to take a break, which would keep us from getting lost in the muddled space between us.

Step 2: Jolt Your Relationship Out of Its Trancelike State 

Remember your purpose.

Use the power of surprise. A second strategy to jolt your relationship is to draw on the power of surprise. Imagine what might have happened if, during that ugly scene in the mall, the professor had cast aside his conflict script and startled his wife out of her anger. Suppose, for example, that after she snapped that she was no longer even sure why they had ever gotten married, he had responded, “In my case, because I loved you. And I love you now. Should we go back and look at the bedspread?” His wife's anger might well have begun to deflate in response to his solicitude. Soon they would have felt their sense of perspective returning, along with their ability to think rationally and generously. They might even have laughed about the absurdity of it all: Was a bedspread really enough to tear them apart like this? The well-placed jolt can be equally effective in international relations.
Consider the famous visit of Egypt's President Sadat to Israel. Until 1977, no Arab leader had ever made an appearance in the Jewish state. Israel and Egypt had fought four wars, and Israel maintained control over the Sinai Peninsula, a region of Egypt it had captured in the 1967 conflict. Israelis felt little hope that peace could ever exist between the two nations. Then, in an act that surprised the world, President Sadat landed at Ben Gurion Airport and spent thirty-six hours in Israel, addressing the Knesset and meeting with key leaders. Sadat's visit jolted the Israeli public into seeing Egyptians not as adversaries but as partners, leading to a peace agreement between the two countries.
An unexpected apology may be the most powerful jolt of all. As the couple argued in the mall, the professor could have taken a deep breath,paused, and told his wife, “I've said a lot of mean things to you just now.
I'm sorry. I spoke without thinking.” That admission would have been likely to stop her in her tracks, surprised at this sudden turn of events. If she felt her husband's apology was a sincere expression of remorse, the space between them would have opened for constructive conversation.

- Summon a legitimate authority.

- Change the subject.

Step 3: Expand Your Field of Vision

Broaden Your Sense of Space

- Alter your physical environment.

- Look at the conflict from a new vantage point.

In vertigo, the issues at hand can take on such gravity that backing down from your position feels like a crushing defeat. You can counter this by examining your situation from a broader vantage point.
Imagine taking a spaceship to the moon, looking down at the Earth, and realizing just how small your conflict is in the grand scheme of things.
Frank White, a colleague at Harvard, studied the psychology of astronauts and discovered that after they return to Earth, they share a profound cognitive shift in their view of human relations: To them, all the world's troubles seem secondary to the goal of embracing the Earth as a whole. He calls this expansive perspective the overview effect. Even if you never make it into space, you can still benefit from this exercise in perspective.
You also can change your vantage point in more modest ways.
Imagine your conflict is a twelve-story building, and both parties are on the top floor. Up there the situation is intense, gut-wrenching, an emotional whirlwind. Now imagine telling the other party in your conflict to wait there on the twelfth floor for a few minutes. You enter the elevator. As you travel downward, floor by floor, you take a deep breath and feel the calm that arrives as you exhale. You begin to perceive the other party's feelings of vulnerability and can better appreciate your own. By the time you reach the ground floor, you more clearly understand each side's contribution to the conflict. Now press the button to return to the twelfth floor and finish your conversation.

Reorient Your Sense of Time

Slow down. 

Because vertigo causes a chain of reactive emotions, it may be helpful to slow the tempo of the conversation and just listen—not to register incoming attacks, but to detect underlying emotions. You might also slow communication: Wait a few hours before responding to the e-mail that angered you. Speak more slowly, reminding yourself to take a momentbefore responding. Or, if you are involved in an extended conversation, take breaks periodically to maintain some distance between the conflict and your emotions.

Fast-forward. 

In our mall example, the professor might have said to his wife, “Pretend it's ten years from now, and we're looking back on this fight about the bedspread. What advice do you think those older, wiser versions of ourselves would give us?”
I drew on this fast-forwarding technique several years ago when designing and co-facilitating a private negotiation workshop for Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. Rather than asking them to discuss ways to break their impasse—which would have quickly brought them into a state of vertigo—I challenged them to imagine what a peaceful state of coexistence between them would look like twenty years in the future, from an economic, social, and political perspective. That question transformed a potential battleground into a collaborative brainstorming session.
Envisioning a specific future made that future more tangible than the abstract fears brought on by vertigo. That session planted the seeds for a major peace initiative.

Rewind. 

When my wife and I get into a conflict, vertigo regularly tempts us to turn a short-lived argument into a long-term fiasco. On those occasions, I get myself to remember our relationship at its happiest: the first time I flirted with her, the day we got married on Block Island, the feeling of laughing at the ridiculous jokes of our three boys. These memories open up space in my mind to decide whether I want to walk down the path toward vertigo—and I almost always choose not to.
I say “almost always” for two reasons: First, I am human, and sometimes the pull of vertigo is too strong for me to resist. Second, vertigo, when properly controlled, does sometimes have its merits. For example, you might think to yourself, I'm in vertigo now, but it feels good to express myself. However valuable that may be at a given moment, I recommend that you set a specific time limit at which to end it: Let me look at my clock, and in ten minutes I'll propose that we take a break. While such deliberateness of purpose may sound unnatural, it helps you establish an important mechanism to break through vertigo's hold on your sense of time.

Step 4: Externalize the Negative

You need a strategy to combat vertigo's obsessive focus on the negative— one that enables you to reveal distressing emotions without reveling in them. But how do you formulate one?

Name the Dynamic

Oscar Wilde once remarked that “man is least himself when he talks in his own person; give him a mask and he will tell the truth.” In a conflict, talking directly about distressing emotions can feel combative, especially if you see your pain as a result of the other's words or behavior. You need a technique to allow you to talk about emotional obstacles without specifically talking about emotions—in other words, to help you have a direct conversation in an indirect fashion. You need to externalize the negative—that is, to use symbolic communication to discuss the emotional forces weighing down your relationship.
Rather than reacting to conflictual dynamics at play in a conversation and heading straight toward vertigo, you can identify those dynamics and strategize aloud about how best to deal with them. By objectifying your subjective experience, you give a name and concrete reality to the intangible forces driving your conflict.

Ch 5: Repetition Compulsion

We are, all of us, creatures of the repetition compulsion.
—DANIEL SHAPIRO,
NEGOTIATING THE NONNEGOTIABLE

The Anatomy of the Repetition Compulsion

Repetition is a fundamental aspect of human life. You wake up at the same time each morning, eat the same types of food, and laugh at the same kinds of jokes. Some repetitive behaviors are helpful—but others, like the repetition compulsion, can do harm.
Sigmund Freud initially presumed that human beings are fundamentally driven by the pleasure principle, which leads them to seek pleasure while avoiding pain. This theory made sense—until Freud encountered a series of paradoxes. Why, he wondered, do some people repeatedly engage in relationships that result in “unpleasure”? Is it a mere accident that each of an individual's friends eventually betrays him? That his protégés all angrily abandon him? That his romantic relationships always begin with a bang but fizzle out at the three-month mark? Freud conceived of the repetition compulsion as a way of explaining this “demonic force” that is “more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it overrides.”
I view the repetition compulsion as a dysfunctional pattern of behavior that you feel driven to repeat. It is a more complex form of a habit, which springs to life when a stimulus produces a desired response. (For example, you crave caffeine, so you mindlessly walk to a café and order a latte. The stimulus produces the response you wished for—and soon you develop aserious espresso habit.) The repetition compulsion goes deeper, luring you to repeat that which you would rather not. You unwittingly place yourself in a self-defeating situation, unconsciously repeating an age-old pattern of behavior while assuming that it is a product of present circumstance.
To break free of the repetition compulsion, it is important to first understand how it distorts your perceptions during a conflict.
First, you suffer an emotional wound. When your identity feels violated—whether by aggression, abuse, or a catastrophic change in circumstance—the experience leaves a painful emotional wound. Consider the experience of my friend Jen. When she was seven, her father left home and never returned. His abandonment affected her deeply and gave rise to a lasting emotional scar. When she was growing up, she would play outdoors with friends but look incessantly toward the top of the street, hoping to see her father's car approaching. It never came.
Second, you exile painful emotions to your unconscious. You lock those emotions in a cell within the back corridors of your mind, hoping never to see them again. When I first met Jen, she was thirty years old, but her father's abandonment remained the most painful event of her life. She had never sought therapy, however, and rarely discussed her childhood with friends, instead confining her sadness, shame, and rage within that chamber in her unconscious, pretending those emotions did not exist.
Third, you scan hypervigilantly for any stimuli that may produce a similar emotional wound. Though Jen repressed her emotions, they refused to stay sequestered in her unconscious. They pounded the walls, banged the ceiling, and shouted incessantly. Whenever she unconsciously detected a conflict situation in her life that was even modestly suggestive of abandonment, she drew on the only experience she knew. Despite evidence to the contrary, she held firm to the belief that her husband would eventually betray her, her boss would fire her, and her best friend would end their relationship. In situation after situation, Jen cast herself as a victim of desertion. The pain of her childhood wound regularly resurfaced, turning even unrelated conflicts into painfully familiar scenarios.
Fourth, you unconsciously attempt to alleviate your painful feelings. While the most effective way to address painful emotions is to unearth them and work through them head-on, facing them can befrightening. The repetition compulsion offers an alternative route—it attempts to help you master them without dealing directly with them.
But it has limited effectiveness, because it restricts your behavioral repertoire. On the one hand, the repetition compulsion may encourage you to unconsciously “act out” painful emotions, repeating the very conditions that hurt you initially in the hope that this time you will “master” your age- old trauma. Whenever Jen's husband traveled on a business trip, she felt deeply abandoned, and when he would return home, she would pick fights with uncharacteristic intensity, with the secret hope that this time she would be able to achieve command of her situation. But of course the more she yelled, the more distanced her husband felt, leaving her repeatedly promoting the very abandonment she so deeply feared.
On the other hand, you may avoid situations in which your repressed emotions will emerge. For example, Jen remained alert to any context in which someone might abandon her. When she believed she had identified such a prospect, she would take preemptive action, distancing herself before the other party could do the same to her. The result of her premature withdrawal was predictable: Her friends felt rejected—and abandoned her.
Once again Jen recreated the very circumstances of abandonment she was attempting to master.
While the repetition compulsion can cause you ongoing grief due to its self-defeating nature, it is in some respects well intentioned and a necessary part of the healing process. It prompts you to wonder, Do I really need to endure this pain again? And ultimately it is that very question that will help you finally halt the repetition compulsion.

Barriers to Breaking Free

1. The Repetition Compulsion Happens Automatically

2. The Repetition Compulsion Feels Education-Resistant

3. The Repetition Compulsion Takes Control of Your Feelings

4. The Repetition Compulsion Feels Ingrained

Strategy for Breaking the Repetition Compulsion

1. Catch the repetition compulsion at the earliest possible moment.
2. Resist the pull to repeat the same patterns.
3. Reclaim power over your feelings.
4. Add a new routine to your repertoire.

1. Catch the Repetition Compulsion at the Earliest Possible Moment: The TCI Method

Just as the police are better able to catch a bank robber if they have a mug shot, you will be more effective at halting the repetition compulsion with a picture of your typical pattern of conflict.

Start by identifying a relationship that repeatedly comes under strain from conflict. Do you bicker time and again with your spouse, your kids, or a colleague? Conflict is inevitable—you can expect to have differences with other people—so look specifically for patterns of recurrent mayhem, situations in which you repeatedly avoid, confront, accuse, blame, or otherwise sabotage straightforward resolution. If you keep finding yourself having the same sort of disagreements with the same unsatisfying results, the repetition compulsion is likely at play.
Once you identify this recurring conflict, map out the key pattern that you tend to repeat, including the trigger, cycle of discord, and impact (“the TCI method”). Awareness of this pattern empowers you to stop its repetition. The chart here provides a guide to get you started.



The Lure of the Compulsion Do You Repeatedly Fear Being . . .
 Abandoned Alienated Dependent Emasculated Empty Enmeshed Helpless Inferior Insignificant Patronized Powerless Rejected Subordinate Used Weak Worthless

3. Reclaim Power over Your Feelings

Clarify the Emotional Contours of Your Current Conflict While some of your emotions will undoubtedly be stirred by the circumstances of your current conflict, others will likely be a product of the repetition compulsion. To detect the latter, ask yourself three powerful questions: 1. Are these issues mine, or are they yours? Distinguish the ones that drive each of you to conflict.
2. Is this now, or is this then? Attune to past wounds affecting your present experience.
3. Did I do this, or did you? Notice what you each contributed to the conflict—and whether any blame may be misplaced.

Work Through Emotional Wounds

First, identify a deeply sensitive issue that repeatedly triggers strong emotions, such as fear of rejection, abandonment, or inferiority.

Second, trace the origins of that issue.

Third, explore painful feelings that accompany the wound.

Fourth, release the pain. This requires both a conscious decision and conscious effort. Once your pain has been “heard,” you can let it go; it has said what it needs to say. Jen realized she could decide whether to hold on to the emotional burden of abandonment—and chose to release it. The process was emotionally wrenching but purifying.

Fifth, turn your wound into a source of strength. The scars of Jen's abandonment will remain with her forever, even though she has released the pain of her childhood memories. Rather than seeing herself as a victim of those circumstances, however, she has reframed her perspective, vowing to be a beacon of love to her own family and friends and to never abandon a friend or relative in need.

4. Add a New Routine to Your Repertoire

While you cannot change the other's behavior, modifying your own routine can productively affect the relationship. To devise a new routine, recall your typical pattern of conflict, which you mapped out in the chart here. Now conceive a constructive alternative to this behavioral repertoire, considering what steps you might take to do the following.

Preempt the trigger.
When you know what sets you off, you are better equipped to halt it. If you and your spouse frequently fight over finances, you might agree to discuss money matters only with a financial adviser present, or commit to uphold a monthly budget.

Replace a behavior in the cycle of discord.
Review your cycle of discord and choose one behavior to alter. For example, imagine a typical cycle of discord between you and a colleague over project plans. She criticizes you, you criticize her, she criticizes you again, and you withdraw. One alternative approach would involve you empathizing with her situation after her initial attack.

Replace the entire cycle of discord.

Envision a constructive cycle of dialogue to replace your current one. The two founding partners of a technology start-up company heeded this advice. As investments in their company increased, the intensity of their arguments escalated. Realizing that their deteriorating relations might jeopardize their company, they sat down and articulated an alternative process to deal with their differences. Rather than engage in a cycle of attack and counterattack, they agreed to shareperspectives and search for common ground, an approach that proved much more effective for their company and their relationship.

Guard Against Relapse 

The decision to change your fundamental patterns of behavior requires a reconceptualization of your identity—a task that can be extremely difficult.
I remember watching my loving grandmother, whom I called Nan, struggle to quit smoking. As the years wore on, the habit took its toll. Even with an oxygen tank helping her to breathe and lung cancer spreading, she would still sneak an occasional cigarette. The habit cost her her life.
While addiction certainly was a contributing element to my grandmother's behavior, I believe identity was her core obstacle. She identified herself as a smoker—I saw her that way too—and she could not envision herself otherwise; it had been part of who she was for nearly fifty years.
Revise Your Self-Image Breaking free of the repetition compulsion requires you to envision a new self-image and visualize yourself enacting it. You might even choose a role model and channel that person's qualities in your next conflict. What will it feel like to act as that person? What might you say if the other side offends you? What can you do to generate their goodwill? Rehearse your response in your mind again and again until it becomes second nature.
Devise a Plan to Guard Against Relapse William James wrote, “Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; takea public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know.” Perhaps the most powerful way to live up to James's exhortation is to enlist help in guarding against the repetition compulsion's return. Jen, for example, knew that while she was ultimately responsible for pulling herself out of its hold, the combined effort of Mark's assisting her in achieving that goal was ultimately more effective than Jen's attempting it alone.
Guard Against the Unguarded Moment Before engaging with the other side, reflect on what they might say or do that could trigger you to repeat a destructive pattern of behavior. Then consider the most important question: What might you say or do to avoid the repetition compulsion? When I mediate a heated dispute, I establish norms to prevent the disputants from returning to the repetition compulsion: “The goal of our session is to help you come to a better understanding of each other's perspectives and to explore ways to reconcile your differences. I recognize you are in a rut—and it's easy to fall back into your same old conflict dynamics. So our goal today is to have a different conversation, a more productive one in which you listen to learn rather than to defend.” During the mediation, I listen carefully to ensure that each disputant treats the other with respect. If either party offends the other, I immediately interrupt to remind both parties of our norms—and redirect discussion toward constructive dialogue.
There are times, however, when you are likely to let down your guard and no mediator is there to rescue you. With a little bit of forethought, you often can anticipate these situations and make a plan to prevent them. For example, during vacations with extended family, my wife and I used to engage repeatedly in an emotionally draining pattern of conflict, in which we felt angry over some perceived offense, then felt embarrassed and ashamed that our relationship was not “perfect,” at which point we would pretend our connection was fine, which merely exacerbated our tension.
Once we realized this pattern, we made a plan to guard against it, agreeingto talk privately each evening to vent any frustrations and emotionally reconnect, in effect keeping the repetition compulsion at bay.

Ch 6: Taboos

What Are Taboos?

Taboos are social prohibitions—actions, feelings, or thoughts that a community deems unacceptable. The word “taboo” was introduced into the English language in 1777, when British explorer James Cook sailed the HMS Resolution across the Pacific to what were then known as the Friendly Islands and are now known as Tonga. Cook discovered that the island's inhabitants used the word tabu to refer to all that was forbidden, and the term soon found its way into English parlance—perhaps because it handily describes a dynamic familiar to people in just about every culture.
Every taboo has three components—a prohibition, a punishment for breaking it, and protective significance.

Prohibition

A taboo identifies certain feelings, thoughts, or actions as being off-limits, creating a boundary between what is acceptable and what is forbiddenwithin a community to which you belong, whether your family, your workplace, or broader society. For example, premarital sex is acceptable in some cultures but taboo in others. A taboo is thus a social construction and is prohibitive only to the extent that we tacitly agree on its restriction. Curse words hold no inherent power: If you were to say an English obscenity calmly to someone who speaks no English, he would stare at you just as blankly as if you had said the word “chair.” We attach prohibitive meanings to words, thoughts, and actions—which means we can also attach new meanings to them.
Punishment Every taboo comes with punishment for violation. The more intense the punishment, the more likely you are to feel pressure to comply with the taboo. You either hang together or get hanged. Typical penalties for breaking a taboo:

Don't talk about that issue . . . or I will walk out the door.

Don't negotiate with those people . . . or we will ostracize you from our community.

Don't eat that type of food . . . or you will break a religious covenant.

Don't touch that dead body . . . or you will contaminate your body and soul.

Protection

Taboos act as unwritten social rules guarding you from saying or doing things that offend values deemed important by society, or by the powerful members within it. Some taboos protect you from committing sacrilege. For example, in the Jewish religion it is taboo to drop the Torah, with one tradition commanding the violator and those who witness the act to fast for forty days. Other taboos shield you from dangers both moral and practical —the taboo against adultery helps maintain a stable social and familial order and also reduces the spread of sexually transmitted disease. Still others may protect your identity from criticism, as when rules of politeness inhibit people from disparaging one another's views.
Taboos bear a close functional resemblance to the repetition compulsion: Both are imperfect systems designed to defend your identity from harm. The repetition compulsion uses psychological mechanisms such as repression to protect you from undesirable thoughts, feelings, and behavior, whereas taboos use social mechanisms such as ostracism to protect you from unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And just as attempts to break the repetition compulsion are met with psychological resistance, attempts to break a taboo are often met with social resistance. In Marrakesh, as BBC host Nik Gowing requested that Dahlan speak English,
Dahlan refused; the harder Gowing pushed, the more strongly Dahlan resisted.

Why Do We Stumble over Taboos?

Several obstacles often make it difficult to deal with taboos.

1. We Are Unaware of a Taboo

2. We Fear Discussing the Taboo Issue

3. We Have No Framework

How to Navigate Taboos

 
 
Stumbling Block
 
Strategy
 

 
1. We are unaware of a taboo.
 
1. Become aware of taboos.
 

 
2. We fear discussing the taboo.
 
2. Establish a safe zone.
 

 
3. We have no framework to decide how to treat a taboo issue.
 
3. Make an action plan: the ACT System.
 
 



Ch 7: Assault on the Sacred

Welcome to the World of the Sacred

When your deepest beliefs feel threatened, you may find yourself mired in the fourth lure of your tribal mind, an assault on the sacred. This is an attack on the most meaningful pillars of your identity: any matters so deeply significant that they feel sacrosanct, exempt from debate. Spouses passionately disagree over which values to instill in their children.
Employees reject a colleague who criticizes core institutional values.
International negotiators deadlock over who should control sacred land.
An assault on what you hold as sacred triggers a powerful emotional reaction that to the outsider may seem an overreaction, irrational. But that is not the case from your own vantage point. The central purpose of identity is to help you make meaning of your experience in the world—and the sacred represents your deepest form of meaning. An assault on the sacred cuts you to the quick, shaking the most sensitive pillars of your identity and raising fears that it will not withstand the blow.
What Is the Sacred? I define the sacred as that which we perceive to be imbued with divine significance. The “divine” need not refer to a specifically religious entity.
While the object of one's veneration can be a deity, prophet, or holy text, it also can be a family member, beloved place, or cherished event. Just as a religious person holds hallowed scripture as sacred, a nationalist views his country's flag as a sacred object never to be defaced, and a widow holds sacred her departed spouse's ashes.
We revere as divine whatever we view as imbued with infinite, intrinsic, and inviolable significance.

Infinite

My love for my children, and their worth to me, is boundless. But love that is nonquantifiable presents problems in conflict resolution. When negotiators are forced to quantify the sacred, the act feels both morallyoffensive and practically impossible. After a deadly act of terrorism, how should a government distribute compensation to the families of the victims? Should the amount vary by recipient, based on such criteria as the victim's age and income? Asking such questions is discomfiting, and making the resulting decisions is enormously difficult.

Intrinsic

The divine holds intrinsic significance. It is not just that I feel my children are sacred; from my perspective they are sacred in their very being. Their infinite value resides in them, not in my belief about them. We perceive the significance of the divine to be an innate feature of the object of our reverence.

Inviolable

Because every aspect of the divine possesses infinite worth, to insult one part of a sacred entity is to insult its entirety. It is immaterial whether someone burns ten pages from the Bible or Koran or crosses out a single word; the offense is sacrilegious. To dismiss an assault on the sacred as “minor” neglects the fact that any offense committed against a revered object, however slight, can feel enormous to the offended party.

Obstacles to Negotiating the Sacred

1. We Are Unaware of the Sacred

2. We Conflate the Sacred and the Secular

3. We Fail to Give Due Respect to the Sacred

4. We Refuse to Compromise on Sacred Issues

 
 
Obstacle
 
Strategy
 

 
1. We are unaware of the sacred.
 
1. Sensitize to the sacred.
 

 
2. We conflate the sacred and the secular.
 
2. Disentangle the sacred from the secular.
 

 
3. We fail to give due respect to the sacred.
 
3. Acknowledge what each side holds sacred.
 

 
4. We refuse to compromise on sacred issues.
 
4. Problem solve within each side's sphere of identity.
 
 

A Strategy for Negotiating the Sacred

1. Sensitize to the Sacred

Do You Feel a Threat To . . .
1. Sacred beliefs—vital cultural, religious, or social convictions? 2. Sacred rituals—meaningful activities or spiritual practices? 3. Sacred allegiances—intense loyalty to close friends, family members, or political allies?4. Sacred values—deeply held ideals or principles? 5. Sacred experiences—emotionally meaningful experiences that integrally define your identity?





Ch 8: Identity Politics

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
—KARL POPPER

Consider what the following three scenarios have in common:

1. The rocky marriage. 

A friend named Kathy calls me up in tears.
Her marriage to Joe is falling to pieces. From a distance, I can see the dynamic at play: While their differences are not insurmountable, their parents unwittingly mobilize them to battle. Every time Kathy calls up her mother for consolation, her response is “You are absolutely right, Kathy.
Joe is wrong—and as self-centered as ever. I honestly don't know how you live with him.” Meanwhile, Joe's mother supports his perspective and dismisses Kathy as “difficult” and “stubborn.” The parental support is tearing their marriage apart.

2. The company clash. 

A multinational company is in the midst of a turf war between the research and marketing divisions. Each fears the other is out to sabotage its productivity and “steal” resources. As preparations begin for next year's budget, each division's leader meets discreetly with the CEO to advocate for her own division as the “soul” of the company and a wiser investment of the company's resources.
3. The turbulent state. Serbian president Slobodan Milošević stands before a huge crowd in Gazimestan, Kosovo, invoking Serbia's defeat in Kosovo six hundred years earlier as a nationalistic call to arms. “Let the

memory of Kosovo heroism live forever!” he exclaims. “Long live Serbia! Long live Yugoslavia! Long live peace and brotherhood among peoples!”
Many observers credit this speech as the breaking point leading to the Kosovo war.
In each of the previous examples, the fifth of the lures—identity politics—is at play. Identity politics can jeopardize the emotional life of a marriage, the efficiency of an organization, or the security of a region.
Unlike the other lures, it is often deliberately used to manipulate and divide people, fueling the Tribes Effect. But armed with the right strategies, you can use identity politics to improve your relationships and reach mutually satisfying outcomes to conflicts.

What Is Identity Politics?

Humans are, by their nature, political animals—an observation made by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago. Your every word and action conveys a message about your political standing in relation to others. You may nestle yourself in good relations with your boss or compliment a friend to strengthen your bond. Simply put, politics is about “who gets what, when, and how.”
Identity politics, then, refers to the process of positioning your identity to advance a political purpose. You ally with specific individuals or groups within a power structure to better your odds of reaching your goals. But you also may pay a price for associating with one particular group and not another. This whole process occurs within a political space—a social circle in which people interact to make decisions. A government is the most familiar such space, but others include a marriage, friendship, or workplace.
Each of these spaces presents opportunity for discord over who gets what— and at what price.
Looking back at the three examples at the beginning of this chapter, we can now see how people positioned their identities to serve some sort of political purpose—and paid the price:

In the rocky marriage of Kathy and Joe, each mother sought to cocoon her child from emotional distress (the purpose), allying herself as a loyal advocate for her child (positioning). Each mother delegitimized the other spouse's concerns, strengthening her own child's sense of righteousness but inadvertently fracturing the couple's relations (the price).

In the company example, the research and marketing leaders aspired to gain greater financial resources (the purpose) and each met privately with the CEO to argue for her own division's superior importance to the organization (positioning). But their actions reinforced their long-standing rift and reduced organizational productivity (the price).

In the Serbia example, Milošević aspired to mobilize support for his vision of a greater Serbia (the purpose), rallying Serbian nationalism through his speech on the former battlegrounds in Kosovo (positioning). But he also sharpened the lines of division between the region's ethnopolitical groups; the subsequent violence contributed to a massive loss of lives and brought Milošević before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where he was indicted for crimes against humanity (the price).

The Pitfalls of Politics

 
 
Pitfall
 
Strategy
 

 
1. Ignorance of the political landscape.
 
1. Map the political landscape.
 

 
2. Clinging to a negative identity.
 
2. Build a positive identity.
 

 
3. Reliance on an exclusive decision-making process.
 
3. Design an inclusive decision-making process.
 

 
4. Treated like a political pawn.
 
4. Protect yourself from being exploited.
 
 

1. Map the Political Landscape

Look for Two Levels of Political Influence

The Ladder: Who's the boss?

The Network: Who are your allies?

Stay Actively Aware of the Political Landscape

Notice when others seek to shape your identity.

Attune to the other side's political pressures.

Be alert for spoilers. Spoilers are people who try to undermine your efforts to resolve a conflict—and identity politics is a key tool in their arsenal, for conflict suits their political interests more than resolution.

2. Build a Positive Identity

Emphasize the Relentless 'We'

Define Identity in Positive Terms

3. Design an Inclusive Decision-Making Process

The ECNI Method

This process provides a template for inclusive decision making while also accounting for differences in authority. Begin by considering three key questions:

(1) What is the decision to be made?

(2) Whom does this decision affect?

(3) How much input should each stakeholder have in the decision-making process? If you believe that a stakeholder is likely to be a spoiler, you may even want to exclude them from part or all of the negotiation process—but weigh that against the risk that they may feel rejected and seek retribution.

Now draw three columns on a sheet of paper. In the first column, write the decision to be made. In the second column, list the key stakeholders the decision affects. To complete column three, employ the ECNI method, deciding which stakeholders to exclude from the decision-making process; consult before making the decision; negotiate with to reach a decision; and inform after a decision has been made.
Mia and I sat down one evening and discussed who should be part of the vacation negotiation and who should merely be consulted or kept informed. The chart here illustrates the results of our thinking. I consulted with my department chair on the date of our trip to ensure there was no major academic meeting scheduled for that time; Mia and I then consulted with our parents and kids on their interests; and finally the two of us negotiated the location and informed everyone: We would head to Block Island in the summer to catch the sun, sand, and hiking trails, and then join the in-laws over the winter holidays at Disney World. We decided topostpone any international travel until all our kids passed the toddler stage.
And we agreed that, should any of the stakeholders oppose our suggestions, we would negotiate with them. Using the ECNI Method—exclude, consult, negotiate, inform—we streamlined the politics of decision making and enjoyed a great vacation.




In Multiparty Conflicts: Clump

4. Protect Yourself from Being Exploited

Name the Dynamic—and Propose an Alternative

Enhance Your Structural Power

Forge Good Political Relations

In Sum
 Identity politics is a matter of power, and power is relational: You acquire it through your relations with others. Negative identity politics traps you in adversarial relations that can spiral your conflict toward the Tribes Effect.
Positive identity politics, on the other hand, can foster cooperative relations.
The underlying strategy of positive identity politics is straightforward: Define who you are, not who you are not. Then persistently position yourself to maximize partnership and minimize resentment.

Section 3: Bridging the Divide

Ch 9: Integrative Dynamics—a Four-Step Method

There is nothing quite like listening to the late, great jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie. As he brings the trumpet to his mouth, puckering his lips and expanding his cheeks like two balloons, the sound that flows through his instrument feels rhythmic and melodious, then as choppy as a car hitting bumps in the road, then flowing again like water in a stream. As a drum sizzles softly in the background and a piano accents three off notes, Dizzy hits a potent staccato—bop-ditti-bop-bop-BOOM—disrupting the rhythm once again and then striking a downward scale with penetrating speed and bravado. This wild array of sounds and beats, discordant and discombobulated, frenzied and fanciful, weaves together in a strikingly integrated whole, a harmonious trail of musical whims.
Jazz finds harmony in dissonance. The dissonance remains, but is held together by a deeper, integrative force.
This insight is crucial to resolving an emotionally charged conflict. To heal broken relations, you need to find transcendent unity. While your core identity and the other's may feel completely incompatible, do not let the Five Lures undermine your sense of what is possible. You have the capacity to create harmony within yourself and in your relations with others. Once you believe in the possibility of transcendent unity, you open yourself up to finding it. Dizzy Gillespie undoubtedly had off nights, searching in vain for that elusive well of creative energy. At times he undoubtedly was dissatisfied with his own performance; transcendent unity can be elusive.
But his “on nights” were flawless. He integrated Afro-Cuban rhythms with Afro-American jazz, bopping up and down scale after scale in lightning-fast tempo and creating a musical whole much larger than the sum of its discordant parts.

Conventional Methods of Conflict Resolution Are Insufficient

Two conventional methods of conflict resolution—positional bargaining and problem solving—are insufficient to achieve transcendent unity in an emotionally charged conflict.

Positional Bargaining?

In positional bargaining, you and the other side take firm, opposing stances, cling tightly to them, and stubbornly refuse to concede. This method works best in straightforward transactions. When purchasing a new car, for example, the buyer requests a lowball price, the dealer responds with a higher one, and both sides volley back and forth until finally agreeing on a number somewhere in the middle. Everyone walks away relatively happy.
Positional bargaining falls short, however, when issues of identity are at stake. Identity implicates indivisible issues of meaning, memory, and narrative. To reduce identity to a tradable commodity that can be compromised is to undermine its very essence. For almost anyone, such existential compromise would seem repugnant. Imagine two leaders negotiating a sacred piece of land:

Politician A: If you sacrifice 20 percent of your religious values, we'll give you 20 percent more land.

Politician B: I will never agree to that! I suggest we do an even 10 percent sacrifice on religious values. You add a 20 percent increase in respect for my people, and we will guarantee a 5 percent decrease in humiliation of your people for two years.

Politician A: Only if you include a clause in the contract noting that you'll wipe out all negative memories of my people. Is it a deal? The entire premise of the above negotiation—that core identity can be quantitatively adjusted and traded—represents a fundamental methodological flaw. Yet even at Davos, the leaders held to entrenchedpositions and presumed that their task was to persuade others to join their tribe, until positional bargaining produced an explosion.
Problem Solving? A second common method of conflict resolution, collaborative problem solving, encourages you and the other side to look beneath your respective positions for underlying interests and then to devise an agreement that best satisfies those deeper motivations. But this approach also has serious deficits in the face of an emotionally charged conflict.
Consider one of the most well-known anecdotes in the field of negotiation. Two young sisters fight over an orange. “I want the orange!” yells one. “No, it's mine!” responds the other. They tug back and forth.
Along comes their mother, frustrated and tired. Should she cut the orange in half? Tell the sisters that no one gets it? Eat it herself? Well versed in problem solving, she finally asks each child, “Why do you want the orange?” The younger sister sniffles and says she needs its vitamin C to help cure her cold. The older sister says she is making a pie and needs the rind. Aha! The solution becomes clear. By looking behind the girls' stated positions to determine their underlying interests, she can give each daughter what she wants without compromise.
Problem solved! Or is it? I used to think so, until I became a parent. I have three young boys who have a knack for sibling rivalry, and problem solving tends to be no more than a temporary solution. In the real world, the mother in the above anecdote could expect, only minutes after resolving the orange dispute, that the girls would begin to argue over who should get the bigger cookie or the last piece of pie or some other issue. In other words, the mother may have solved the problem, but not the fundamental dynamic.
The emotional intensity of each sister's commitment to getting her way suggests deeper concerns—ones that involve identity. Who is stronger? Smarter? More loved? Until such issues are confronted and dealt with, any solution to the presenting problem will only temporarily forestall a new conflict.To overcome an emotionally charged conflict, an alternative method of conflict resolution needs to be found—and Dizzy Gillespie's discordant harmony offers a way.

The Power of Integrative Dynamics

To reconcile strained relations, summon the power of integrative dynamics —emotional forces that pull you toward greater connection, with the most stable connection being transcendent unity. In this state of mind, you move beyond the pull of opposing perspectives, beyond the duality of us versus them. Integrative dynamics link you and the other side together as one, separate but united. Just as the Five Lures divide you from the other side (regardless of your similarities), integrative dynamics connect you (regardless of your differences).
Integrative dynamics hold the power to convert your relations from adversarial to collegial, shifting the habitual center of your emotional energies from enmity to amity. Achieving this requires an emotionally intense process to transform your relations until positive sentiment occurs outside your conscious will, leaving you feeling as if a dark cloud had suddenly lifted. I view this process as a relational conversion, for through it you effectively alter the emotional space that exists between you and the other side. As in a religious conversion, the key is to believe change is possible and to surrender yourself to it. You will still feel afflictive emotions, but if you trust in the potential of integrative dynamics, your healing instincts will follow.

Integrative dynamics pulls you toward a communal mindset, which is characterized as:

1. Cooperative. 

Rather than viewing the other side solely as a threat, you are able to identify ties of connection and highlight them to foster cooperative relations. You do not disregard difference, but you do not turn it into a basis for division.

2. Compassionate. 

A communal mindset invokes compassion toward your own plight, as well as toward the suffering of your counterpart. In a conflict, some people may suffer more than others, but everyone feels a degree of pain. Compassion is a humanistic ideal, because it demonstrates that your motives extend beyond self-interest. As your connections improve, compassion naturally flows between you and the other party.

3. Open. 

In a communal mindset, you are open to connecting with others. The walls of your identity become porous, allowing you to learn about the other side's concerns and to share your own.
Rather than getting mired in a battle over core identities, you permit yourself to imagine new, creative approaches to relate to each other.

 
 
Divisive Mindset (the Tribes Effect)
 
Communal Mindset
 
 
 
1. Adversarial
 
1. Cooperative


 
2. Self-righteous
 
2. Compassionate
 

 
3. Closed
 
3. Open
 
 

Integrative dynamics comprises a four-step approach to reconcile damaged relations and resolve identity-based differences. The chart on the next page depicts these steps and how they interconnect. In brief, the process begins with your engaging in a unique method to understand how you and the other side each view your relations in the conflict. Once your narratives feel heard and acknowledged, you jointly work through emotional pain. As your relations thaw, opportunities open up to build authentic connections, which provide a basis for recasting your relationship within a mutually affirming narrative. Subsequent chapters guide you through each step.

Ch 10: Uncover Your Mythos of Identity

Humans are innate storytellers. From the moment you are born, your family wraps you in stories about your identity—naming you, teaching you about your culture, and inculcating in you a historical web of allies and adversaries. These stories lend coherence to your life and shape to your identity.
Of all the stories that fuel conflict, none affects you more than your mythos of identity—the core narrative that shapes how you see your identity in relation to that of the other side. In a conflict, you are likely to regard yourself as the victim and the other as the villain. You fill in the details of this mythos with personal grievances and accusations. Of course, the other side also sees the conflict through a mythos—and in theirs they are the victim. Unless you transform the fundamental way you relate to each other —your mythos—your conflict will remain.
But to characterize your mythos solely as a liability is to tell only half the story. Just as atomic energy can be used productively to generate electricity, your mythos can be used to bring about reconciliation. The more deeply you appreciate each other's mythos, the more space you create to build positive relations. The other's “irrational” behavior becomes understandable.
This chapter presents a unique method to uncover each party's mythos. As it turns out, merely acknowledging grievances is not sufficient to resolve an emotionally charged conflict. You need tools to unpack the symbolic significance of the conflict and reshape your relations, yielding a more successful dialogue and enabling you to defuse even the most explosive conflict.The Unconscious Power of Mythos The mythos you project onto a conflict has a powerful, unconscious impact on how your conflict unfolds, as I witnessed while facilitating a negotiation exercise for global leadership at an international conference in Europe. I randomly stratified the fifty attendees into economic classes, ranging from elites to lower-income groups. The elites were given substantial resources; the lower classes were given nearly none. Attendees had three rounds to trade resources with whomever they wanted to maximize their independent financial success. As the elites compounded their wealth, the lower classes' frustration grew.
Prior to round three, I announced a surprise twist. The elites had by now acquired so much wealth that they would be given the opportunity to formulate new rules for the final round of bargaining: They could redefine the value of resources and restrict who could negotiate with whom. I invited them to meet in a nearby room furnished with comfortable couches, champagne, and Swiss chocolate.
They were overjoyed—but only momentarily. As they left the main conference room, the lower-income groups hissed and booed. An angry businessman stood on a chair and shouted, “We can't trust them!” Another yelled: “Let's start a revolution!” A third urged, “Let's steal their stuff!”
And in fact, the moment the elites left the room, a participant stole one of their folders.
Strikingly, the elites spent twenty minutes in their room discussing how to reconfigure the bargaining rules to benefit the lower classes—not themselves. But by now the underclass had worked itself into such a vertigo-like frenzy that as the elites reentered the main room, jeers drowned out their voices. The lower classes accused them of abusing power while the elites responded contemptuously and defended their good intentions.
Everyone had begun shouting, and I realized that the final round of negotiation would never happen. It took a good ten minutes for the group to calm down so that we could debrief.
What caused these global leaders to end up in virtual class warfare? Each side's mythos of identity was a significant factor. The lower classes admitted to seeing themselves as victims of a dictatorship, a mythos towhich they attached even before the elites announced the new bargaining rules. In other words, they presumed the elites would exploit them—when in fact the elites had no such intention. For their part, the elites attached to the mythos of saviors serving the helpless. In their private discussion over champagne and chocolates, they brainstormed how to “rescue” the lower classes and applied top-down decision making. No rules prohibited them from consulting with the lower classes, though they never thought to do so.
Thus, each side drew on a mythos that misread the other's intentions—and produced an emotional thunderstorm.

How a Mythos Works

A Mythos Frames Your Emotional Reality

A Mythos Is Rooted as Much in Biology as in Biography

A Mythos Deepens the Personal Significance of Your Conflict

Strategy: Creative Introspection

1. Establish a “Brave Space” for Genuine Dialogue



2. Identify What's at Stake

Search for what is personally motivating you and the other side to clash. At first glance, your conflict may appear to be a straightforward battle over a resource, policy, or other substantive issue. The challenge is to unearth the deeper stakes in the conflict. You may argue incessantly with an arrogant colleague—until you learn that he was bullied as a child and longs for social respect. Understanding his deeper need for status can boost your patience with him and help you bridge the emotional divide.

Recognize the Depths of Human Motivation Rationality Emotionality

Spirituality

Seek to Understand the Conflict's Deeper Significance

1. What interests are at stake? Look beneath positions to the underlying interests behind them. For example, John and Sarah, senior partners in a small company that is experiencing financial difficulty, disagree about firing two employees. “For the company to survive,” John says, “we have to lay them both off.” Sarah disagrees. “No,” she insists.
“Firing them will erode the heart and soul of our company.” John grows angry, asking her why she has to be so oppositional. But while John and Sarah have taken contrary positions, their interests are in fact compatible.
They both want to save the company costs, maintain its essence, and preserve their partnership. They weigh options for mutual gain and decide upon a feasible one: to retain both staffers while moving their office to a less pricey building.
2. Which core concerns feel personally at stake? Examine which concerns may be fueling the strongest emotions in your conflict. Do you feel unappreciated for your perspective? Treated as an adversary? Excluded from decision making? Demeaned in status? Cast in an unfulfilling role? Then step into the other's shoes and envision which of their core concerns might feel unmet.
Before John and Sarah were able to problem solve, they had to escape the lure of vertigo. Sarah did so by becoming aware of unaddressed core concerns in herself, but also in John. She realized that she was feeling unappreciated for her perspective; her autonomy felt impinged upon as John “told” her what to do; she felt treated as an adversary; her status felt belittled; and her role in the company felt insubstantial. She realized that John probably felt exactly the same way. This self-reflection on core concerns helped to calm her strong emotions, creating a space for problem solving.
3. Which pillars of identity feel personally at stake? Discovering the spiritual layer of your mythos can be an intense process, requiring you to look inward and be honest about what you perceive. But through spiritual insight, you can discover aspects of yourself that substantially affect your behavior—aspects you may have known little about or denied altogether.
To become aware of your spiritual experience in the conflict, reflect on your pillars of identity. Which of your fundamental beliefs, rituals, allegiances, values, or meaningful experiences feel threatened? Which pillars are calling you to action?You also can ask yourself comparative questions to better understand what really matters to you in the conflict. If you have established a good rapport with the other side, you then might ask them the same questions: What do you most wish others would understand about your experience? How does this dispute personally differ from previous ones? If you were to look back on this dispute five years from now, what would you see that you cannot now see? What would you view as most important? How would a good friend of yours describe your experience in this conflict? How would your mother describe your experience in this conflict —and what would she be most concerned about for you? What do you think she does not understand about your perspective? You may feel confident that the other party is driven solely by rational, emotional, or spiritual concerns, but do not be fooled: All three are typically significant. The chart here suggests some additional questions to help you decipher the deeper meaning of a conflict.
Even a rationalist can experience the spiritualist's world. Not long ago,
I bumped into my colleague Mooly Dinnar at a café. His father had died a week earlier, after falling and suffering a brain hemorrhage. Though Mooly is not particularly religious, he revealed how his father's final moments of life took on mystical importance. His father's health had deteriorated rapidly, so Mooly caught the next flight overseas to see him. Upon landing, he discovered that his father had fallen into a coma; the doctors had been saying for the past ten hours that he could die at any moment. Mooly rushed into the hospital room and took his father's hand. Dad, I'm here. I love you.
We're all here around the bed now with you, and love you. His father let out his last breath. Mooly felt awed: It was Memorial Day and the eve of the Sabbath; these events together symbolized for him the transcendent meaning of his father's life and death.

 
 
Core Identity
 
Relational Identity
 
 
 
Which of your . . .
 
In what ways do you feel . . .
 
 
 
1. beliefs feel attacked?
 
1. unappreciated for your perspectives or effort?
 
 
 
2. rituals feel endangered? 
 
2. constrained in autonomy to act or feel as you would like? 
 
 
 
3. allegiances feel strained?
 
3. disaffiliated: alienated or treated as an adversary?
 
 
 
4. values feel threatened?
 
4. disrespected in status?
 
 
 
5. emotionally meaningful experiences or memories feel delegitimized?
 
5. cast in an offensive role?
 
 

Listen to Learn—Even in the Tough Moments Conflict can feel unsettling, but do not let that frighten you away from listening to the other side's narrative. Embrace your discomfort: It is an important signal of emotional learning. All too often, a person asks a good, open-ended question but then interjects with a defensive rejoinder only moments later. Your goal is to listen to understand, not to rebut.
While active listening is a popular method, it is insufficient in an emotionally charged conflict. If you mechanically repeat back the other's words, you demonstrate only that you can hear what they are saying, without showing an understanding of its deeper meaning. In an emotionally charged conflict, it is this deeper meaning that aches to feel heard. Simply parroting back the other party's feelings of rejection can leave their mythos unacknowledged. So rather than parroting, listen proactively for how the other's identity is wrapped up in the conflict.
The most important part of listening takes place within you. Righteous indignation, shame, and judgmental thoughts may so preoccupy your attention that you literally are deaf to the other party's message. It is therefore critical to make a practice of assessing your emotional state every few minutes, taking note of hurt feelings, physical tension in your body, and angry thoughts. By paying attention to these experiences, you can sideline them and deal with them after you fully attend to the other's experience.The result is that you become a more powerful listener and avoid knee-jerk reactions.
After listening carefully to learn the other's narrative, share yours— but remember your goal: to have the other party hear and acknowledge it.
The best way to do so is to express yourself with nonthreatening language.
For example, rather than complaining, “You are a complete fool for accusing me of abusing power,” you might say, “A big part of me feels angry at your accusation. Here was my intent. . . .” You avoid distancing the other person and also indicate that while “a big part” of you is angry, your emotions are complex; you leave open space for reconciliation.
3. Uncover Your Mythos—and Theirs To reach a durable resolution to a conflict, you must transform how you fundamentally view your relationship with the other side—your mythos of identity. Two leaders may sign a peace accord, but if they essentially view each other as adversaries, their agreement won't stick. Your mythos of identity unconsciously casts you and the other side as archetypal opponents relating to each other in predictable ways: You might see yourself as David confronting Goliath or as a victim held hostage by a captor, but in either case you are confronting the disempowerment you feel in the face of a powerful adversary. To regain control over your conflict, you need to uncover these archetypes and the mythos giving them form.
There are several practical benefits to discussing archetypes. First, they allow you to step outside yourself to see your relationship at a distance. It becomes easier to imagine changes to the relationship, because you are talking not directly about yourself but about metaphorical images.
Second, archetypes let you discuss emotional issues through the proxy of symbolic images rather than talking directly about your own emotions.
People in conflict are often reluctant to share their feelings; they dislike being vulnerable and fear saying things that may provoke a hostile reaction.
Discussing archetypes can quell this fear.
Third, archetypes are easy to remember. During a conflict, it can be difficult to stay fully aware of every detail of each side's emotions, complaints, wishes, and fears. An archetypal image, on the other hand, is memorable, visual, and packed with emotional information. You may not recall the other side's complex emotions, but you can easily remember that they saw you as Goliath. The archetype can help you to swiftly contextualize subsequent exchanges and promote empathic understanding.
Finally, uncovering an archetype can open your mind to see beyond your own pain. While conflict narrows your attention to your own suffering, a focus on archetypes expands your capacity to contextualize your conflict.
You see yourself as not just a lone victim of conflict, but a character in a primal drama. The question confronting you is transformed from “Why me?” to “Why us?” Why do we humans suffer at the hands of the powerful? Why do we humans grieve the loss of love? The archetype takes the isolating sting out of conflict.
I find this approach especially comforting. If my wife and I get into a fight, I remind myself that it is in keeping with the way of the world: Couples argue; they always have and always will. Mia and I are not alone in our emotional distress, but are reenacting an age-old archetypal drama. To contextualize the conflict within the broad scope of human experience is to keep the situation in perspective.
Now that you understand the importance of archetypes, you can use them as a tool to uncover each side's mythos.
Create a metaphor to depict your conflictual relations. What image do you feel represents your emotional experience in the conflict? Perhaps you feel like a powerful lion or a powerless child. What image best represents the other party? Try to invoke characters from mythology, a childhood fairy tale, or a spiritual story—the more creative, the better. You might envision the other party as a sneaky monkey, violent windstorm, or tough boxer.
If you have established a brave space, consider working with the other party to conceive these images. I have facilitated this process with disputants in ethnopolitical conflict and have been surprised at their ability to construct mutually agreed-upon images. But the most valuable part is that in creating their images, they must listen to each other's perspectives, acknowledge differing views, and account for them in their shared decision.
Several years ago, I led a workshop in the Middle East to tackle divisions that had flared up between Shias and Sunnis in the region.Tensions ran so high that explicit discussion of the topic in question would almost inevitably have resulted in an unproductive argument. I accordingly divided participants into several groups, each charged with finding a metaphor to depict Shia-Sunni relations. Thirty minutes later, each presented its results. One group depicted conflict between the two sides as a cancer destroying its own body, while another saw it as a chronic brother- brother rivalry. This latter image resonated with the entire group and shifted the conversation to how to heal a fraternal rift. After one participant suggested that only leaders from “within the family” could facilitate reconciliation, the group envisioned structures in which Shia and Sunni leadership could meet, exchange views, and conceive of reconciliation processes. Although the issues surrounding reconciliation were complex, exacerbated by geopolitical rivalries, the exercise helped the participants clarify the nature of the challenge so they could more effectively address it.
There are a variety of creative methods to help you find a fitting metaphor. For starters, choose any image and shape it to your situation. You might select an option from the illustrative archetypes chart on page 157, such as a lion, and consider how to fashion it to express the specifics of your emotional experience in the conflict. Are you a young lion threatening the old guard? Or a wounded lion, suffering but maintaining a tough facade? Another method is to invent a metaphor with a trusted ally. This method worked well with Jung's patients. Jung spent years studying world mythology, so when patients shared with him their problems, he had a rich store of myths to draw upon to depict their archetypal experience. Your own confidant need not be a Jungian scholar on mythology; a creative friend will do.
You also can depict your image through art. Flip through a few magazines to find an image that resonates with your experience in the conflict, or take a risk and draw an image of yourself. The result can be enlightening. In a negotiation course with midcareer executives, I asked participants to sketch how they viewed themselves in a current conflict. The images they came up with were striking and included everything from a determined soldier to a frightened child.
How do you know if you have found the “right” metaphor? The key is emotional resonance. You want to choose one that resonates with youremotional experience in the conflict. Perfection is not the goal; no image will fully encapsulate your feelings. So brainstorm until you create a metaphor that resonates enough to feel useful.
Clarify the relationship between the images. Now that you have a metaphor, think about the nature of the relationship between the images.
Perhaps it feels like a turf war between angry lions? Or a competition for the love and attention of the pride's leader? Professor Vamık Volkan and his colleagues from the University of Virginia and the Carter Center experimented with the power of metaphor in an international context, facilitating unofficial dialogue between leaders from Russia and Estonia soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. During one of their sessions, they asked the Estonian and Russian participants to devise a metaphor to describe the relationship between their countries.
The delegates came up with two images—an elephant to represent Russia and a rabbit to represent Estonia—and pondered the dynamics between the rabbit and elephant. The animals could be friends, they reasoned, but the rabbit must always remain vigilant, because the elephant could unintentionally step on it. “With the elephant-rabbit metaphor,”
Professor Volkan and colleague Joyce Neu observed, “some Russians came to see Estonians not just as ungrateful for the Soviet Union's past help but also as understandably cautious.” The Estonians worried about losing their newly gained autonomy, and each country struggled to define its mythos amid shifting political sands. Exploring metaphors enabled these leaders to safely discuss their relationship. Rather than directly sharing their feelings, they indirectly communicated them.
To sharpen your metaphor, consider how it could better convey the conflict's full significance from each party's perspective. Ensure that the images represent not just the rational interests at stake but also emotional and spiritual ones. As you move back and forth between analyzing the significance of the conflict and refining the metaphor, you will clarify the essence of your mythos of identity.
Of course, you will not always agree with the other party over which archetypal images best depict your relations. You may see yourself as a docile cat, while they are more prone to view you as a hostile lion. If you have diverging images, discuss why each of you depicted the relationship as you did. In fact, a useful exercise is to have each side envision archetypesdepicting its best guess at how the other side would envision the relationship, then to discuss these images.

4. Revise Your Mythos

The final step of creative introspection is to revise your mythos. At this stage, you keep the same images you and the other side have created for yourselves—your core identities remain secure—but reshape the relationship between those images, much as the Russian and Estonian delegates reinterpreted relations between the elephant and rabbit.
Envision better relations between the images. Consider this conflict between my wife and me. “We are not connecting,” Mia tells me, and I agree. We share our personal experiences and realize we both feel frustrated and alienated. I am busy teaching and writing my book; she is working nonstop to take care of our kids and the home. On the occasions when we do have two minutes to talk, we do not click. Despite sharing our narratives, however, our disconnection persists.
Later that day, we have a different type of conversation, painting images of how we each feel in the context of our conflict. We decide that I am like a cloud, floating in the world of theory as I write my book, while Mia is an anchor, grounded as she attends to an endless stream of family tasks. Already we each feel more appreciated. The mood lightens.
We playfully envision how the cloud and anchor can better communicate. At times, the anchor may need to take a helicopter to the clouds—but not for so long that it runs out of gas. At other times, the cloud may need to float down to the ground. We also discuss the possibility of the two of us joining as a kite that is anchored as it floats in the sky. Notice that our scenarios were not logically sound—would an anchor take a helicopter ride?—but that does not matter. Creative introspection is about catching the emotional essence of your relational experience, no matter how dissonant the combination of metaphors.
Translate insight into action. Consider how you can practically apply your new perspectives to your relationship. In my conflict with Mia, we each appreciated the other's hard work in the service of our family andbroader social values. We also realized that we were communicating in two different languages: I was speaking theory, and Mia, pragmatics. We decided that we would each “visit” the other's world for at least ten minutes each day: The anchor would visit the clouds to talk about theory, and the cloud would visit the anchor to discuss everyday life. These steps brought us closer together.
This same process of creative introspection proved helpful in my consultation with Maria and Gail, a mother and teenage daughter who struggled to connect. They would fight for days on end, would threaten to “never talk again,” and then finally would make up—only to have another bout a week later. When we discussed archetypal images that they felt captured the essence of their relational dynamic, Gail saw herself as a small fish, always being threatened by an aggressive shark. Her mother agreed— except she saw herself as the small fish.
When I asked them to describe the nature of the relationship between the shark and small fish, they had a lively conversation about each other's frustrations, but both expressed a strong desire to improve relations. Gail suggested that they figure out how to become two friendly sharks that aggressively protect each other's feelings. Her mother agreed, and we went on to explore how to translate this into action.
Sharing their feelings had failed time and again with this mother and daughter; they had quickly gotten caught in the repetition compulsion and spiraled into vertigo. Their relationship had by now become so battered that the indirect route of creative introspection proved a particularly safe and effective path to reconciliation. The mother could now listen behind Gail's angry words for the deeper dynamic at play, while Maria realized her anger was mere armor to protect her identity from harm.
How to Uncover a Mythos Call to mind your conflict. Complete the questions below to create a metaphor that depicts your relationship with the other side.

1. I feel like a ___________________(image) because______________________________________.

2. I see the other side as a ____________ (image) because ______________________________________.

3. Describe how the images interact: ___________________.

4. What metaphor might the other side use to depict how they see their relationship with you? ____________________________________________________________________________.




But What if They Are More Powerful?

A mythos is not just a narrative, but also a tool for wielding power. The basic principle is simple: Whoever controls your mythos controls you, so it is little wonder that the other side in a conflict may try to shape your mythos to serve their objectives. This is identity politics at its most perilous. Consider how an emotionally abusive husband crafts a narrative of dominance over his wife, making her feel that she cannot leave the relationship without getting hurt; she sees no space to voice her dissent. Or consider how racial narratives in the United States, such as the Jim Crow segregation laws, have given whites disproportionate access to goods, services, and networks of social influence.
Reclaim Power over Your Mythos In most conflicts, each side will feel that the other side is mischaracterizing their identity or demeaning them in some way. To reclaim power over your mythos, follow these steps: First, become aware of the mythos the other side imposes on you.
The wife in the emotionally abusive relationship may come to realize that her husband is trying to define her as dependent and submissive. He is Zeus on Mount Olympus; she feels like a feeble, helpless mortal. To come to this realization, she asked herself what identity her husband was defining for her and whether that was an acceptable role in their relationship.
Second, identify the sources of the other side's power. Does the other side have the following types of power?

1. Legitimate power: They hold a position of authority over you.

2. Expert power: They have specialized knowledge or credentials.

3. Referent power: They have influential interpersonal connections.

4. Reward power: They have the ability to reward you.

5. Coercive power: They have the ability to threaten, punish, or impose sanctions on you.

6. Informational power: They have access to information you or others want.

In our example, the wife realizes that her husband's mythos anoints him as the sole legitimate power in their marriage—the only one who can decide whether it is acceptable to go out for dinner, enjoy a vacation, or determine weekend activities. He draws upon expert power in claiming he “knows better” than she does about what is good for their marriage. He uses reward power by giving her a weekly “allowance” as long as she takes care of family duties. And he commands coercive power, threatening to cut her off financially should she leave the relationship.
Third, identify sources of power you can draw upon. The wife attends a weekly support group that broadens her social network and enhances her referent power. She realizes that she, too, can act as a holder of legitimate power in her relationship, an important decision maker in choosing the fate of their marriage. She consults with a lawyer to learn more about her financial and legal rights, enhancing her informational power and decreasing her husband's coercive power. She boosts her own coercive power by arranging to stay at her sister's home should her husband refuse to change his ways.
Finally, reclaim control over your mythos. The wife approaches her husband, voices her frustrations, and demands that he modify his behavior —or she will leave the relationship. The warning is credible; she has re- empowered herself. The husband threatens to cut off financial resources, but she is well prepared. He demeans her as “incapable of surviving outside the relationship,” but she is confident in her support network. The fear of losing his wife motivates him to accede to her demands, and he reluctantly joins with her to reconfigure their relationship, a process that requires time as well as deep and intensive personal deliberation and dialogue.
But What If the Other Side Resists Dialogue? You cannot force the other side to reveal their mythos, nor can you force them to listen to yours. In fact, if you are trying to reconcile with a partywho feels they are more powerful than you, you should expect resistance.
They may fear that if they agree to speak with you, they open themselves to the possibility that you may undermine their narrative—their source of power.
The best approach is to tactfully persuade the other side to engage in dialogue; threats may bring them to the table, but in a state of resentment.
Here are a few suggestions to break through the other's resistance to dialogue: Before you talk to the other party, clarify your purpose in wanting to have a dialogue. Is it an internal desire to heal your pain? A curiosity to understand their perspective? A moral obligation? You may be able to satisfy your need without opening a dialogue, such as by independently healing painful emotions.
Launch a conversation with them about how to conduct a dialogue about tough relationship issues; thus you discuss not your conflict itself but rather the process of talking about it.
Invite them to an off-the-record dialogue. Conversation out of the spotlight is safer.
Should they still refuse to talk, you might share your perspectives with them in the form of a personal letter—and request they reciprocate.
Seek a shared ally who can encourage joint dialogue. Or enlist a mutual friend, colleague, or other trusted third party to organize and facilitate it.
View this entire process as an opportunity for personal learning that requires patience and compassion.
If the situation is an institutional concern, strive to change the institutional structures, such as discriminatory laws or policies, to create more space for your voice to be heard and dialogue to take place.
As a last resort, you may have to exit the relationship—but before doing so, know where you are going.Putting It All Together: An Office Example Uncovering your mythos of identity in a conflict takes work—and a willingness to approach the conflict with a creative spirit. It may seem childish to characterize yourself as a bent spoon or a timid rabbit, but the effect of shaking up your perspective on a difficult situation can be profound. That is exactly what Adam, a respected executive, realized after he and I worked together.
Adam had just left the helm of a nonprofit to try his hand in the corporate world. The attitude of his new supervisor, Jerry, was in no way easing the transition. “He's out to get me,” Adam said. “Two weeks ago Jerry asked me to put together a proposal for an important client. I spent a week working on it, day and night, over the weekend, neglecting my family.
I sent it to him, and the next day he criticized a few minor details and said he didn't think I had what it took to make it in this business. I was fuming.”
We identified Adam's main interests in the conflict, which were keeping his job and positioning himself for a promotion. We explored his core concerns, including his desire for Jerry's appreciation of his work. And we discussed his spiritual calling in the conflict: to be someone who serves his community.
Then we turned to the question of archetype. “How might you depict your relationship with Jerry through metaphor?” I asked. Adam thought a moment, then said, “He's the charter member of an exclusive club, and everyone in that club is rich and successful and motivated by money. He sees me as the impostor, an interloper doing anything to become a member of the club. To him I'm just the nonprofit guy, a guy who's not a real corporate player. I don't think he believes I have the grit for this line of work.”
“Do you?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Adam, his tone defensive, hesitant.
“Do you?” I persisted.
“To be honest,” Adam said, “I've been having doubts about whether I'm meant for the corporate world. I'm not sure I fit in. But that doesn't give Jerry the right to slam my performance.”“Of course it doesn't,” I agreed. “But there are a few issues on the table. One is the question of whether you want to work here. Another is what Jerry's perspective is all about. A third is what you can do to improve your situation.”
Our conversation dug deeper into Adam's mythos of identity. What was his core relational narrative in this conflict? Did he feel like a sellout for having left the nonprofit sector? Did he doubt his ability to survive in the jungles of business? We then shifted to his boss's perspective, looking for hints of his mythos. Adam happened to know that Jerry's parents were both community activists. I suspected that Adam's own community-driven spirit might be threatening to Jerry, calling into question his corporate career path. When interacting with Adam, Jerry might feel like an impostor or, even worse, a traitor to his family's values, triggering the Tribes Effect.
The use of metaphor helped Adam think about how to pursue his career aspirations in a way that supported his identity. After our conversation, he invited Jerry to lunch and broached the issue of his conflicted feelings about corporate life. To his surprise, Jerry opened up about his own struggles, explaining that he saw his job as a way to feed the family and dedicate the rest of his life to community service. Had they never taken the time to have this conversation, they might never have formed a connection—and Adam's job might have been in peril.

In Sum

The first step in reconciling tense relations is to better appreciate each other's perspectives on the conflict. But rationally discussing each other's interests is insufficient to understand the deeper emotional issues at stake.
Even discussing emotions directly is not enough, as people tend to use the same words to describe drastically different experiences. We can “fear” a rainy day, or a bomb dropping on our heads.
So this chapter presented creative introspection as a method to help you shed light on the emotional narrative fueling your conflict. There is nothing more real to either party, nor more emotionally powerful, than a mythos of identity. It is an archetypal story planted in a contemporarycontext, a narrative both universal and personal, that sheds light on matters of deep significance. By uncovering each party's mythos, you take a huge stride toward bridging the divide.

Ch 11: Work Through Emotional Pain

 Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
—CONFUCIUS


At the height of the U.S. Civil War, a battle-weary Confederate soldier reflected in quiet despair, “How can one forgive such enemies as we are contending against? Despoiling us of our property, driving us from our homes and friends and slaying our best citizens on the field are hard crimes to forgive. At any rate let me have a chance to retaliate and then I can forgive with a better grace.”
The soldier struggled with two possible narratives for how to respond to the misery in which the South found itself: One beckoned him to forgive, pure and simple, by the grace of God. A competing narrative, much more emotionally compelling, urged him to take justice into his own hands. Seek an eye for an eye—then grant clemency.
The soldier's dilemma is our own. Forgiveness appeases our conscience, but retaliation feeds our thirst for revenge. As much as we may want to reconcile with a family member or colleague, hurt feelings urge us to strike back, to even the score. Like the Confederate soldier, we may feel compelled to avenge, sometimes so strongly that we feel we have no choice in the matter.
But we do have a choice. This chapter presents a method to work through emotional pain and unburden yourself of the necessity to avenge.
It's not easy to shake away deep resentment, but while doing so may goagainst your every retaliatory instinct, the effect is liberating—and far more productive than the alternative.

On Working Through

The best way to heal emotional pain is to work through it. The pain is frozen within you, and addressing it transduces negative emotions into a positive relational force, just as a lamp transduces electrical energy into light. This process requires you to look within to locate and understand your emotional pain, and then to gain control over it. The process can be frightening, for you may confront inner demons beckoning you to cling to grievance and retaliate with all your might. But while you can ignore a cut on your hand and it will still heal, ignoring those inner demons makes things worse. Pain compounds pain, and past a threshold point your world explodes.

Are You Ready? Check Your BAG

Your emotional fate rests with you. You cannot let go of a grudge if you are not emotionally ready to let go of it. So inquire within: What's your best alternative to a grudge? (I call this your BAG.) Compare your life as it is now, holding the grudge, with a realistic vision of life without it. How would things be different, and possibly better? Your grudge has a purpose. When the other party offends your identity, they undermine your moral order—your sense of right and wrong —and you naturally feel demoralized and driven to retaliate. To not retaliate can feel disloyal to your own suffering. But to sustain a grudge requires intense personal energies that, ironically, can eat away at your own well- being and integrity.
So check your BAG: What would it feel like to unburden yourself of your toxic emotions? How would you relate to the other side? The choice is yours: Decide whether you are ready to let go of the grudge. You have the power to work through your pain or ignore it. If you feel ready to work through it, you will need to journey through three stages: (1) bear witness toemotional pain, (2) mourn loss, and (3) contemplate forgiveness. In short: witness, mourn, forgive.

Stage 1: Bear Witness to Pain


To bear witness means to acknowledge a person's emotional pain, no matter how hard that reality is to accept. It is useful to start by bearing witness to your own pain, then engaging with the other side in the same process, which involves seeing the pain, entering into it, and deciphering its meaning.

See the Pain

Look for two aspects of emotional pain: raw pain and suffering. Raw pain is the visceral feeling you get when your romantic partner says, “I don't love you anymore.” Your chest tightens, your throat constricts, and your head pounds. Suffering is how you make sense of that pain, quietly worrying, What's wrong with me? To detect raw pain, monitor your emotions and bodily sensations.
Envision yourself back in the heat of your conflict, and slowly scan your body from head to toe, looking for points of tension. Do your shoulders feel tight? Do you have a knot in your gut? What you find may startle you.
Anger can so consume your attention in a conflict that you fail to notice the physical manifestations of other powerful emotions such as shame, humiliation, or self-pity. It is tempting to deny these painful feelings, but until you acknowledge them, you remain at their mercy.
Once you identify your emotional pain, look for signals of suffering— how you make sense of your pain. Be attentive to the things you tell yourself when you feel hurt: I can't believe he did this to me! He'll pay! Note fears of inadequacy hiding beneath your angry thoughts: Why do these things always happen to me? Maybe I'm destined for a life of misery.
But while pain is unavoidable, you can reduce your suffering. Your inner critic tends to be your biggest critic. The secret is to become aware ofit—to slow down its “whirling machinery” of self-denunciation—and talk back. Do not let your inner critic have the last word. The next time you get into a heated argument, observe the stream of thoughts running through your head and slow them down so you can listen to them carefully: He's such an idiot! Why does he always give me a hard time? Maybe I'll never fit in here.
Then question your self-criticism. Call to mind an inner advocate— your loving mother or a cherished mentor—and respond to the criticism with that person's supportive commentary: You tried your hardest and have a lot to offer the world. Just because he doesn't see your strengths doesn't mean you don't have them.

Enter into the Pain

Remember a simple motto: To heal, you must feel. You cannot bear witness to pain if you tiptoe around it. That is why problem solving alone is insufficient: It solves problems, not pain. You can resolve emotional pain only if you confront it directly and make sense of what you feel.
Find the courage to experience your pain. Anger is easy to feel, because it enables you to blame someone else for your misery. But emotions that call attention to your shortcomings, whether shame, guilt, or humiliation, are more difficult to acknowledge. You may be tempted to bury these emotions, because experiencing them is necessarily painful. But again: To heal, you must feel—the insecurity of your jealousy, the mortification of your shame, the heaviness of your sorrow.
While you must enter into your pain, do not allow yourself to drown in it. One strategy to navigate this line is to imagine yourself simultaneously playing two roles: diver and lifeguard. As the diver, you plunge headfirst into your pain, observing and experiencing all that you see in the same way that a scuba diver absorbs the sights of the fish and coral reef. As the lifeguard, you remain above the surface to protect the diver. The moment the diver appears at risk of drowning in emotions, the lifeguard pulls the diver back to the surface. In other words, know when to take a break fromyour emotions—go out for a walk, read the news, catch your breath. The sea will be waiting when you are ready to head back in.
Consider enlisting the help of a professional therapist in understanding your emotional pain. This is especially important if you feel overwhelmed, overcome by personal crisis, or afraid for your physical or mental safety. A good therapist can supply the necessary safety and skill to work through intransigent emotions.

Decipher the Meaning of the Pain

Begin by clarifying the origin of your pain. Who said or did what to injure your emotional well-being? Was there a single traumatic incident, or is your pain the result of long-standing abuse? Then decode the function of that pain. When I get a headache, for example, it tells me I need to reduce stress.
Similarly, emotional pain sends a message about what is missing or broken in your life. Look for its message. If you experience a strong urge to avoid a superior who disparaged one of your ideas, your pain may be telling you that you require more praise than you realized.
After bearing witness to your own emotional pain, turn your attention to the other's pain. Imagine yourself in their shoes. What might they be feeling? Why? If you are trapped in the repetition compulsion or vertigo, it can be difficult to empathize with them, but keep trying.
You cannot, however, force the other side to heal. The will to heal is a personal choice. A common misstep is to push the other side to find common ground and “cool” the conflict, but should they feel aggrieved, they may feel that you are depriving them of their righteous anger and trying to neutralize the leverage that comes with being angry and ready to use force.
In that case, the best you can do is to establish an environment conducive to emotional healing—a brave space to bear witness to each other's pain. This space may be facilitated by a mutually respected third party, such as a trusted family member or professional mediator. If you both feel comfortable exploring each other's pain without a third party, it is important to establish ground rules to promote productive conversation. Forexample, a married couple I know posted the following ground rules on their refrigerator:

Share emotional pain one at a time;

Listen nonjudgmentally to each other and repeat the other's key points;

Take emotional risks;

Remember to care for each other; and

Remember the “escape clause”—that either of us can call for a break if overwhelmed.

Stage 2: Mourn the Loss

The second stage of working through emotional pain is to mourn the loss you have incurred. Any conflict involves loss: A divorcing couple must mourn their thwarted vision of a life together; a pair of reconciling siblings must mourn the years they spent apart; battling armies must mourn their casualties of war. Mourning is, in essence, the emotional metabolizing of loss. If you fail to mourn, you remain trapped in a time capsule of painful emotions. For a better future, you need to take emotional stock of your loss and come to terms with it.

Recognize the Loss

Notice what you have lost and what can never again be. Your conflict may have cost you a friend's trust or your idyllic marriage. Such loss can feel disorienting, sometimes devastating, in the same way that the death of a loved one leaves you reeling: Is she really gone? How can this be? To mourn is to come to accept that what was in the present is now in the past. But while you may intellectually understand that your friend betrayed you or your spouse left you, coming to emotional terms with this actuality is extremely difficult. As you confront existential reality, your relational identity must transform.I watched this process unfold when close family friends suffered the loss of their teenage daughter, Nora. For years they underwent therapy to grieve her loss. But they left Nora's room as it had been when she died: her dresses strewn on the floor, her diary by her bed. Then, one rainy Tuesday, they woke up and knew the time had come to recognize their loss and put Nora's belongings into storage. While their love and pain endured, they had made an emotionally painful but necessary stride in acknowledging the reality of their daughter's death.

Come to Terms with the Loss

The pain of loss will endure until you come to terms with it—until you emotionally resolve to the fact of your loss. This requires you to move beyond recognition to emotional acceptance. A key challenge here is that the intense pain of loss can compromise your ability to confront it. In fact, when your brain records a traumatic experience, it tends to inactivate your language encoding, preserving the experience as an emotional imprint, a wholly nonverbal impression. But without words, you literally cannot come to terms with your pain and claim control over it.
So find the words. Ask yourself: Why is this loss so painful to me? How can I best make meaning of it? You might discuss these questions with a trusted friend or journal your thoughts to put language to your feelings.
Coming to terms need not be done solely through words, however.
Ritual is a powerful tool to release your pain and put closure to your emotional experience. Through ritual you perform a solemn ceremony to support your internal transformation from a state of loss to acceptance. In the Jewish religion, for example, to mourn a person's death, the immediate family of the deceased sits shivah for seven days, remaining in their home and receiving a stream of friends and family who bring food and drink.
The most potent rituals connect to the basic elements of our planet: fire, water, earth, and air. In the Christian rite of baptism, for example, an infant is immersed in water to symbolize admission into the church. The dead are often buried in the earth. Religions such as Hinduism usecremation, destroying the dead body in fire. And many spiritual traditions spread the ashes of the dead into the air.

To come to terms with loss, you can memorialize it. A nation may honor its fallen soldiers with a monument. Grieving parents may preserve their dead child's memory through a nonprofit foundation. You also can begin to accept loss through art, whether composing a song of sorrow, drawing a picture of rage, or writing a short story of nostalgia. Some of the world's most impassioned stories and songs were born of loss. To commemorate is to turn your pain from an all-consuming experience into a contained entity, a tangible structure that puts one chapter of life to rest while conceding that the pain it caused will never be forgotten.
Just as you need to mourn loss, so does the other side. Give them the space to express their grief. Behind their sharp attacks may reside a longing to regain that which, through the conflict, they have forever lost.

Stage 3: Contemplate Forgiveness

Forgiveness is the third stage of working through emotional pain—and typically the most demanding. The Confederate soldier cited at the beginning of this chapter felt victimized and duty bound to avenge the emotional cost incurred by him and his comrades. How, he wondered, could he ever pardon the perpetrators of these transgressions without first exacting his vision of justice? That soldier was unaware of a crucial truth: To forgive is to free yourself of victimhood. Remaining consumed by anger holds you captive to those who perpetrated it. Forgiveness unchains you and frees up space in your mind to attend to worthier concerns. If you spend 40 percent of your time replaying old wounds, nursing your rage, and plotting revenge, you have only 60 percent left to spend on more beneficial activities. And while a desire for vengeance keeps you firmly stuck in the past, forgiveness frees you to live in the present.
To forgive, you need not concern yourself with the dictionary definition of the term, but rather with developing a practical plan of action to advance reconciliation. For example, you might prepare an expression of forgiveness: Despite what has happened—which I will never forget—I amprepared to let bygones be bygones, to abandon the idea of revenge, to talk with you, and to work together toward a better future.

The Unique Qualities of Forgiveness

To forgive is not to absolve. A father may forgive his daughter for staying out past curfew, but he will still ground her for the weekend. The Confederate soldier may forgive his enemies for their actions but can still hold them accountable in a court of justice.

To forgive is likewise not to forget. A bank may forgive your debt, but it will still keep a record of the loan. Two nations may fight on opposite sides in a brutal war, but after they reconcile, each group's history books will still record what happened.

Forgiveness is a process. There is no quick path to forgiveness. It requires time, effort, patience, and the recognition that your motivation to forgive will ebb and flow. A friend may betray your trust, and you may resist forgiving him for years—until suddenly, one unexpected day, your grudge softens.

No one can force you to forgive—not even yourself. Author C. S.
Lewis tried to forgive someone for thirty years, and when he finally felt ready to do so, he realized that “so many things are done easily the moment you can do them at all. But till then, simply impossible, like learning to swim. There are months during which no efforts will keep you up; then comes the day and hour and minute after which, and ever after, it becomes impossible to sink.”

It is tempting not to forgive, for you hold the key that can allow the perpetrator back into your moral community. That person once held power over you—violating your dignity—but now the power dynamic is reversed.
South African writer Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela observed that “just at the moment when the perpetrator begins to show remorse, to seek some way to ask forgiveness, the victim becomes the gatekeeper to what the outcast desires—readmission into the human community.”

To begin the process of forgiveness, open yourself to the possibility of forgiving. Imagine how your relationship might feel if you do so. Consider the pros and cons of forgiving—and not forgiving—and record them using the chart below. Next, check with your gut: What would it feel like to release yourself from your grudge? Compare that feeling with the anger currently weighing you down. Contemplate what feels right. Talk with a confidant, and examine your dilemma from every angle. Over time, clarity will emerge.

Should I Forgive?

 
 
If yes:
 
If no:
 

 
What are the pros?
 
What are the pros?
 

 
What are the cons?
 
What are the cons?
 
 

Finally, decide whether to (1) forgive, (2) withhold forgiveness, or (3) revisit the question at a later date. Think through your decision carefully, and listen to your heart. Should you decide to forgive, you will feel freer and more empowered—but that will not be the end of the story. You will still need to release your anger, and the best way may be to invoke compassion, to feel concern for the other's suffering. So when you feel the pull of anger, ask yourself: Do I want to cause suffering to myself and others, or to embrace compassion?

But What About the Unforgivable? Philosopher Hannah Arendt proposed that certain behaviors are so beyond the pale that they can only be the product of what Kant calls “radical evil,” a malevolence so terrible that it has abandoned all claims to ethics. As a Jew who fled her homeland of Germany in the face of rising nationalism and anti-Semitism, Arendt witnessed the Holocaust from a distance and could not shake off the notion that this deed was so extreme, so absurdly offensive to humanity, that it was an act of radical evil that was, in her words, both “unpunishable” and “unforgivable.”
Like Arendt, I believe that certain conflicts may produce such intolerable pain that the transgression feels unforgivable. But I also believethat assuming with unquestionable finality that we can never forgive another is ultimately a self-fulfilling prophecy. Healing can take generations, until emotional wounds are transformed into scars of remembrance. But forgiveness always lies within the realm of possibility.
Apology: The Other Side of Forgiveness A sincere apology is perhaps the most powerful tool for restoring positive relations. An apology is an expression of regret, a message that you wish you could take back the actions that hurt the other party—so much so that you are willing to sacrifice your pride in the interest of reconciliation.
Whereas forgiveness is an internal decision, an apology is an interpersonal acknowledgment of regret. You can forgive in any conflict, with or without the perpetrator present, but you cannot apologize to an empty room. To apologize is to communicate directly to another person that you are sorry—and mean it.

To Offer a Genuine Apology, Follow a Few Guidelines

A sincere apology comes from the heart, but several guiding principles can prove useful. Before you apologize, examine these guidelines and think how you might authentically communicate them. The more you can integrate them into your apology, the more effective your communication will be: 1. Express honest remorse.
2. Acknowledge the impact of your behavior.
3. Communicate that you accept responsibility.
4. Make a commitment not to repeat the offense.
5. Offer reparation.

Decide whether to apologize privately or publicly. A private apology makes it easier to build affiliation and puts neither of you at great risk of losing face. In complex cases of restorative justice, the perpetrator of a crime may meet privately with the victim to explore perspectives on the offense and even to apologize for the wrongdoing. At other times, apology may best be made publicly, especially when the injustice is political and collective. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission provided a platform for victims of political violence to tell their stories of grievance and for perpetrators to admit to and apologize for their wrongdoing. In some cases, victims even forgave the perpetrators.

Offer an Apology, Not an Apologia

If you are going to apologize, be straightforward. Do not muddle it with remorse and defensiveness. In Plato's book The Apology, Socrates stands trial—having been accused of corrupting the minds of youth, disbelieving in gods recognized by the state, and inventing new gods. At his hearing, he delivers an apologia, a Greek word referring to a speech in defense to an accusation—in other words, the opposite of an apology. For example, the spouse who arrives home late for the birthday dinner would be ill-advised to say, “I'm sorry I hurt your feelings by showing up late, but I had a project I needed to get done.” This contradictory communication may appear on its surface to be an apology, but its subtext is clear: I take no responsibility for hurting you.

In Sum

An emotionally charged conflict causes pain for everyone involved—which is precisely why it demands understanding and compassion. By bearing witness to each party's emotional pain, mourning the loss incurred, and moving toward forgiveness, you can begin to heal. As poet Roethke observed, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”

Ch 12: Build Crosscutting Connections

In 1991, a man named Cyril Ramaphosa received an invitation from a friend to join him for a weekend of fly-fishing. Cyril loves the sport and readily accepted the invitation. Three hours into the trip, his host informed him that Roelf Meyer and his family would be joining them for lunch on Saturday.
These events would be of little interest to most people—if not for the fact that Cyril Ramaphosa was secretary general of the African National Congress and Roelf Meyer was the minister of defense for the then-ruling National Party of South Africa. Two weeks hence, the two men were scheduled to begin negotiating some of the most contentious issues regarding the transition to a multiracial, democratic state.
On that Saturday afternoon in the South African outback, however, politics was not the only thing on their minds. Roelf's son asked Cyril,
“Will you teach me how to fly-fish?” Cyril agreed, and off they all went.
Roelf also decided to try his hand at the sport, but when he cast his line in the wrong direction, the hook caught his ring finger and pierced his flesh.
He turned to Cyril and asked plaintively, “What do you do now?”
After Cyril's wife, a nurse, tried unsuccessfully to disengage the hook,
Cyril knew what had to be done. “Get me a pair of pliers,” he told her. He poured Roelf a glass of whiskey and said, “Okay—drink this, look away, and trust me.” He then yanked the hook out.
Two weeks later, on opposite sides of the negotiation table, the leaders found themselves at an impasse. Over the years, the National Party had imprisoned a great number of people who resisted apartheid, including African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela and many of his colleagues. By 1991 many, but not all, of them had been released. TheNational Party was willing to free the remaining political prisoners if the ANC ceased its use of armed resistance; the ANC, in turn, refused to stop using armed resistance until the prisoners were released. The negotiation came down to a question of who would accede first.
Roelf leaned over the table and told Cyril, “I hear you saying: Trust me.”
He ordered release of the prisoners, and one week later the African National Congress announced an end to its armed struggle.
The backbone of reconciliation, as this anecdote so powerfully illustrates, is human connection. When people fight, they typically view their connection as adversarial, as us versus them. But even in the midst of an emotionally charged conflict, there are ways to establish positive connections that deepen relationships and transcend self-interest. The key is to build what I call crosscutting connections.

The Power of Crosscutting Connections

Relationships can be fortified through diverse links between you and another. The more numerous and meaningful these links, the stronger your relationship. Cyril and Roelf connected through their fishing adventure, their conversations in the outback, and their common role as negotiators.
These varied connections inspired trust and enabled creative problem solving. Within their cocoon of connection, they were able to argue more vociferously; they each felt secure enough in the relationship to express their concerns uninhibitedly and to share information. You likewise will be better positioned to influence an ally than an adversary. Friends listen more willingly to friends than to enemies.
To help you foster cooperative relations, this chapter presents a strategy for proactively building crosscutting connections. The method shows you how to:

(1) evaluate your current level of connection,

(2) envision what better relations might look like,

(3) decide whether to change your relationship, and, if so,

(4) draw on three tools to strengthen it.

Step 1: Evaluate Your Current Level of Connection (Using the REACH Framework)

Human connection has different levels of depth; the deeper your bond, the more likely you will stick together even during the turmoil of conflict. To help you gauge the status of a relationship, I have developed the REACH
Framework, which provides a simple guide to assess your emotional closeness. While your sense of closeness ebbs and flows—you feel intimate with your spouse this morning but distant in the afternoon—the following pages will help you attune to these dynamics.

The REACH Framework

This model distinguishes between five levels of connection, which form the acronym REACH—a reminder to reach for connection. In ascending order of emotional depth, the levels are: (1) recognition of existence;
(2) empathic understanding;
(3) attachment;
(4) care; and (5) hallowed kinship.
Level 1: Recognition of existence. Does the other party treat you as invisible, or acknowledge your existence? In the movie The Jerk, Steve Martin plays Navin Johnson, a down-and-out gas station attendant trying to find his place in the world. One day a new phone book arrives at the gas station, and Navin jumps for joy when he finds his name inside. “I'm somebody now!” he shouts. “Millions of people look at this book every day! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity—your name in print—that makes people!” His delight underscores the power of the most fundamental form of human connection: recognition of existence.
We all want to feel that we are “somebody”—a person who is visible and heard, a meaningful part of the world. Picture yourself attending a meeting with colleagues during which they disregard everything you say. Or imagine yourself at the dinner table with your family, and as hard as you try to get a word in, no one even looks your way. The sense of anguish you feel in such situations is palpable. Ethnopolitical groups can experience extreme frustration when denied political recognition or excluded from diplomatic discussions. To feel unrecognized is to feel like a nobody—and nobody wants that.

Level 2: Empathic understanding. 

Does the other judge your emotional experience as irrelevant, or authentically appreciate it? To empathize is to inhabit the emotional landscape of another person. You sense his or her felt experience and understand the emotional significance he or she attaches to it.
There are two kinds of empathy. Cognitive empathy refers to an intellectualized understanding of someone's emotional experience, but one that does not inspire an emotional response. Picture a psychopath about to victimize a teenage girl: He charms her into his car with his keen cognitive understanding of her vulnerabilities, reading her emotions but experiencing no emotional resonance of his own. If you feel emotional empathy, in contrast, you co-experience the other party's feelings. The brain is equipped with circuitry to make this possible, and this circuitry is especially active in meaningful relationships. German neuroscientist Tania Singer has shown that even if you simply watch your romantic partner receive a zap on the hand, your neural networks activate, and you experience the emotional tone of their pain.

Level 3: Attachment. 

Does the other perceive you as expendable, or emotionally irreplaceable? Through attachment, you experience an enduring bond. Perhaps the greatest pain in a marriage is to discover that your spouse is having an affair, signaling that you are replaceable.
Attachment implies cohesion; emotional glue connects you to the other party. This is why attachment is so useful for reconciliation: It leads to cohesive relations.
Look for two telltale signs of attachment. First is a yearning to stay emotionally connected. My four-year-old son, Liam, constantly clings to his mother's leg while she types on the computer or cooks dinner, not daring to stray more than a few yards from her. Some divorced couples continue to fight long after their divorce, in part to feed their unwavering feelings of attachment. This yearning to sustain an attachment helps explain seeminglyirrational behavior. A classic example is the disgruntled wife who packs her suitcase, announces that she has had enough of the relationship, and storms out the door—only to be followed by her husband, who yells, “I can't live like this either! Wait a minute, and I'll go with you.”
The second sign of attachment is separation anxiety. When your need for emotional connection goes unmet, internal alarms of anxiety begin to sound. For little Liam these translate into a tantrum: “Mama, HOLD ME!”
When he reconnects with his mother, opiatelike painkillers activate in his brain, reinforcing his attachment and bringing a smile to his face. The same alarms of anxiety wail for the divorced couple who cannot stand being together but cannot bear being apart.

Level 4: Care. 

Do you sense that the other is indifferent to your fate, or cherishes you? At one end of the spectrum, the other party values everything about you; their love is unconditional. The extent to which another willingly makes sacrifices for your welfare is a good indicator of their degree of care for you. I know a mother in Florida who was so deeply worried about her teenage son, a cocaine addict, that she had the police arrest him; she sacrificed her relationship out of concern for his life.
“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference,” wrote Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. As a Holocaust survivor, he realized that for Jews in concentration camps in World War II, perhaps the only thing more painful than the insufferable cruelty of the Nazis was the international community's initial indifference to their plight.

Level 5: Hallowed kinship. 

Does the other view you as ideologically incompatible, or as a kindred spirit? Hallowed kinship is a transcendent bond based upon spiritual or ideological ties. Malcolm X initially scoffed at the notion of racial integration but then traveled to Mecca and observed “tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white.”
Nationalism is another example of hallowed kinship. The soldier on the battlefield risks life and limb to save a fallen comrade, motivated not just by care for the individual but also by patriotism. Indeed, any transcendent experience, religious or otherwise, can serve as the basis forhallowed kinship. When my first child, Noah, was one year old, I brought him to the beach at dawn, and together we watched the sun cast its rippled reflection across the ocean. I felt a sense of hallowed kinship with him and with the natural beauty surrounding us.
Take Stock of Your Connection Now that you have a better sense of the five levels of connection, you can use them to evaluate the quality of your own relationships. Start by thinking of someone with whom you are in conflict, such as a family member, colleague, or neighbor. Take an honest look inward to assess your current level of connection. How recognized do you feel? How emotionally understood do you feel? Do you feel attached? Do you care for them? Feel hallowed kinship with them? Consult the chart below, which can help you analyze relational tension. In a family business, for example, you may feel that your sibling does emotionally understand you, but not to the extent you would like. This suggests an empathy gap (level 2). Within each level of the framework, place a C at the place along the line where you perceive your current connection to be. Then ask yourself: What is my desired connection within this level? Place a D at that spot. The gap between your current and desired degrees of connection represents the amount of tension you feel. Note any gaps between your perceived and desired level of connection.
Now step into the other's shoes and imagine how connected they feel to you. Do they feel you recognize them? Emotionally understand them? Revisit the chart below, considering their perceived level of connection— and whether they aspire for more or less.

 
 
Level of connection
 
Spectrum of possible feelings
 

 
1. Recognition
 
Invisible——————Fully acknowledged
 

 
2. Empathy
 
Emotionally judged———————Appreciated
 

 
3. Attachment
 
Replaceable———————Irreplaceable
 

 
4. Care
 
Insignificant———————Cherished
 

 
5. Hallowed kinship
 
Spiritually separate————————Spiritually unified
 
 

Step 2: Envision Better Relations

1. Make it vivid.
2. Suspend judgment. Do not critique your vision. In the heat of conflict, any thought of reconciliation can feel unrealistic. But without some vision of reconciliation, you condemn yourself to continued conflict.
Just as you do not judge your dreams while asleep, do not judge your visions while awake. Your goal is to imagine a vibrant picture of what the future could look like. Allow yourself to picture fresh possibilities.This process can help resolve conflicts at any level. I facilitated a workshop for Israeli and Palestinian leadership from the public and private sectors, in which I challenged the group to create concrete visions for what peace could look like twenty years in the future. At first skepticism ran high, and several participants complained that the exercise would be a waste of time, as peace felt unattainable. But I encouraged them to think creatively, however unrealistic their ideas might seem, and they obliged.
Within ten minutes the room electrified, and when the group presented their ideas an hour later, the results were striking. Participants enthusiastically described possibilities for joint economic ventures, interlinking social organizations, and new political collaborations. Because they had been tasked with envisioning specific measures of connection rather than abstract arguments over political rights, the group worked with great enthusiasm.
The possibility of peace was within their grasp, which led this influential group to support a broader, ultimately successful initiative to break the impasse in formal negotiations. Despite the fact that the political negotiations faltered, the group continued to meet and work together toward their visions of peace.

Step 3: Decide Whether You Are Willing and Ready to Change

You cannot just jump from vision to action without attending to a critical middle step: determining whether you and the other side are both willing and ready to deepen relations. Too often parties agree to new forms of political or personal connection, only to renege on their commitments because they are not truly eager and able to implement them. So ask yourself the following two questions:

Do You Have the Will to Deepen Your Connection?

Are You Ready to Deepen Your Connection?

Step 4: Strengthen Your Connections

 
 
Form of Connection
 
Associates Us Through . . .
 

 
1. Physical
 
Geographic proximity
 

 
2. Personal
 
Emotional closeness
 

 
3. Structural
 
Shared group membership
 
 

The Power of Physical Connection

Become aware of physical barriers to connection.
Design the setting to promote connection.

The Power of Personal Connections
 1. Relate to significant aspects of their life.
2. Reveal meaningful aspects of your personal life.
3. Attune to personal chemistry.
4. Notice bids for connection.
5. Create rituals of connection.

The Power of Structural Connections

Look for points of commonality with the other party.
Create a community of tribes.
Highlight transcendent connections.

Ch 13: Reconfigure the Relationship

Imagine you get a phone call from the mayor of New York City. Only nine short years have passed since Islamic extremists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center skyscrapers. “I need your help,” the mayor tells you.
“We have to figure out how to resolve the Park51 controversy. I'm calling a meeting of key people involved—will you facilitate?”
A developer has purchased an old Burlington Coat Factory in Lower Manhattan in hopes of converting it into a fifteen-story mosque and Islamic cultural center called Park51. But protests have erupted over the location, which is roughly two blocks from the site of the fallen Twin Towers. Many opponents feel that erecting an Islamic center so close to Ground Zero will tarnish the site's sanctity and emotionally distress people who lost a loved one in the attack. But proponents of the project, equally passionate, argue that the mosque will send a global message that the actions of the nineteen terrorists are not representative of Islam and that the United States fundamentally supports religious tolerance.
The task is clear: to help the opposing parties find a viable resolution to the Park51 controversy. But why should either side compromise? In this book, we have explored ways to resist the Five Lures of the Tribal Mind and promote integrative dynamics, including surfacing each side's mythos of identity, working through painful emotions, and building crosscutting connections. Though these strategies will all serve to improve your relations, in any conflict you will still have to figure out how to solve the actual problems at stake without compromising your core identity. In this chapter I introduce the SAS system, a simple framework to help you resolve such issues.You Cannot Solve the Problem from Within It As core identities come under threat, conflict can easily turn into a zero-sum battle: Either the other side bends to your identity, or you bend to theirs.
Because you are unlikely to betray your identity, you see only one viable option: Get the opposition to cave. But they are no more likely to bend to your identity than you are to theirs, which leaves you both in a troubling stalemate. Money and other tangible assets may be negotiable, but core identity is not. As the Tribes Exercise suggests, most people would rather blow up the world than sacrifice their selves.
So how do you negotiate the nonnegotiable? Is it even possible? It is, and the key insight to remember in doing so is: You cannot solve a problem from within it. You need to shift your objective from “winning” an identity battle to reconfiguring your relationship so that your core identity and the other side's can coexist. But coexistence alone is not your goal—a family, for example, can coexist for years in misery. To truly resolve identity-based divisions, you need to reframe your conflict as a quest for harmonious coexistence, thus opening up the possibility for resolution without compromise.
Reconfiguring Your Relationship There are three steps to the SAS system: (1) Clarify how identity is at stake;
(2) envision scenarios for harmonious coexistence; and (3) evaluate which scenario best fosters harmony. Once you complete these steps, you will be in a strong position to problem solve even the most substantive issues.

Clarify How Identity Is at Stake

Recall how the Five Lures can hook you and spiral your conflict out of control. You may initially be merely irked with a colleague for excluding you from a meeting, but within minutes vertigo and the repetition compulsion work you into a rage. So search for the conflict's deepersignificance—the mythos of identity. It is often the case that the conflict at hand, while important in itself, is a proxy for an identity-based concern. The controversy over Park51 concerned the building's practical function, but it served as a proxy for deeper questions of national identity: Who is American? Who belongs in the United States, and who is an outsider? What is the role of Islam in American society? Because such issues are difficult to discuss directly, the building became an emotional proxy—an object through which people could express their wishes and fears about the shape of their identities. A proxy is a safer subject to consider than a direct conversation about identity. In this case, the mosque is a tangible quantity; you can argue about whether it should be placed two blocks or ten from Ground Zero. But the moment you explicitly share your personal perspectives on identity itself, you open yourself to a direct attack on your ego.
Strive to understand the deeper motives driving each side to conflict.
A helpful starting point is to explore how a highly charged issue might be an emotional proxy for a question regarding identity. Is your interdepartmental battle really about resource distribution—or is it ultimately a conflict over which division the board sees as more central to operations? Is your argument with your sibling really about your inheritance —or about whom Mom loved most? The need to understand deeper motives was very much on my mind a few years ago, when I consulted for a young couple, Linda and Josh, whose marriage was teetering on the brink of dissolution. They had met in college, dated for three years, and then married. Their relationship was fine until their twin girls turned four and became old enough to know about Santa Claus. The problem was that Linda is Protestant, and Josh is Jewish. As the holidays neared, they faced the perennial issue of how to celebrate in a way that worked for both partners. The more Linda pleaded to have a Christmas tree, the more Josh refused. They talked about it endlessly, read negotiation books to help them find a win-win solution, and sought advice from friends.
But before long their resentments had grown so deep that finding a compromise seemed impossible, especially now that their daughters were also involved in the matter.
I sensed that the battle over the Christmas tree was a proxy for deeper differences in identity that the couple needed to work through, and I askedthem, “What parts of your identity feel threatened in this conflict?” I listened for which of the Five Pillars of Identity seemed most under siege for each of them: beliefs, rituals, allegiances, values, or emotionally meaningful experiences.
Linda explained that she was only ten years old when her mother died, leaving her father as the sole caretaker. Linda felt a strong allegiance to him, recalling the ritual of waking up each Christmas to piles of gifts. The tree had become a proxy for Linda's close relationship with her father, who emotionally nourished her; its absence would feel like a betrayal. For Josh, winter inspired an allegiance to his parents and grandparents to uphold Jewish rituals and values. He imagined their disappointment if they learned of a Christmas tree in his home, with his little girls awaiting Santa's gifts.
To him, the tree symbolized a betrayal of his own blood, a shameful desecration of his family roots.
While this discussion helped both Linda and Josh see why the other had been so resistant, and renewed their connection as a couple, the practical question of how to deal with the Christmas tree still had to be resolved.

Envision Scenarios for Harmonious Coexistence

The SAS system provides three approaches to coexistence: separation, assimilation, and synthesis. No one method is right for all circumstances, but the following three questions will help you devise a wide range of possible scenarios to address your conflict.
1. What would it look like to separate your identity from theirs? If you are in a troubled marriage, you may decide to live apart for a while or file for divorce. If you have an invasive neighbor, a fence can help. A first step in ending a war is to withdraw troops. Even in my own family, what do I do when my older two boys fight? Separate them.
But physical separation is not the only possible route. You also can pursue psychological forms of separation, such as fencing off discussion of specific issues from your relationship. When I was a teenager, my mother habitually peppered me with personal questions about girls I was dating. I would tell her, “That's off limits,” which kept those issues out of our relationship. Nations sometimes use the same tactic, setting aside contentious matters to preserve good relations and avoid military escalation.

2. What would it look like to assimilate to their identity, or vice versa? To assimilate is to incorporate a part of their identity into yours.
While separation keeps your identity intact, assimilation expands it. For example, a friend of mine who emigrated to the United States from Russia quickly assimilated to pragmatic, fast-paced American culture, but also maintained his national identity by speaking Russian at home and regularly enjoying shashlik and borscht.
You can assimilate to another's core identity through conformity or conversion. In conformity, you play by the other's rules without internalizing them. During President Barack Obama's state visit to Japan, he bowed deeply upon meeting Emperor Akihito. In other words, the president conformed to Japanese ritual but did not take on that behavior as an integral part of his identity; he did not bow to other state leaders he met.
In conversion, in contrast, you internalize aspects of the other's core identity, as when a missionary persuades an individual to adopt a new religion as his or her own. Because conversion is a choice you make, your core identity remains uncompromised. You have changed your identity, but not by force.
3. What would it look like to synthesize identities? The third route to reconfiguring your relationship is synthesis: You redefine your relationship with the other side so your core identity and theirs coexist. You are separate and connected, autonomous and affiliated. Consider the great number of ethnic groups that live within the United States, each with a distinct cultural history but all identifying as American.
I encountered a creative example of synthesis during a visit to South Korea. After I conducted a workshop in Seoul, my host took me to the Jung district in the heart of the city. She pointed out the old city hall, an austere concrete structure erected during the Japanese occupation of Korea. After South Korea gained independence from Japanese rule, the seat of Seoul's municipal government remained in the building. In 2005, however, Mayor Lee Myung-bak called for construction of a new city hall. But what would be done with the old one?The citizens of Seoul were split. Some advocated for its demolition: Why keep this vestige of Korea's painful past when a new building could eloquently express its modernization? Others opposed its destruction, arguing that all aspects of Korean history deserved acknowledgment. For each side, the city hall served as a proxy for South Korean identity.
As my friend led me past the building, I realized that the municipal government had resolved this identity-charged dilemma through synthesis.
They converted the old structure into the Seoul Metropolitan Library, which rested in the shadow of a new city hall—a modern glass edifice whose curvature resembled an enormous wave cresting over its predecessor.
Together, the two buildings presented a story about South Korea's multifaceted identity, juxtaposing its dark past and radiant present.



Revisiting the Christmas tree. Linda and Josh had reached an impasse over how to resolve the dilemma of the Christmas tree. To help them explore possible scenarios for harmonious coexistence, I introducedthem to the SAS system. Although each of them held fixed spiritual beliefs, they were open to exploring ways to bridge their divide. I explained that their goal was to brainstorm a wide variety of options, from realistic to far- fetched, in hopes that creative thinking would help them find one that felt right. I also asked them not to evaluate the merits of each scenario; that would come later.
The couple began by envisioning scenarios of separation. They could both pretend the conflict did not exist, fencing off this irreconcilable difference from their relationship for most of the year and dealing with it only when Christmas neared. Alternatively, one or the other could agree explicitly to the other's desire but harbor resentment. Or they could take the more unusual step of actually dividing their home. “In this part of the house,” they could agree, “we will celebrate Christmas. In the rest, we'll celebrate Hanukkah.” Or they could seek a lawyer and initiate a divorce.
Next, they considered scenarios of assimilation. Josh could convert to Linda's religious beliefs and become a Protestant. Or he could accept the Christmas tree in the house, either living with a sense of betrayal to his ancestry or figuring out how to accommodate the tree within his beliefs.
Conversely, Linda could agree to conform to the rituals of Judaism, remaining faithful to her Protestant denomination but observing Jewish rituals. Or she could convert to Judaism.
Finally, the couple envisioned a scenario in which to synthesize their differences. They could buy a tree for their house, jointly decorate it with their kids, and each ascribe personal meaning to it: Linda could view it as a Christmas tree, Josh as a festive Hanukkah decoration.

Evaluate Which Scenario Best Harmonizes Differences

I gave Linda and Josh a few minutes to reflect on the scenarios and then to assess the options. The question I asked them to focus on was: “Which scenario—or combination—seems most compelling and feasible for both of you?”Weigh the pros and cons. As Linda and Josh came to realize, there is no perfect approach to coexistence. Separation can reduce the emotional intensity of a conflict: Separate the troops, and crisis is averted. But while separation can be useful for making peace, it can become an impediment to keeping it. In Northern Ireland during the period of bloody hostility known as the Troubles, “peace walls” of iron, brick, and steel were built to protect areas that had served as flash points for violence. During a recent visit to Northern Ireland, I was surprised to see peace walls still standing, more than a decade after the Good Friday Agreement; in fact, the number of walls had actually risen after the peace accord. The walls kept communities safe, but at a psychological cost to an integrated society.
Similarly, while assimilation allows you to join with the other, it can give rise to long-term resentment. If you conform to the other's identity but grow to resent it, the backlash can be intense. Imagine that Josh decides to accept the presence of the Christmas tree, but then experiences a change of heart once he sees it in their home. Resentment begins subtly but then engulfs him, spinning him into vertigo as he asks himself, Why did I have to betray my roots? The advantages of synthesis are many. If you and the other side can find a way for your identities to coexist, your relationship can withstand strong headwinds. You become increasingly interconnected and feel an obligation to stick together through good times and bad. Because you are “in it together,” the incentive to sabotage your relationship has been neutralized.
Yet even synthesis is not a panacea. It can be extremely difficult to identify a mutually agreeable area of connection within which adversaries can coexist. How, for example, can a government synthesize differences with a terrorist organization? There is also the risk that the more powerful party may attempt to impose itself on the weaker power; the two will have joined at the cost of the weaker party's interests. Finally, maintaining a synthesized identity requires conscious long-term effort. Marriage is a great example of synthesis, but the mere act of saying “I do” is not enough to sustain a relationship.
Don't battle over the relationship; jointly build it. It is hard to reconcile a conflict if, say, you want to synthesize and the other side demands that you assimilate. Any mismatch between preferences will resultonly in more conflict. Opponents of Park51 demanded that the mosque be erected farther from Ground Zero; they wanted separation. Proponents of the project leaned toward synthesis, advocating for the original location but including in the mosque a community center with prayer space and a memorial for victims of the attacks.
Rather than battling over scenarios, try to devise ways to restructure the relationship to address each party's fears and wishes. Linda and Josh followed this advice and ultimately found a solution that combined the three approaches to coexistence. They agreed not to have a Christmas tree in their own home, but to celebrate Christmas each year at Linda's father's house in Georgia. This was consistent with each spouse's mythos of identity: Linda,
Josh, and their kids would get to experience Christmas with Linda's father, honoring Linda's attachment to ritual while respecting Josh's beliefs.
Meanwhile, Linda reaffirmed her premarital commitment to raise their children in the Jewish faith, which allayed Josh's fears of betraying his heritage. The couple came to understand and accept each other's identities, weaving differences into the relationship and growing in the process. To be sure, their agreement was a work in progress—but progress had been made.
Beware of power struggles. People like power, and they fear losing it. Thus, the powerful often want others to assimilate to their ways, whereas the powerless prefer synthesis. The resulting clash can become explosive. A case in point is the Treaty of Versailles, the agreement that ended World War I. The victorious nations sought to “utterly humiliate and destroy their enemies—mostly Germany,” excluded the Germans from peace negotiations, and imposed sanctions that drained the German economy.
Germany felt humiliated, which set the stage “for a leader such as Adolf Hitler and his ultranationalist agenda to rise to power, something that was unimaginable just twenty years earlier.”
Recognize when you are engaging in a struggle for structural power— the authority to legitimately tell others what to do. Many negotiations do not involve structural power: When you haggle over the price of a new car, you are not negotiating the dealer's level of authority; you cannot force him to give you the price you want. But if a minority group seeks greater decision-making authority, they are negotiating for more structural power.
Similarly, when two owners of a company fight for more than 50 percentequity in their company, their conflict involves structural power; only one of them will have the ability to dictate company policy.
The most heated conflicts usually involve a power struggle, because the powerful fear losing power and the powerless crave more. So proactively seek to rebalance power relations. Here are a few suggestions: Avoid humiliating the other side, especially when you are more powerful. After World War II, the victorious nations sought not to disgrace the defeated nations, but to help them rebuild and reintegrate into the global community through the Marshall Plan.
Seek institutional change. The Civil Rights Act mandated equal treatment of black and white people in the United States.
Enlist a mediator. A mediator can level the playing field and ensure each party has equal airtime to voice their views, problem solve differences, and reconfigure the relationship for mutual satisfaction.
Remember the necessity of sacrifice. Remind yourself that harmonious coexistence requires each party to relinquish some degree of autonomy for the sake of harmonious coexistence.

Back to Park51

Just before you and the mayor hang up, he reminds you, “New York and our nation are counting on you.” You begin preparations for the meeting you will facilitate—designing the agenda, contacting invitees, reminding each that the meeting will be private and off the record. However, you are concerned, having realized that there appear to be only two possible solutions: Either the proponents or the opponents of the project will prevail.
Very few mutually agreeable scenarios have been presented, and those that have—such as using the site as both mosque and memorial—have been roundly rejected.
A few days later, twelve of the parties involved in the debate gather for a two-day workshop at a hotel in upstate New York, out of the media spotlight. After explaining the purpose of the workshop, you describe theFive Lures and facilitate a two-hour discussion of how they might be escalating the conflict. Participants discuss how the nation and media have fallen into a state of vertigo around Park51; how the repetition compulsion may be at play in reaction to the trauma of September 11; and how there is a taboo around explicitly discussing the range of attitudes toward Islam in American society. Individual members of the group also realize that the issue feels like an assault not just on their own sacred values, but also on the sacred values and beliefs of the other parties involved. A couple of brave souls even acknowledge that Park51 may have been usurped for purposes of identity politics, recognizing that a few outspoken politicians have exploited the issue as midterm elections near.
Next, you lead the group through a rough version of integrative dynamics, starting by having each participant share his or her mythos of identity for five minutes, then opening the floor for others to pose questions about that perspective. You ask each participant to answer the question “What is the personal significance of Park51 to you?” You remind the other participants to listen carefully and respectfully; the goal is to learn, not debate.
As each person speaks, a common theme emerges: The parties all feel emotionally pained and fearful. The September 11 attacks have profoundly affected the way people view their identity and security. In light of the shared sentiments in the room, you ask everyone to join in a moment of silence for the victims of the attack. As silence falls, you feel the group's dynamic shift. They are sharing in mourning, an important step in working through emotional pain. They are fortifying their human connection.
The members of the group discuss what has driven them to speak out on the controversy, each participant diving deeper into his or her own motives. By midday, the group seems ready to problem solve practical differences. You introduce the SAS system and establish two ground rules: (1) brainstorm as many scenarios as possible, and (2) do not evaluate ideas yet. You start by asking the group: “What are some ways to deal with Park51?”
The group envisions possible solutions, and two separation-based scenarios emerge: move the center to a location farther from Ground Zero or keep it within the old facility. Assimilation scenarios include making Park51 a cultural center; turning it into solely a memorial for victims of theterrorist attack; and incorporating the mosque into the Park51 community center. Synthesis scenarios include making Park51 a center for all religions; keeping it as an Islamic cultural center but adding a memorial for victims of the terrorist attack; and doing what former president Bill Clinton proposed: “Dedicating this center to all the Muslims who were killed on 9/11.”
You ask the participants to jointly evaluate which scenarios might prove most satisfactory to everyone involved. A positive-spirited debate ensues as the list is narrowed to the three most promising scenarios. You share these with the mayor, who responds enthusiastically: Each scenario is preferable to the binary scenarios dominating the public debate. The mayor privately discusses the ideas with the key stakeholders, who agree to move forward with one of the three recommended scenarios—and who ultimately choose one that synthesizes concerns implicit in each stakeholder's mythos of identity.

In Sum

Can you negotiate the nonnegotiable? My answer is yes. The SAS system allows you to disentangle your core identity from your relational identity in order to reconfigure your relationship. Your core identity is largely fixed, so attempting to negotiate it is unlikely to be productive. Instead, concentrate on adjusting your relational identity, transforming the way in which you and the other party coexist.
The SAS system offers three tools for reconfiguring your relationship while keeping your core identity intact: separation, assimilation, and synthesis. Each of these alternatives has pros and cons that must be carefully evaluated. Your goal is to identify, and then develop, the scenario that best serves each party's mythos of identity.
So remember: You cannot solve a problem from within it. By applying the SAS system, you can step outside the conflict in order to resolve it.

Section 5: Reconciling Irreconcilable Differences
 
Ch 14: Managing Dialectics

An age-old Native American legend tells of a grandfather who shares a secret with his grandson: “I have two wolves fighting within me. One is a wolf of love and kindness. The other is a wolf of hate and greed.”
The boy's eyes open wide. “Which will win?” he asks.
The grandfather pauses for a moment and responds, “Whichever I feed.”
•••
Reconciliation involves a dialogue between people—but the hardest part takes place within yourself. In any conflict, you have to decide which wolf to feed. Can you release your grievances, forgive, and move forward? Do you trust the other side enough to welcome them back into your good graces? Are you fundamentally willing to change? The answer to these questions resides not in any textbook, but in your heart of hearts.
What makes these questions especially difficult is that they involve contradictory impulses. While you want to resolve your conflict, you also want to protect yourself. To invite the other side back into your life is risky, for they have opposed you. They have hurt you. How can you be sure they will not do so again? The vulnerability required to transcend your differences, therefore, causes unavoidable ambivalence about reconciliation. Even the most compassionate among us will experience a desire for vengeance; the gentlest soul will acknowledge a hint of resentment; the most accepting will feel a twinge of judgment.
I call these competing impulses relational dialectics. They are the wolves within you—and they pull your emotions in two different directions:toward the relationship and away from it. In a conflict, contradictory impulses can be neither avoided nor resolved, as they are part of your human architecture. But once you become aware of them, you can decide which to feed.

A Brief History of Dialectics

The concept of dialectics dates back thousands of years. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus proposed a unity of opposites: the notion that everything in the world is determined by its opposite. In U.S. politics, for example, the Republican Party's agenda can affect that of the Democratic Party, and vice versa. This is the essence of dialectics: the nature of how two opposing perspectives relate to each other.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant took the concept a step further. He proposed that ideas develop in three stages: a thesis bumps up against an antithesis, producing a synthesis. This simple, elegant formula sheds light on the evolution of ideas, history, economics—just about any field of thought. A medieval fisherman supposes that the flat world ends at the horizon (a thesis). But then one day he sails a ship so far that he eventually arrives on the opposite coast of his homeland, causing him to reexamine his assumption (antithesis). Ultimately, he concludes that the world is round (synthesis).
Despite Kant's brilliance, his theory had holes—or, to put it in dialectical terms, his thesis was not without antithesis—and German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel attempted to fill them. Hegel believed that the concept of an antithesis was too fuzzy, so he proposed that an idea progresses through three states: abstract, negative, and concrete. An initial thesis is abstract and untested and lacks the “negative” precision of trial and error. Every idea, no matter how thoughtful, contains an intrinsic incompleteness. The idea that the world ends at the horizon contains an internal error, a “negative,” that is overcome only through a new idea that brings the dialectic to completion. Once the abstract meets with the negative, a more concrete synthesis emerges.
Dialectics present you with necessary ambivalence, an inescapable conflict within yourself. But they need not prohibit you from reachingresolution—if you know how to manage their contradictory forces.

Navigating a Bundle of Contradictions

Several dialectics dominate the emotional world of conflict: acceptance versus change; redemption versus revenge; and autonomy versus affiliation.
You seek redemption but harbor vengeance. You try to accept the other party but hope they will change. You build affiliation but feel constrained within it. To deal with these dialectics effectively, adopt a three-pronged strategy.

First, become mindful of the dialectics struggling within you. If left unattended, the pull of dialectics can sabotage even your most satisfying agreement. So remain aware of how they are affecting you. Do you feel resistant to reconciling? Hesitant to change? Second, feed the force that gets you where you want to go. If you want to improve your relationship with your ex-spouse, perhaps because you share parenting duties, first recognize the internal battle simultaneously pulling you toward both redemption and revenge. Then, to rebuild your relationship, focus on redemption, even as you accept that years of accumulated anger may saturate your heart with calls for vengeance.
Acknowledge the hostile feelings—but do not feed them.
Third, recognize that dialectics affect the other party, too. By becoming aware of their dialectical challenges, you can help allay their fears about reconciling with you. For example, you can let your ex-spouse know that you understand how hard it must be to build a partnership with you after all the pain you have inflicted in the past.

Dialectic #1: Acceptance Versus Change

Most conflicts hinge on two essential truths: (1) everyone involved wants to be accepted, and (2) nobody wants to change. Consider the situation facing Susan and Ron, a couple married for thirty years, as they sit on the couch watching television. Susan says, “My New Year's resolution is to lose twenty pounds—and I have to start by curbing my snacking. Will you help me?”

“Sure,” Ron says with a supportive smile.
“Oh,” Susan snaps back, “so you think I snack too much?”
Ron, startled, finds himself caught in a dialectic that exists within Susan's mind. Underlying her request for support were two potent questions: Should I accept myself as I am, or change? Does Ron accept me as I am, or does he think I should change? By supporting Susan's New Year's resolution, Ron unwittingly undermined his support for her.
Of course, dialectics have no “right” answer. Had Ron replied, “You don't need to lose weight. You're perfect the way you are,” Susan might well have said, “Why can't you support me?”
We Crave AcceptanceWhen you feel accepted for who you are, blemishes and all, you feel both comforted and liberated. You no longer need to worry about what you say or how you behave. You have confidence that, no matter what, the other person will support you.
When you feel judged, you experience the opposite. Judgment is the enemy of acceptance. Everyone possesses an emotional radar system that is alert to any hint of nonacceptance. Whenever someone accuses you of an “unfair” feeling, “wrong” thought, or “defective” character trait, you feel unaccepted. And it hurts.
But the most painful form of judgment comes from within. You fail to accept parts or all of yourself, harshly judging your own behavior, feelings, or thoughts and concluding that you are inadequate. Psychologist William James dismissed one of his own books as “a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that William James is an incapable.” James was one of the most venerated minds of his era, yet even he was susceptible to harsh criticisms of his work and, by extension, of himself.
It is extraordinarily difficult to break free of self-criticism. You eventually become trapped in a self-perpetuating pattern of flawed thinking —what psychologists call cognitive distortions: The more you criticize yourself, the more you find yourself worthy of criticism.

We Resist Change

Conflict saturates you with tension, making you want to alter the other party's behavior—but not your own. You believe you are right, so why should you change? But because the other party has precisely the same rationale, the more you each demand that the other change, the less each of you feels accepted. In Hegel's words, you each feel the other side casts a “negative” to your perspective, some error or gap, leading you both to stubbornly maintain your positions.
Time and again in the Tribes Exercise, I have witnessed how the pressure for change collides with the yearning for acceptance. In the firstround of the exercise, tribal leaders often try to persuade other tribes to join theirs, emphasizing the appeal of their own tribe while discounting the merits of others. What these leaders fail to account for, however, is just how resistant identity is to change. The more external pressure a tribe feels to change, the more they demand that other tribes accept them as they are. A battle of autonomy emerges, with each tribe insisting that the others accept theirs as the leader. The result is a nearly inevitable clash.
The Five Lures further diminish your motivation to change. Vertigo, for example, thrusts you into a warped world of confrontation. The repetition compulsion pulls you deeper into divisive patterns. Taboos prevent you from even talking about change with the other side. And both an assault on the sacred and identity politics strengthen the lines of division.

Acceptance or Change?

By recognizing the acceptance/change dialectic, you can improve the way you and the other party deal with tension. I advised a couple, Marshall and Betty, who struggled with chronic intense fights. Marshall explained how Betty would unexpectedly lose her temper and how he would attempt to placate her by saying things like “Calm down, we can work this out.” But Betty would only grow angrier in response, causing Marshall to withdraw.
Neither party felt accepted for his or her style of emotional expression.
Betty was comfortable expressing anger, whereas it made Marshall anxious.
He had grown up in a conflict-avoidant home; his family rarely expressed strong emotions. Betty's parents, in contrast, regularly blew up at each other but always reconciled. The more Betty expressed anger, the less Marshall accepted her, and the more Marshall tried to change Betty's anger, the more unaccepted she felt, which only further fueled her anger. This couple was caught in a disastrous spiral, at the heart of which lay the dialectic of acceptance versus change.
After I presented this observation to Marshall, he began to view the relationship in a new light. When the couple next fought, Marshall responded in a different way. He recognized and accepted his feeling of discomfort with Betty's anger, but did not act on it or attempt to placate her.To his surprise, Betty's anger softened. By accepting their dialectical struggles, Marshall helped to reconfigure their relationship.
To reconcile an emotionally charged conflict, both acceptance and change are necessary; the key is knowing what to accept and what to change. It is an uphill battle to change someone's core identity—people resist changes to essential beliefs and values. But accepting a tense, unproductive relationship serves no one.
Therefore, aim to accept the other's core identity as is, nonjudgmentally acknowledging their values and beliefs. Meanwhile, seek to reconfigure your relationship, embedding each party's core identity in a broader relational narrative. Marshall restructured his marital relationship by recognizing, but not responding to, Betty's anger—and that strategy worked.

Dialectic #2: Redemption Versus Revenge

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? and if you wrong us shall we not revenge? —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE MERCHANT OF VENICEImagine sharing a deep, dark secret with a close friend, only to discover that she has posted it on her website. You are aghast. The moment she betrays you, the dialectic between revenge and redemption commands your attention. On the one hand, a gut-level force compels you to retaliate to restore your sense of moral order, perhaps by posting some of her secrets on your website. On the other hand, because she is a friend, an inner voice urges you to confront her and talk things out. To which voice should you listen? The challenge is to disentangle impulse from action. Even a trivial offense to your identity can trigger a strong impulse to avenge. If you fail to notice the impulse, you remain at its mercy. But while you cannot avoid the impulse, you can thoughtfully consider how to respond.
To become aware of the impulse to avenge, take note of any fantasies you have of retaliation. If your boss constantly demeans you, do you daydream about exposing his flaws to the world? Fantasies have no limits; they can be antisocial or shocking. A small part of you may enjoy these daydreams, for they mollify a wounded ego and invoke a sense of justice: Your boss made you suffer, and now you want to administer him a dose of his own medicine. But whether you decide to actually retaliate is a wholly different matter.

The Upside of Revenge

Revenge can empower you by giving you access to justice, power, and catharsis.
Justice. Revenge motivates you to rectify injustice, to “even the score.” Relatives who exclude you from a holiday party should not expect to receive an invitation to your next family reunion. The flames of revenge are stoked through a desire not for contrition from the offending party, but for punishment. You want your relatives to viscerally experience emotional pain comparable to that which you suffered at their hands; and you gain the satisfaction of knowing that they now truly understand—and are paying for —your suffering. Justice feels restored.The threat of revenge can also deter future injustice. If the school bully knows your daughter will slug him if he insults her, he might think twice about doing so again. In fact, your daughter may threaten to respond to him with excessive force. While her threat may seem irrational, it creates a wide wall of deterrence that can promote cooperation.
Power. Revenge galvanizes you to improve your standing in relation to the other side. Your daughter challenging the bully may be a way for her to assert her dominance and reorder the social hierarchy. This hunger for increased status can supersede the desire for justice.
Catharsis. Revenge provides you with a means of catharsis—purging you of painful emotions. As a result, you feel free from the chains of victimization, released from humiliation and shame. In fact, researchers at the University of Zurich have discovered that as you enact revenge, blood flows increasingly to your brain's reward centers, including the caudate nucleus and thalamus—the same parts of the brain that are activated if you take a hit of nicotine or cocaine.
The Downside of Revenge While revenge offers gratification on several fronts, scientific research and anecdotal evidence cast doubt on its ultimate efficacy.
Lopsided justice. Revenge can indeed promote a sense of justice— but only for you. The other party will perceive your justice as their injustice, triggering a cycle of mutual retaliation. Even if you are convinced that you are inflicting suffering on the other side in proportion to that which they inflicted upon you, they are likely to see your punishment as excessive.
As my grandmother used to say, “If it's your finger, it hurts more.” In other words, you judge your own pain as more severe than do those who see it from the outside. This makes the belief that revenge will prevent further offenses an unlikely proposition.
Short-lived empowerment. While revenge can briefly empower you, the perpetrator-turned-victim is likely to begin quickly to scheme their own ways to retaliate. For example, as a husband seeks revenge on his ex-wife— for instance, refusing to let her back in the house to collect her favoritepainting—he is energized with empowerment. A day later, however, he finds himself facing the deflating reality of new legal charges.
Fleeting catharsis. The sweet taste of revenge does not linger for long. Scheming to avenge the misdeed of a nasty spouse or colleague may feel revitalizing, but research suggests that after we retaliate, we actually feel worse than we had anticipated: We question our own morality and increasingly ruminate about the offender. Furthermore, the cathartic experience of revenge is but a momentary distraction from the emotional pain of loss. A soldier who has seen a comrade die in battle may feel a wave of cathartic justice as he shoots the perpetrator in retaliation, but he still must live with blood on his hands, the heightened threat of the enemy retaliating, and the unchanged reality that his comrade is forever gone.
Venting: A Middle Ground? Instead of seeking revenge, you may decide to vent your anger. You grab a pillow, imagine it as the person who hurt you, and pound it; you then talk to a close friend and spill the gory details of how you feel you've been wronged. Surely these popular forms of catharsis work, right? Wrong. A massive body of scientific evidence has demonstrated that venting anger actually backfires: The more you vent, the stronger your desire for revenge.
Venting assumes that your anger is like steam in a kettle: If you open up the lid to release the steam, the pressure will be reduced. But anger does not function like that. The more you think about all the ways you feel wronged, the more you work yourself into an emotional frenzy. Rather than releasing anger, venting reinforces it.
Professor Brad Bushman designed an unusual study that underscores this point. The subjects were instructed to write an essay on abortion, either pro-life or pro-choice. A student in another room then evaluated the essays and returned them with a handwritten comment: This is one of the worst essays I have ever read! Unbeknownst to the participants, there was no student in the other room—an experimenter had actually written the comment as a way to anger the participants. Experimenters then divided the subjects into three groups—one hit a punching bag while thinking of the(fictitious) despised student evaluator, a second hit the punching bag while thinking about becoming physically fit, and a third sat quietly for two minutes.
All three groups then put on headphones and played a computer game against the (fictitious) student who had graded their essay. The loser in each round of the game would be blasted with a loud noise, while the winner got to choose the duration and intensity of the noise. The game was rigged so that the subjects won half the time. So which group set the volume the loudest? The bag punchers were equally aggressive whether they had just been thinking about their despised counterpart or their own physical fitness —and these results point to the dangers of venting anger.
Of course, there are other forms of catharsis that are much more effective. A massive amount of evidence in clinical psychology points to the value of talking about your feelings as a way of making meaning of them. While venting focuses on getting rid of anger, better-designed methods of catharsis use the power of dialogue to understand your anger and work through it, such as those described in the previous chapters on integrative dynamics. The key, however, is in your mindset.
Focus on Redemption, Not Revenge Whereas vengefulness undermines relationships, redemption makes space for a communal spirit. To redeem a relationship requires you to believe in the possibility of reconnection, making amends, and restoring positive bonds. But redemption is more of a mindset than a skill. It is characterized by courage to recognize your insecurities, compassion for others' suffering, and moral determination to build better relations. The potential for redemption resides within everyone. Here are concrete ways to help yourself access it.

1. Summon the courage to look inward. 

At an international conference some years ago, I spoke with a top political negotiator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As we explored some of the sensitive issues surrounding the conflict, his cheeks reddened, his arms flailed, and the cadence of his speech accelerated. As I watched this display I finally asked him, “Do you think emotions are impacting you in the conflict?” He bristledand replied, “Absolutely not!” It was a clear case of refusal to look inward.
On some level his analysis was right—structural factors were major causes of the conflict in question—but within this outwardly rational problem he and the other stakeholders were at an emotional standstill. It takes courage to objectively examine our fears and insecurities in order to open the door to redemption.

2. Feel compassion for others' suffering. 

You may not agree with the other party's beliefs or actions, and you may even be disgusted by their words or deeds. But remember, they are human, and in an emotionally charged conflict, you can be certain that they too are suffering. Being sensitive to their anguish is the single best way to restore positive relations.
In a state of compassion, you empathize with another's suffering and feel the desire to relieve it. The Buddha saw compassion as “that which makes the heart of the good move at the pain of others.” The Latin roots of “compassion” mean “to suffer with.” Compassion emotionally moves us to action.
While the capacity for compassion lies within each of us, the challenge is to evoke it. But how can you feel concern for someone who has intentionally hurt you? For starters, remember that feeling compassion for someone does not preclude your seeking justice for any wrongdoing he or she might have done.
Second, inquire into the other's suffering. You might ask, “How has this conflict personally affected you?” Listen not to defend, but to understand.
Third, imagine stepping into the other person's situation—not just their shoes—and identify with their suffering. Recently I flew from Boston to Chicago, and several rows behind me a four-year-old girl wailed continuously. Fellow passengers and I shared sympathetic glances, yet there was little we could do but bear it. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I was viewing this girl as a tribal outsider, an object to which I felt opposed. I decided to imagine that she was a part of my own family, and soon my annoyance turned to compassion. I walked down the aisle and tried to distract her with a few clownish faces. Her crying stopped for a few minutes, and her mother looked up in appreciation.
A fourth way to evoke compassion is to build even a trivial emotional connection. Pairs of students in a laboratory experiment who sat acrossfrom each other and merely tapped their fingers in synchrony to musical tones were 31 percent more likely to volunteer to help their partner in a tedious forty-five-minute follow-up task than those subjects in pairs who did not tap fingers in synchrony to the music. The synchronized tappers spent on average seven minutes helping, while the asynchronous tappers spent only one.
But how do you find compassion for a reprehensible adversary? I posed this question to Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi, a distinguished diplomat who has negotiated political stability with dictators and militants in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Liberia, South Africa, and Yemen. We were members of a council exploring methods for promoting global conflict resolution. With characteristic thoughtfulness, Ambassador Brahimi reflected on the question and said, “I find something admirable in them.”
He proactively seeks to recognize the humanity in everyone he meets and works to appreciate something about them, whether their dedication to parenting or their loyalty to a cause.
Another effective method to awaken compassion is to draw on contemplative practices. One well-researched technique is known as the loving-kindness meditation (LKM), which encourages the bolstering of positive emotions through systematic cultivation of kindness toward yourself and others. This technique may sound insubstantial, but hard science supports its positive effect. Eminent neuroscientist Richard Davidson and colleagues found that the practice of LKM strengthens brain circuitry linked to empathic sensitivity, and Professor Barbara Fredrickson found that LKM is associated with “increases in a variety of personal resources, including mindful attention, self-acceptance, positive relationships with others and good physical health.”
To practice LKM, begin by cultivating a feeling of loving kindness directed at yourself. Embrace it and allow it to flow throughout your body.
Now imagine radiating this same positive feeling toward your loved ones.
After a few minutes let this compassion emanate to colleagues, acquaintances, and strangers. Then call to mind people who distress you, and extend your compassion to them.
In sum, an emotionally charged conflict will tempt you to seek revenge. Don't fight these feelings, but don't succumb to them. Let this be your mantra: Focus on redemption, not revenge.3. Invoke moral determination to improve relations. To counteract the temptation to avenge, approach redemption with moral determination: Grit your teeth, hold fast to your goal, and don't let go. You can do so by first defining your guiding values and then sticking to them. This second part is the key. In the Tribes Exercise, for example, tribes regularly claim to espouse such profound values as equality, harmony, and compassion, but these values vanish when they begin negotiating.
Take a few minutes to list the three to five values you most cherish, such as dignity, compassion, equality, justice, security, and respect. Post them on your refrigerator as a daily reminder. As you manage your next conflict, reflect on whether you live consistently with those values. If not, revise your behavior or redefine your values.
In some conflicts it can help to jointly define a shared set of values.
For example, spouses embroiled in a pattern of conflict might sit down in a time of peace and identify three core values that define their relationship— dignity, fairness, respect, kindness, compassion, and so on—and agree to hold themselves accountable for honoring them. In effect, the spouses create a social covenant, a mutual commitment to the moral foundation of their relationship. In subsequent conflicts, the mere fact of having that social covenant can heighten their respect for each other.
However, not all relations are so easily reconciled. The greatest barrier to seeking redemption lies in the belief that the other side simply cannot be redeemed. You condemn their behavior as immoral and regard them with such vehement disapproval that an emotional connection feels not only unbearable but impossible. To seek redemption in such cases, therefore, requires moral fortitude, the internal strength to tolerate a connection with someone whose moral code you condemn.
This was the challenge facing my colleague Robert Jay Lifton, a distinguished scholar who interviewed dozens of Nazi doctors accused of committing horrific medical experiments on men, women, and children.
This work tested Lifton's moral fortitude, particularly because he is Jewish.
He told me that as he embarked on this study, he consulted his mentor, the esteemed psychologist Erik Erikson, who remarked, “You know, you may even make contact with their humanity.” To truly grasp the psychology of Nazi doctors, Lifton would have to enter their psyches to understand howthey had justified these atrocities to themselves and rationalized medical torture as a virtuous act.

Lifton is a dedicated humanist, but even he discovered thresholds to redemption. These interviews gave him “regular nightmares,” and he went on to explain that his “greatest challenge arose during a trip to Bavaria to interview one of history's most repugnant Nazi doctors. I arrived at his door and met this charming elderly man who had never been tried for his crimes.
From the moment he opened the door, I felt this strange affinity for him. Of course, I felt deeply ashamed of this feeling, knowing what I knew about his past. But the man generously hosted me and answered all of my questions with complete candor.”
The dialectic between redemption and revenge soon came to a head.
Typically, Lifton refrained from sharing meals with interviewees, which was his way of separating the necessary objective rapport he needed to establish for his research from his moral condemnation of the subject's actions. But on this particular day, Lifton was in the middle of the Bavarian woods, miles from any restaurant and fearful of losing valuable time for his interview, so he accepted. As he notes, “The next hour was one of the most difficult of my entire research experience. Divested of our rather clearly defined interview roles, we were suddenly thrust into a social situation and reduced to making small talk.” He felt self-condemnation for being on “such seemingly affable terms with this man and his monstrous ideas,” but concluded that his research goals justified his actions. He later acknowledged, “I have no regrets.”
However resilient an individual's moral fortitude might be, not all relationships are readily redeemable. Political leaders on opposing sides of a conflict may recognize the social, economic, and long-term political value in restoring good relations, but also recognize that extending their hand in peace will effectively be political suicide. What should they do? In such cases, it is best not to abandon one's determination but to channel it in a different direction. In politically fraught conflicts, a third party may have to be enlisted to “force” an agreement. The two political leaders may appoint their deputies to meet privately with an official from a neutral country who can help them iron out an agreement. The third country's leader can then invite the conflicting countries' leaders to asummit, where they finalize the agreement and have decisions that are politically sensitive “imposed” upon them.

Dialectic #3: Autonomy Versus Affiliation

A mystique surrounds the number one. When two people marry, they join as one. When a child is conceived, two lives create one. When organizations merge, two entities become one. But this process of affiliation brings with it an inherent tension. Spouses feel beholden to each other; the child longs for independence; and the merged organization strains to integrate its original entities.

This dual desire to be one with another (affiliation) and one from another (autonomy) represents the third dialectic. I believe this is the essential dialectic of coexistence—and it confronts us with two dynamics that can escalate conflict: one that threatens your autonomy and another that endangers your affiliation.
The Turf BattleEvery organization grapples with turf battles—fights to protect or expand domains of autonomy. The fact that employees work within the same organization, which affiliates them, also limits the space for independence.
Autonomy becomes a finite resource for which people compete; if someone encroaches on their turf, they pounce.
Consider a common scenario: The CEOs of two companies agree to merge their companies. On paper the merger guarantees skyrocketing profits, but as these two executives implement the agreement, the situation turns disastrous. The newfound affiliation has given rise to a turf battle: Because the employees have not been properly inducted into the newly merged organization, they have maintained loyalty to their original ones.
They have effectively become two tribes, panicking over the potential loss of their members' jobs, authority, and culture. As a result, they begin to battle for power, wreaking havoc on both productivity and morale.
Leadership in an effective corporate merger must recognize the inevitability of turf battles and take proactive action to prevent them. As company leadership formulates a merger strategy, it should appoint cross- departmental, multilevel consultation groups to devise ways to increase the chances of the merger's success. They can develop policies to ensure that members of each “tribe” hold key roles within the new entity.
Institutionalizing the consultation groups will help create a new corporate identity in which everyone feels connected. Turf battles will still erupt—the autonomy/affiliation dialectic is inevitable—but can be blunted through preemptive efforts to enhance everyone's sense of affiliation to the new organization and autonomy within it.

The Space Invasion

Whereas a turf war is a battle over autonomy, a space invasion is a battle over affiliation. In this scenario, tension emerges because you feel so emotionally smothered by a relationship that you cannot separate your identity from that of the other. Excessive affiliation impinges upon your autonomy.Space invasions are unavoidable within families. When my friend Peter's mother-in-law visited for a few days, the two of them got along fine.
But when she later moved in for six months, tensions ran high, and he found no time to be alone with his wife and kids. Soon enough his mother- in-law was weighing in on every family matter. From her perspective she was providing helpful ideas; from his, she was impinging on his ability to make decisions. Peter knew that if he raised his frustration with his mother- in-law, he risked offending her. If he didn't, his autonomy would continue to feel compromised. He felt trapped in a lose-lose situation.
But he was not. Peter and I spoke about the matter, and he decided that, rather than endangering his relationship with his mother-in-law, he would discuss the matter with his wife. She empathized with him and spoke privately with her mother about how best to structure everyone's roles. The mother-in-law understood and distanced herself from some of the family decisions. Having Peter's wife raise the issue constructively defused the space invasion.
Unless you're able to manage the tension between autonomy and affiliation, it can become all-consuming. This became clear to me several years ago when I co-led an executive education program at Harvard for senior business and government executives. My co-facilitator and I ran the Tribes Exercise, and while we typically have participants negotiate without a microphone, we had one available that day. The unexpected ramification was that the microphone enabled delegates to speak one at a time, reducing chaos and encouraging everyone to listen to one another. From the outset of the intertribal negotiation, a delegate named John took positive advantage of this situation and led the discussions. He stood at the middle of the room, handed each tribe the microphone to share its attributes, flip-charted the results, and facilitated a consensual decision-making process. In the middle of the final negotiation round, John turned to me and said, “We've all come to agreement.”
“Really?” I asked, skeptical. All six delegates nodded, pointing to John's tribe as the chosen one. I asked everyone to return to their seats so we could review the exercise, whispering to my co-facilitator, “This is going to be a boring debrief!”
It turned out I was wrong.

I opened the discussion by asking the group, “How are you feeling?” A businessman at the back of the room raised his hand and, pointing to John, asked, “Why did you get the microphone?”
“Yeah,” remarked another participant before John could respond.
“Who authorized that? In the first round we all had a chance to use the microphone. In the second round you monopolized it!”
“You didn't pay attention to what I said!” complained a woman at a neighboring table, arms crossed. “You were like a dictator!”
“But I saved your life!” John protested.
A businessman from the back row, who had been shaking his head, suddenly stood and shouted, “I would rather die than be in a tribe with people like you!”
As a hush fell over the room, I asked the businessman to explain what he meant by that statement. He said he had been deeply offended by the degree to which John usurped everyone's autonomy during the negotiation.
Although John's intentions had been positive—he was, after all, trying to save the world—he had failed to respect everyone's independence.
Consequently, the businessman and a majority of participants felt disempowered, humiliated, and ready to fight back.
But what should John have done? He was, after all, in a double bind.
By taking on the leadership role, he saved the world—but at the cost of inciting great animosity toward him. Had he not assumed leadership, the world most likely would have exploded. Neither option seemed good.
Though John's leadership helped the tribes reach agreement, I have no doubt that had this been a real-life situation, the rage these tribes now felt would have ignited a civil conflict.

In Sum

To resolve an emotionally charged conflict, you must cultivate a communal mindset. But like a ship keeping its direction on the high seas, that mindset requires you to constantly monitor the push and pull of dialectics. You must balance acceptance with change; focus on redemption, not revenge; and most of all, strive for affiliation and autonomy, for us and them, for now and always.
That is the path to reconciliation.

Ch 15: Fostering the Spirit of Reconciliation

Every mythos must have its end, and we have come to ours. We have journeyed into the world of conflict resolution and discovered tools along the way to neutralize the divisive forces of conflict and stimulate integrative dynamics. But a book is just a book: Theory is useful only if it is actually used. So put these ideas into practice, trying them out to see what works in your particular conflict. Keep in mind, though, that reconciliation is not social engineering: Your heart needs to be fully involved in the process. The spirit of reconciliation is ultimately what makes it work. And so I leave you with a few essential principles:

1. Reconciliation Is a Choice

No one can force reconciliation upon you. It begins as a feeling that change is possible. That feeling may be hard to cultivate, because the Tribes Effect conspires against you—but it is not an invincible force. You can break its spell if you so choose.
To foster change, become what Norman Vincent Peale calls a “possibilitarian.” Enlist your imagination in a quest for the positive possible. While knowledge confines you to what is, imagination opens you to what can be. Einstein was right in asserting that imagination is more important than knowledge.

2. Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference

The ripple effects of reconciliation are far-reaching. Each fight you resolve in a productive manner trickles up into the world. Reconciling with a family member creates the possibility for better relations at work, which can in turn spread to your community at large, and then on to the world. As Indian philosopher Krishnamurti noted, “A stone can change the course of a river.”

3. Don't Wait

If a conflict distresses you, give it the attention it deserves. The fundamental struggle of reconciliation is not with other people, but within yourself. Internal resistance is the greatest obstacle to peace, and no one can overcome that for you.

In The Wizard of Oz, young Dorothy struggles to return home to Kansas from the magical land of Oz. At her great moment of despair, Glinda the Good Witch appears and tells her that she always had the power to go home. “Then why didn't you tell her before?” asks the Scarecrow. The Good Witch responds, “Because she wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.”

There is no quick fix to bring about reconciliation. It is a process you must work through with thoughtful deliberation, and you need to start somewhere. Rather than blaming others and watching your relationships suffer, ask yourself, What might I do now—today—to bring this conflict one step closer to resolution? Dorothy's journey ended where it began: in the comfort of her own home. Should you take the journey to reconciliation, you too will end where you began: within yourself. But in the process you will have achieved self-transcendence.

Years after the exercise at Davos, I bumped into the deputy prime minister who had participated in the Tribes Exercise. He told me that his group's failure to save the world had truly shocked him. As a result, he initiated the practice of preparing for his every upcoming negotiation by reflecting not just on rational strategy, but also on deeper issues of identity at stake for the other side—and for himself.

This is the key to overcoming the Tribes Effect. The world did not have to explode at Davos, and it need not explode in your own life. Thepotential for reconciliation rests firmly in your mind and in your heart. It is up to you to decide whether to use it.

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