The longer I work and live with conflict, conflict between others, conflict between me and another, or conflicts within myself, the more clarity I gain on the opportunity for personal growth that conflict offers.
Even perhaps that conflict offers more than “opportunity” and is instead an integral and central part of the process that fosters growth in a human being.
The symptomology of conflict can manifest in different ways. Maybe it arises through repetitive, stuck, and emotionally heightened patterns of thinking, pain in the body, trapped feelings of anger, fury, rage, sadness, impulsive fight/flight responses, gnawing feelings of anxiety and fear, periods of depression, experiences of feeling lost and chaotic in mind and body, a team, family or other system that is fragmented and without focus. These are just a very few examples of how conflict may be recognised.
The choice we’re offered, is to shoulder the weight and difficulty of such symptoms on an ongoing and potentially never-ending basis, or instead to turn towards the arena of conflict where the epicentre of the disturbance exists and find relief through undoing the binds that are keeping us trapped in the pain of the conflictual dynamic.
There are many advantages in turning towards the conflict. For example, we give ourselves some sense of agency and power, as different from the common conflict phenomenon of feeling helpless. However, the advantage I want to most highlight in this article, is that in turning towards the conflict, we offer ourselves an opportunity to learn and grow.
Navigating through and transforming the energies of conflict is in one way, an exercise in problem solving, very much like the problems we faced or continue to face in the classrooms we sit in during formal learning programmes.
To take that analogy further, when a student solves something like a maths or science problem, they learn a method. Next time they face a maths or science problem, they may try and use that method again. It may work if the problem is similar to the ones they faced previously, or it may need to be adapted, or even a new solution found altogether.
Either way, the student is learning methods through which to solve the problems they are faced with. I contend that the same principle can be applied to conflict. However, instead of the currency through which we learn being a maths or science problem, it is instead a problem born in and of relationship, either with others or within oneself.
As one learns to undo the “bind” at the heart of the conflict, one learns new skills, techniques, approaches that will hopefully aid when addressing and transforming conflict binds in the future.
Esteemed conflict practitioner and writer Ken Cloke describes the opportunity for learning through conflict in the following way,
“Without conflict, quite simply, there would be no learning, growth or change. This is not merely because learning growth and change require a release from outmoded or obsolete circumstances, but because every human being, relationship, organisation, and system stabilises itself by means of integration and order, yet is only able to evolve to higher levels of functioning by means of disintegration and disorder, expressed primarily through conflict.” (p.40, 2019)
Of course, there is a choice. The choice being that rather than turning towards conflict, to turn away. I would argue that to turn away is to perpetuate the pain of the conflict experience. It is to move further into a repetitive dynamic. With the conflict to our back, we are endlessly fuelled by its energies and vicissitudes. The conflict is the driver for our behaviours.
To turn towards conflict is to face it with the tenderness and subtlety of our chest and heart to the fore. It is to be prepared to feel the difficulty and pain in a conscious way. Because then we create the possibility for something different. Even in this movement, from turning away from conflict to turning towards, the back and forth of this movement and the middle ground in-between, there is immense learning and growth. And it is in this learning and growth more broadly that we find a kernel of individual and collective evolution and emancipation.
Reference:
Cloke, K. (2019) The Crossroads of Conflict – A Journey into the Heart of Dispute Resolution. Dallas: GoodMedia Press
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An article by Nick Adlington of www.go-dialogue.co.uk
go-dialogue works with families, organisations, companies, and communities, to build heart felt relationships and work through intractable conflict to something brighter.
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