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Why would we want to resolve conflict lovingly? One could answer is that love is the antidote to hate. Hate and the fear below it fuel fascism and authoritarianism.
Love is not something we simply feel or don’t feel or something that is. Love is a verb. Something we do, as bell hooks points out in her book All About Love.
Oligarchs, fascists, emperors, ruling elites and techno-feudalists have a set of values focused on domination, profit-exploitation, and first and foremost power. They use fear and hate as tools to get power by convincing an overwhelmed, precarious, even desperate population that they need violent protection from a dangerous, dehumanized other. As power centralizes and violence escalates, people feel even further deprived of safely relating to others.
Autocracy creates a non-sustainable, low-nurturing, and life-denying sphere of scarcity, where only those favored by those in power can be safe.
Improving our skills in lovingly resolving conflict can improve our ability to have more peaceful, connecting, difficult conversations. We live in an increasingly fractured, divided, untrusting world. Activist cancel culture is part of the problem. Let’s help each other to create ecosystems of lovingly relating with a commitment to reciprocally being in each other’s care.
Other tools and mindsets that can help are curiosity, listening and com-passion — not just empathy, as Bayo Akomolafe points out on bayoakomolafe.net.
Anarcho-capitalism, off-the-charts militarism, and run-away-climate-change hurt all of us.
Please consider having as many difficult and uncomfortable conversations as possible with people you disagree with. Can you move from being an activist by talking to people that you mostly agree with to also becoming an organizer — a person that encourages everyone to create solutions, possibilities, maybe realities that work for all of us?
The points below are from family therapist Pete Walker’s website pete-walker.com. He has also published several very resourceful books on Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and recovery from it.
1. Normalize the inevitability of conflict and establish a safe forum for it. Discuss and agree to as many of these guidelines as seem useful.
2. The goal is to inform and negotiate for change, not punish. Punishment destroys trust. Love can open the ears of other people’s hearts.
3. Imagine how it would be easiest to hear about your grievance from others. Say how it would be easiest for you to hear. Present a complaint as lovingly and chargelessly as possible.
4. Preface complaints with acknowledgement of the good of the other and your mutual relationship.
5. No name-calling, sarcasm or character assassination.
6. No analyzing the other or mind reading.
7. No interrupting or filibustering.
8. Be dialogical. Give short, concise statements that allow the other to reflect back and paraphrase key points to let you hear that you have been accurately heard.
9. No denial of the others rights. See “Human Bill of Rights” on Pete Walker’s website or “Personal Bill of Rights”.
10. Differences are often not a matter of right or wrong. Both people can be right and merely different. Be willing to sometimes agree to differ.
11. Avoid “you statements.” Use “I statements” that identify your feelings and experience of what you perceive as unfair.
12. Stick to one specific issue with accompanying identifiable behavior at a time. Ask yourself what hurts the most to try to find your key complaint.
13. Stick to the issue until everyone feels fully heard.
14. Take turns presenting issues.
15. If discussion becomes heated, either person can call timeout (one minute to 24 hours) as long as they suggest a time to resume. Discharge as much of accumulated charge as possible before you resume.
16. Own responsibility for any accumulated anger that might come from not talking about an issue soon enough.
17. Own responsibility for accumulated charge displaced from other hurts (transference, i.e. from other / previous relationship pain).
18. Commit to grow in understanding of how much of the charge comes from childhood abuse / neglect.
19.Commit to recovering from the losses of childhood by effectively identifying, grieving, and reclaiming them.
20. Apologize from an unashamed place. Make whatever amends are possible. Include your intention to correct your behavior in the future. Explain your extenuating circumstances as evidence that you were not trying to be hurtful.
BE CAREFUL WITH EACH OTHER, SO WE CAN BE DANGEROUS TOGETHER!