I’m on my way to Philadelphia for the annual national conference of the Association for Conflict Resolution, where I’m presenting a workshop on practice-building for other mediators. I stopped by my big sister’s house on the first leg of my trip and we had one of those conversations that would make Rod’s head spin. Pressed for time before I had to hit the road again, we were talking fast and in layers, finishing each other’s sentences and overlapping sentences. It was great.
We talked briefly about my upcoming workshop and pondered why there’s a need for mediators to have a practice-building workshop. That lead to a conversation about the public’s lack of familiarity with mediation, confusion about the difference between mediation and arbitration, and the tendency for people to wait until they’re thinking “lawyer” to consider mediation. And then my sister added, “Half the people in a conflict don’t think they’re in a conflict and so would never think to hire a mediator.”
My thoughts jumped to the Interpersonal Conflict class I teach for my graduate mediation students. I’ve written about this class before. By the end of the term, each student in the class must have engaged a difficult conversation in their lives. It’s a healthy reminder for would-be mediators how important it is to step up to difficult conversations with people that matter, at home and at work, and yet of the courage it sometimes takes to do so.
When I announce the assignment at the start of the term, a substantive percentage of the class typically gets a rather puzzled look. I’ve been teaching this class long enough that I have a pretty good guess what many of them are thinking: Conflict? What conflict? I don’t have any conflict in my life.
Inevitably, some students find me at a coffee break to explain the difficulty of completing the assignment when they don’t have any conflict in their lives. I usually suggest that they see how the term unfolds and what pops up. I say this because, for virtually all the students, something happens after more class time with me, followed by some reading and writing:
They realize they have conflict in their lives.
It’s not new conflict that suddenly finds them because they’re looking for it. It’s old conflict that never really got addressed and which they’d artfully avoided in their desire to escape the tension and the potential messiness. These students, like many of us, had turned a blind eye to the unresolved tensions. They were attending family gatherings or going to work and exchanging shallow pleasantries with folks from whom they no longer had the kind of relationship they really wanted. And they had begun to confuse “pleasant conversations” with “having no conflict.”
They’d settled for less of a work or personal relationship in the name of avoidance, not rocking the boat, or, ironically, making the conflict go away.
Last week, I chatted on the phone with a group of my current students, checking in with them between on-campus residencies. Several had finished their difficult conversations. I asked how they felt about such conversations now. One, who had chosen to speak with a family member from whom she’d been estranged for many years, said, “It went so well and made such a difference that I’m now making a list of all the other people I want to talk to.”
My heart leaped for joy. This is why I do—and love—this work.
Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
