Stereotypes

I went to see RoTK and have dinner with jneal, mbent, and jdoe (a friend of jneal's) - had a great time and an interesting conversation about conflict resolution practitioners (crp). Jneal and jdoe both expressed some surprise at my interest in cr. i found this rather puzzling, especially from jneal, but figured i would find out why. when we started talking and they began explaining what they thought about a crp. it was fascinating! i heard comments like "you seem more like the kind of person who would be in the middle of the fighting" and "CRPs are quiet, calm, soft spoken, etc". Once I realized that they were working from some preconceived notion of who can be (or is) a CRP, it was okay.

I had felt a bit defensive at first, thinking they were say that I, specifically, wasn't suited for this type of work. But I realized also that they weren't really sure what conflict resolution is, let alone what type of person would be 'best' for it. This fascinates me. What I kind of got from them as to the 'type' of person is this: Calm, quiet, maybe a bit passive, acts like a psychologist (maybe), tries to make everyone happy, tries to stop anyone from feeling bad or acting angry, tries to smooth everything over.

EWWWW!!! That's not resolution, that's either avoidance or smothering. Either is icky and probably (ultimately) facilitates more conflict! Funny thing is, I don't think most CRPs would be like that! I wonder where that idea comes from? I have a feeling much of it comes from our own experiences with conflict. Most people shy away from anything remotely painful and conflict (i.e. change) often carriers the appearance of pain. Within families, I think we most often see the extremes - lots of useless conflict/confrontation OR a total avoidance of any confrontation at all. Neither is helpful.

There isn't a lot in the media about conflict resolution and there certainly aren't a lot of movies with CRPs. True, the movies that are out there do *heavily* emphasize one side winning and the other losing but none really demonstrate the resolution process in action. From what I can remember, they use the CRP as a mouthpiece for the 'winning' side. Maybe that's it - maybe most folks see CRPs as a mouthpiece for the other side or for their own agenda. They don't see them as truly being able to resolve anything because true resolution looks far far different than what most of us are used to.

Most people are conditioned to the win/lose mentality and anything other than what they consider winning feels like a loss of power (disempowerment). I get this funny image of two people who will only talk to each other through the third person - even though they're all in the same room. I don't want to be that third person - I want to facilitate the two people talking to each other. I want to facilitate people learning their own motivations and then discovering how those motivations either support or resolve their disagreements.

Conflict resolution? I think it should be called change management instead. Conflict is resistance to change, fear of something different. My goal is to help people discover the truths that will help them feel safe enough to move with change instead of fighting it.