The Penny Has Dropped

And what a surprise it was. And yet at the same time, it wasn’t. After all, it had been staring me in the face and pulling at my ears for years but maybe I didn’t really want to acknowledge the strength and depth of it.
How attached, even addicted so many of us have become to it.
So just what the heck am I talking about?
Training a group of front line practitioners recently as part of the Reducing Parental Conflict programme and hearing their experiences with parents and carers, it became really obvious just how attached we are to evaluating and assessing what’s said and done in moralistic, critical and judgemental terms.
In short, it’s our long term habit of wanting to be right and good, rather than wrong and bad.
This attachment to our opinions and beliefs, I suggest, is the basis of all conflict and the more we become attached to the rightness of our opinion/belief/way of behaving, we more entrenched, adamant and insistent we become.
So if we are right that must mean the others are ….? Correct.
And the consequence of being wrong and bad? Some type of sanction or punishment which they deserve.

To me, it seems to boil down to 3 thoughts
1) I’m right
2) You’re wrong
3) Once you agree with me, all will be well.

This puts this type of communication (and the relationships that flow from it) into the ‘competitive sport’ arena, where defeating an opponent becomes the aim. This puts ourselves into a win/lose frame of mind, which I believe is actually a ‘lose/lose’ frame. This means, as Radney Foster’s song goes, ‘Nobody Wins’.

So ok, it’s one thing to accept this and realise what our well formed habits are in this regard but what do we do instead? Try to stop doing it or doing it so much? I don’t know about you but I haven’t found that to be very successful solution with any habit.

What though, if we evaluate and assess using a different measure?
What if we accept a premise put forward by Marshall Rosenberg, the architect of Non Violent Communication, namely that we humans (in fact all living organisms), are constantly motivated to behave in ways that aim to meet our needs.
And conflict occurs, not at the level of needs, but in the habitual strategies that we use aimed at meeting our needs.
And when we become attached to our chosen strategy, we can become fixed, even entrenched, in the rightness of our strategy which we believe is the solution to the problem. And again, if we are convinced of our rightness, that must mean the other(s)…. exactly.
And there we are again, sucked back into what I call the ‘Whirlpool/Vortex’ of intense, frequent and poorly or unresolved conflict, fuelled by our our wonderfully efficient threat detecting amygdala and the release of those chemicals that have ensured our survival as a species.
Not the best state to listen carefully and understand clearly what’s happening!

However, these habitual ‘scripted dramas’ can be affected once we are able to identify the need(s) we are trying to meet. Then we can engage the creative, wondering, imaginative part of our brain to come up with other ways to meet the need and engage in negotiation, the aim of which is to meet the needs of everyone.

So, to me, the main aim of any involvement we have with parents and carers in this programme is:
1) to bring these habits of communication that create unproductive conflict to their attention and
2) to model, apply and share the enhanced knowledge and skills gained by practitioners in the RPC training
The aim being to increase the parents/carers’ choices about how they communicate when there is a disagreement, difference of opinion or argument, thereby encouraging the move from conflict to co-operation, argument to agreement and friction to understanding.

I welcome any reflections, questions and comments you have.