Chapter Two: Navigating Identity Differences
Part One: Emotions in Identity Conflicts
Readings:
Cleaver, E., & Geismar, Maxwell. (1967). Soul on Ice (First ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company
“The Conflict Resolver’s Paradoxical Identity: From Conflicted to Hybrid” (included below) by Robert Gould
Key Difference and Dilemma of Emotions
Reminder of our Definition of Conflict:
In the simplest terms, conflict is a difference or dilemma that generates strong emotions. What makes a conflict intractable are the walls of emotion that separate individuals, identity groups, and countries. If disputants calmly sit with each other and discuss ways to productively address a conflict, the conflict is transformed from a heated difference and dilemma to a manageable difference or dilemma. The problem is that it is extraordinarily difficult for us to get disputants to sit calmly and discuss their conflict. In many cases, it just seems plain impossible!
Therefore, the difference and dilemma, that occurs about emotions in conflicts, is that we need to separate strong emotions from disputes, but efforts to make this separation can easily undermine the power of the conflict, as well as undermine disputants’ principles and group identifications
Review of List of Navigation Strategies for Seemingly Intractable Conflicts, Differences, and Dilemmas:
Not surprisingly, conflict workers have found that if disputants have already agreed to calmly seek a resolution to their conflicts, before the conflict process begins, then the chances for success are bright. Otherwise, the chances are dismal—unless there is a forced resolution looming, by the courts, or by some other authority. Unfortunately, such forced resolution is usually worse than a negotiated resolution. Furthermore, forced resolutions rarely address the needs of disputants to access power, embrace difference, and grow as persons and as moral agents.
In the beginning of any negotiation, disputants are likely to have different emotional stories about the conflict at hand. In taking sides in a conflict, disputants build the best case for their side, and express the severity of the conflict through a flood of their emotions, like anger, grief, sorrow, disgust, revenge, outrage, hate, disbelief, etc.
Example to help us work through this dilemma
Early in the history of PSU’s Conflict Resolution Graduate Program, we were trying to establish an off-campus home for graduate students to provide community mediation services, under the supervision of our faculty members. We were partnered with existing community mediation services and local criminal justice services. The criminal justice services wanted to save money and time that was currently given to local police to manage small scale neighborhood disputes. They wanted to refer cases to a PSU community clinic with professional staff that was supervised by highly trained academics. I assumed that the community services wanted to help us establish a clinic, as in the early stages of negotiation, they did not seem to be opposed to the idea. However, in the latter stages of the negotiations, they were opposed to the idea, which derailed the whole process and alienated the criminal justice representative, as the process just wasted their time. I was also unhappy that my time was wasted, and I expressed that emotion to a group of community mediation service representatives. They were quite resentful of my sharing this feeling. They said that they saw the process a way that the public sector was trying to take over the private nonprofit mediation services. With that assumption, their lack of transparency earlier in the process seemed like a ploy to undermine the project surreptitiously. My emotions were likely perceived as a power play of my own, though I was sad and frustrated, but not enraged. When people are acting like they are being collaborative, but are actually being competitive, my emotional expression could easily be perceived as a ploy of my own. Bitter feelings amongst all of the participants likely spiked by the end of the negotiation. Expressing emotion did not help; rather, it made everyone more bitter.
In the following, we will discuss and critiques ways to manage this flood of emotions, suggested in the book, Difficult Conversations, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen of the Harvard Negotiation Project.
“Feelings Matter: They Are Often at the Heart of Difficult Conversations:
Feelings, of course, are part of what makes good relationships so rich and satisfying. Feelings, like passion and pride, silliness and warmth, and even jealousy, disappointment, and anger let us know that we are fully alive.” (ibid, p. 85)
Yes, I agree that we should all have the capacity to express a full range of emotions, but the difficulty is how we do this and when we do it. In a dispute the stakes are high when our emotions can so easily escalate the conflict.
In the example shared, above, sharing feelings did not work, it backfired, as it was probably perceived as a manipulative ploy.
“Unexpressed Feelings Can Leak into the Conversation:
Unspoken feelings can color the conversation in a number of ways. They alter you affect and tone of voice. They express themselves through your body language or facial expression. They may take the form of long pauses, or an odd and unexplained detachment. You may become sarcastic, aggressive, impatient, unpredictable, or defensive. Studies show that while few people are good at detecting factual lies, most of us can determine when someone is distorting, manufacturing, or withholding an emotion. That’s because, if clogged, your emotion pipes will leak. Indeed, unexpressed feelings can create so much tension that you disengage: you choose not to work with a particular colleague because you have so many unresolved feelings about them, or you become distant from your spouse, children, or friends.” (ibid, p. 87)
In some situations, people with unexpressed emotions should probably learn to express their emotions more regularly to avoid outbursts. The conflict facilitator may need to have a private caucus with such a person, where psychotherapy is recommended for such a difficult transformation. However, our mainstream society (and elsewhere) often moralizes that strong emotions should be an expressed only as a last-resort, and usually only within the province of men. Because strong emotions can so easily escalate conflicts, it is often over-controlled in conflict processes. Clearly, the expression of strong emotions in mainstream society is multiply problematic psychologically and sociologically—a hotbed of dilemmas and difficulties that must be managed delicately, not the least of these are that the expression of strong emotions can lead to classist, racist, or sexist stereotyping.
In our example, I, as a white academic man, could easily be perceived as using my emotions to add to the power of my status. The other people in the room were nonacademic women, who certainly, and understandably, did not appreciate my gestures—even though my intention was to transform our process into something more human and collaborative. So much for good intensions!
“Unexpressed Feelings Can Burst into the Conversation:
For some of us, the problem is not that we are unable to express our feelings, but that we are unable not to. (my emphasis) We get angry and show it in ways that are embarrassing or destructive.” (ibid, p. 89
Some people use anger regularly to try to control and dominate a conflict. These people need to learn how not to do this, though it may have been a successful intimidation tactic. This problem is the misuse of power, as well as the misuse of anger expression. Therefore, the dilemma is how to deconstruct manipulative tactics, as well as adopting a practice of expressing anger in a way that it does not intimidate others. Because power is so often misused in our mainstream culture, and because people in authority often use anger to control others, it is quite a dilemma to change these institutionalized habits. A broader discussion of collegial communication needs to take place throughout the workplace, community organization, neighborhood, and family.
If we construct a continuum between pure collaboration on the one end and pure competition on the other end, we can imagine that most conflict processes happen somewhere in-between, and can vacillate on the continuum depending on the mood of the participants and the topic being discussed. The job of the facilitator is to move the conversation, on the continuum, towards collaboration and away from competition. Good luck doing this, as disputants can easily get locked into their viewpoints and existential realities.
In our example, the process that was organized to be collaborative was actually surreptitiously competitive. Rather deep into the process, a participant accused me of being in league with the “suits downtown,” meaning the criminal justice representatives. At that point, I should have asked if the process was just thinly-disguised competition, and should be restructured or abandoned. I labored on, as the criminal justice people got discouraged and left the process. We ended up with a half-hearted, doomed-from-the-start, project, with one graduate student—that died on the vine a short time later.
“Unexpressed Feelings Make It Difficult to Listen:
The two hardest (and most important) communication tasks in difficult conversations are expressing feelings and listening. A significant pattern we’ve observed in our coaching involves the sometimes-elusive relationship between the two skills. When people are having a hard time listening, often it is not because they don’t know how to listen well. It is, paradoxically, because they don’t know how to express themselves well. Unexpressed feelings can block the ability to listen. (my emphasis)
Why? Because good listening requires an open and honest curiosity about the other person, and a willingness and ability to keep the spotlight on them. Buried emotions draw the spotlight back to us. Instead of wondering, ‘How does what they are saying make sense?’ and ‘Let me try to learn more,’ we have a record playing in our mind that is stuck in the groove of our own feelings: ‘I feel so vulnerable right now.’ It’s hard to hear someone else when we are feeling unheard, even if the reason we feel unheard is that we have chosen not to share. Our listening ability often increases remarkably once we have expressed our own strong feelings.” (ibid, p. 89)
Of course, sharing our strong feelings can backfire, escalating the conflict, which can increase our anxiety and, again, prevent us from listening. Therefore, the dilemma can be that both unexpressed feelings, as well as expressed feelings can make it difficult to listen.
In our example, my expressed feelings certainly prevented other participants from listening. Doubtless, my feelings just added to the competitive atmosphere, and probably came across as shaming. I immediately regretted my sharing emotions.
“A Way Out of the Feelings Bind:
If you are able to share feelings with skill, you can avoid many of the potential costs associated with expressing feelings and even reap some unexpected benefits. This is the way out of the feelings bind…First, you need to sort out just what your feelings are: second you need to negotiate with your feelings; and third, you need to share your actual feelings, not attributions or judgments about the other person.” (ibid, p. 90)
On the surface this sounds great, but I worry about whether the any disputant should be trusted with their feelings. Is it realistic that disputants will simultaneously abandon their competition-to-win the argument and move to collaborative mode? They might both say they have become noncompetitive, but can we trust that? Disputants can easily use their feelings against each other—either directly, through obvious condescension, or indirectly behind your back: “Disputant X is so overdramatic; can’t X talk about the conflict without all that emotion?”
In our example, I should have sensed the potential for competition. It was naïve of me to suppose that we were all committed to collaboration. In a competitive process, emotion is likely to backfire. In competition, it is better to be cool-headed and give your best argument, while sympathetically paraphrasing opponent’s arguments. If you give a better argument for the other side than the other side presents, it will be easier to defeat them with a better argument for your side that undermines the better argument that you just supplied your opposition. In the case at hand, I should have validated their fears that our University program might evolve into a public-supported city-wide mediation program that could drive them out of business. To avoid such a fate, I could have suggested that an advisory panel should be created, and composed of community mediation center leadership, so that our graduate student practicum site would be managed nonthreateningly. Hindsight is usually more accurate that what I did at the time. And my proposal might not have been trusted, anyway. The mediation profession tends to be female-centric, and academia, as well as criminal justice, tend to be male-centric—further undermining the trust-level.
“Finding Your Feelings: Learn Where Feelings Hide:
[W]e often do not know how we feel…This is not because we are dumb, but recognizing feelings is challenging. Feelings are more complex and nuanced than we usually imagine. What’s more, feelings are very good at disguising themselves. Feelings we are uncomfortable with disguise themselves as emotions we are better able to handle; bundles of contradictory feelings masquerade as a single emotion; and most important, feelings transform themselves into judgments, accusations, and attributions.” (ibid, p. 91)
The authors are, rightly, describing how difficult it is to know how one is feeling, not just how difficult it is to express one’s feelings. No wonder we can feel so defeated sharing our feelings, when the likelihood of miscommunicating them is so great! No wonder that social pressured against expressing emotions is so strong. It is easy to understand the urge to “separate emotions from the problem, and then repress them as deeply as possible.
Countering these pressures to keep emotions out of any conflict process means that mainstream society needs to radically change its disposition toward feelings. Appropriately expressing feelings is a challenge in any culture, but in mainstream American culture, it is exponentially more difficult. We are a highly competitive culture, where power, wealth, and status give those who are at the higher rankings more leverage in conflicts, and those down the rankings less leverage. Add to that: the difficulty of managing emotions without accusations of over-playing or under-playing them, and you have a formula for unfair negotiations.
In our example, it ultimately appeared that the community mediation representatives did not want to negotiate anything; they just wanted to shut down the project at hand. When people mislead each other about their intensions, collaborative processes just waste time and resources. Good conflict process facilitators must be vigilant to stop the process, if it is not truly collaborative.
