The openness of conflict

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

This essay is about my journey and is very different I’m sure, from others. Its also not meant to be a statement on anything that happened here over the last several days. But as we talk about conflict and comfort, I wanted to share a bit of my experience in that area.

Perhaps like many of you, I grew up in a family that did not allow conflict. My father and mother have been married for over 50 years and to this day brag that they have only had one disagreement…yeah right. They just learned how to do it in passive aggressive ways that made everyone just as uncomfortable as open conflict would have, perhaps more so. There was one exception. That being when my father and brother would scream at one another and it always ended with my brother getting the shit beat out of him. I felt my father’s backhand across the face once…when I dared to challenge my mother. So yeah, I learned very well to keep quiet and keep my thoughts to myself. Of course, that was also good training for an authoritarian personality. My father ruled and we had no voice. And his rules came directly from God, of course.

When I almost accidentally got a job working in a residential program for kids who were chemically dependent right after college, I was ill equipped to deal with the kinds of conflict that ensued as a result of much of the rage these young people were feeling. For the most part, I failed miserably in helping them. Usually that’s because I tried to avoid dealing with conflict or used what I had learned from my father to shut them down.  

Then I went to work in a group home for troubled teens in Colorado Springs. The interesting thing was that it was a year long internship program where we lived 24/7 with the kids and other staff. Getting away from conflict in a situation that charged was pretty much impossible. But the permanent staff had learned to embrace anger and conflict. They knew how to work with it – whether the participants were staff or residents.

One day in a staff meeting, I had one of the most profound experiences of my life in terms of learning. There were perhaps 10 of us seated around a rectangular table. At either end were two male staff who got into an argument. It became very heated to the point that they both stood and raised their voices to one another. The rest of us sat silently and, as you can imagine, it terrified me. I can’t remember how long this went on – but at one point, the yelling stopped, some accommodation was reached and the two men shook hands across the table. It moved me deeply. I sat stunned as tears ran down my face. And I never forgot it. I saw, with my own eyes, two people have it out with each other. It was ugly at times and uncomfortable as hell. But it was also clear to me that, in the end it needed to happen – it was worth it. And I took one step closer to learning that speaking up and engaging in conflict was not always a bad thing – even if it was difficult.

Not long after that incident, another co-worker and I were scheduled to cook a meal for residents, staff and guests. All total about 40 people. She didn’t show up when it was time to do the preparation…and I was pissed at having to do all the work. When she finally showed up, she apologized and asked me what she could do to make it up to me. I said, “I don’t think you can do anything. I just think I’m going to be mad for awhile.” That was a real turning point for me – to claim my feelings openly and just let them be. And I might say that the co-worker involved is still one of my best friends 30 years later. We often re-count that experience as a turning point in our relationship.

These experiences laid the groundwork for me to learn to be able to embrace my feelings, other people’s feelings, and conflict. As I progressed in my career, I found that I was drawn to working with kids who are likely to get in your face with a “fuck you,” much more so than those that are passive aggressive or take their anger inward. I think that attraction was because I was learning alot from them, all while it looked like I was helping them. And I’m so grateful to those kids and their courage to fight back against the wrongs that were done to them – even if their aim was off-target many times. I’m not sure they would have survived if they didn’t lash out with it somehow.

I know that conflict is often ugly and certainly makes everyone involved, whether as a participant or an observer, uncomfortable. And we’re not usually at our best during those times (to say the least). I also know that I have a long way to go in my journey to understand how all this works and how to do it well. But for anyone who, like me, experienced the heavy hand of silence, I’ll take the openness of conflict any day.