Human Beings tend to revel in their resentments. When we've been wronged, we tell ourselves we're off the hook for our response because *they were wrong*. Somebody else hurt us and thus we become ugly ourselves with impunity. We feel that in order to recover from this ugliness this person must change, must restore the world to where it was. We infer malevolent intent, but more likely another human erred or merely selfishly acted with a deliberate intention to aggrandize the self with ambivalence to what happens to other people. This is different from a deliberate intention to harm.
Legitimate grief is absolutely necessary - when we are harmed, our world destabilizes. It is an unpleasant psychological situation. When destabilized, one of the things you do is to attack (making ourselves taller by cutting off the legs of whomever we're in dispute with).The problem is combatants generally pits one selfishness against another selfishness and each are reacting from reflexive neurological patterns they themselves have created.
It is one thing to be truthful about how hurt I am. This is facilitative - knowing the depths of one's pain is essential to healing it. Grief is raw and untested: a natural human response and one that must be allowed to take its course. If anything as mediators we must legitimate grief, because it is such an essential component of the human experience. After a while, though, the grief itself passes and the sense of wrong sedimentizes. We concoct our "I'm right - he's wrong" story in minor sound bite form and retell it to ourselves as if we're picking at a scab. Each retelling rehearses our reactions and our arousal.
A rehearsed story is not grief but a habit of the mind. Essentially we practice at being angry, upset and stressed to the point that it becomes ever harder to change our response at will. It creates neural pathways that are exceptionally difficult to change and these are maintained by the stress response. The brain is wired to protect us - we associate danger with the image of a lion and thus remain on guard to run when a predator is near. When somebody has hurt us, we do protect ourselves from being hurt again in the same neuro-shorthand. Because of the subtleties involved in our social dynamics, this approach becomes dysfunctional. At the extreme this is PTSD, a rewiring of neural cortex to make sure something that traumatic NEVER happens again. We become tuned into *anything* that suggests the experience could happen again.
During the lecture we were given two visualization exercises. In the first, we were told to close our eyes and think of being angry. Naturally all of us felt immediately unsettled, our pulses shot up, our stomachs churned. This was the effect of our sympathetic nervous systems kicking into effect. In the next exercise we were guided to close our eyes again. Every time we inhaled we were told to completely relax the muscles in your stomach every time you breathe in. After a minute of this, we were told to picture somebody we loved and focus on that sensation of goodness we sensed from them. We were then told to re-think of the situation that made us angry and see if there were other perspectives from which to approach the situation. As one would expect from most forms of mindfulness, our pulses slowed, our minds cleared, and we felt a sense of calm and well-being, allowing the anger from the previous scenario to exist, but in a very different perspective. The parasympathetic nervous system came into play here - it's what we need to feel loved, experience sympathy, and think creatively.
The take away was that when you overrehearse a grudge, it creates instant sympathetic arousal, which can't lead to anything but conflict or avoidance. All it takes it reminding people that there's a place in them that's quieter, has compassion, knows forgiveness, appreciates things and can bring something to a collaborative discussion. Mediators and attorneys can try to create conditions where people themselves can choose to be kinder because their bodies are not forcing them to be unkind.This opens the path to forgiveness, which recognizes that we do not need the other person to change in order to re-establish our own equilibrium. This is not to say that we cannot forgive and yet still ask for redress, for repayment, for terms. It does not require being a doormat, but it allows us to skillfully express our sense of wrong in a way that is more likely to be heard and cared about by the person we are bargaining with.
Part of our job is to normalize pain and suffering as an inevitable response to the experience of being human. But here's the crucible: it's not wrong, but when your emotions can't be self-regulated it is unskillful. Forgiveness asks how can they be more skilled at advocating their position, at expressing their pain. Anger, bitterness and harsh judgment is not a skillful way of getting somebody to care enough about you to care about your suffering. Your goal is to be made whole again. Making somebody else an enemy makes it much harder to negotiate with them. It makes you need them to change before you can be ok and leaves you in a vulnerable position where you cannot get what you want.
The four interventions mentioned below are the bases for the Stanford Forgiveness Project and recommended tools for both ourselves and our clients. They focus on emptying the mind, re-telling our stories, remembering the rest of our lives, and letting go of entitlement.
1. Teach people to manage physiology in vivo - quiet down, breathe deeply, think of something/body they love (your kids, your god, your best friend). This is preparing the person for the mediation. So we can hear the part of you that is able to negotiate. You need to quiet down so you don't make it worse for yourself. Think of love, gratitude, kindness and acceptance.
2. Teach people to change their story. Let them practice rehearsing three or four stories that might ring false to them initially, but provide an openness where they can come in and talk to the other party. One may be "you were hurt and you were in pain and it's difficult for you in pain to deal with this, but you have to. You practice resilience, you grow as a person." Another is "you are willing to hear the other side, even if they can't agree." Or one about "how they were able to develop an ability to stay cool in trying times and recover despite difficult odds" Or give them a moment to come up with their own story.
3. Homework practice in gratitude. When you're aggrieved you lose sight of the blessings in your life, making the wound much worse and allowing it to swallow the things that matter to them. You may forget the things that give your life meaning. Training in coming to the table with a better perspective. This wound is not hte sole definition of my life. And if I only paid as much attention to my kids/loved-ones/pleasures as I do to this case, how happy would I be and how well-situated would I be to deal with this case?
4. Focus on that sense of entitlement. The painful truth is just because you've been harmed, doesn't mean the world owes you. Cognitive disputation is simplified into "unenforceable rules" when you demand something from someone that you don't have the power to make happen, you simply make yourself tense. The trick is to go from demanding to wanting. The wanting is the truth. Nobody gets angry without having confused wanting with demanding. We can be sad and frustrated and humbled from wanting and accepting we didn't get it, but we get mad only when we think we have to get something and we are owed.
I know that was long, but i thought it was pretty interesting. Expect more outlines later on.
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