*John Lande is the Isidor Loeb Professor Emeritus and former director of the LLM Program in Dispute Resolution at University of Missouri School of Law. This originally appeared in Indisputably, the Dispute Resolution Law Professors Blog which was developed by Lande to foster online conversations with colleagues in Dispute Resolution. You can find it here:  Indisputably

See original post here:  Cinergy

Excerpt from the interview:

The example that I would like to give is an example that comes from mediation between kids that I did many years ago, when I was helping to create school mediation programs. This was one in which two girls who had been friends, were talking and one of them accused the other of having taken something that she had said in confidence, and shared it with other people. And I asked her how that felt to her and she said, "It was really upsetting and I was very angry." Well, inside of me I can feel very upsetting and very angry, but that wasn't 100% what it actually felt like. And so I find a place in me where I may have experienced something like that; I think of what words I would use to describe that and the one word that has emotional power is betrayed. So I asked her, "Did you feel betrayed?" and immediately there was a release of tension. That was the thing that turned the corner in the conversation. But I need to ask myself the question: why was it so difficult for her to come up with the word 'betrayed'. And the answer, of course, is that the word 'betrayed' betrays her, meaning the word betrayal consists both of disappointment and desire. And it's the desire piece, the place that is most tender and where she is most vulnerable to disappointment. The place where she wants the other girl to really like and keep her confidences, so that she can feel a sense of intimacy and connection with her, that's the place in trauma.

And so, what I began to realize is that it's always the most tender places inside of us that is the most hurt. That's the first thing that we do in conflict. To protect those places, to distance ourselves even from forms of conversation that will require us to become vulnerable in the presence of someone we no longer trust. And yet, there is at the same time, a desire for release from suffering, a desire for honesty, communication and connection.

And so that opens up the possibility of a very different conversation between these two girls. So I turned to the other girl and I said, "Was it your intention to betray her?" And she said no and started to say why not. I stopped her, and said, "Don't tell me. Tell her." And now that the two girls are talking to each other, they are both being openhearted, and honest with each other. She apologizes for what she did in a very sincere way. And recognizes the pain that her friend had experienced.

And so in a very similar type of way, in every conflict conversation, we are defending ourselves against the very thing that we want the most, against a heart-to-heart conversation with a person who has hurt us. And it's natural for us to want to avoid that conversation because they have in fact betrayed our trust somehow, because they haven't met our expectations, because we don't know any longer who they are, or believe that they don't know who we are. And therefore we don't show them who we actually are. We shut down internally inside and that creates a source of suffering, because it's a kind of attachment. And it's even worse because it's an attachment to something that is over, that we then keep with us in our lives. It becomes a source of personality, just as the flow of a river when it's blocked by a rock will be distorted. And in exactly that way, our lives are formed not just by the conflicts that we've experienced, but by the ones we've not resolved.

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