I recently attended an online course led by Dr. Hazel-Grace Yates which focused on teaching the REPAIR process — a structured framework for navigating interpersonal conflicts. There’s another upcoming course starting February 21st which I definitely recommend for anyone who wants to build their skills around conflict resolution! I am incredibly grateful to be feeling much more comfortable and connected at work and in my relationships since taking the class.
I was immediately struck by the definition of “conflict” used within our class discussions, which was “any break in trust or connection”.
I grew up as a soft-spoken, eggshell-treading, people-pleasing child, and my self-concept about this was that I was avoiding conflict. I saw “conflict” as some scary, risky thing that happened when people confronted each other, and I saw confrontation itself as being innately predisposed towards aggression or emotional outbursts.
But by avoiding speaking up, sharing my emotions, or pushing back when boundaries were crossed, I had actually collected a compounding number of situations and relationships where there were lots of breaks in trust and connection.
These were not externally violent or aggressive dynamics, but they still acted as painful and harmful interpersonal rifts: I didn’t speak my mind, I harbored hurt, and I tolerated repeated patterns of not getting my needs met.
It shook my paradigm nearly to the core to start thinking of these many rifts as also falling under the umbrella of conflict. The class illuminated for me how making myself “convenient” for others was actually a fast track towards cultivating and maintaining lots of gaps in connection.
And it was incredibly helpful for me to start taking that seriously while learning concrete skills for doing something about it. I had to actually enter into the conversations I was most scared of, addressing the things I was most scared to address (though with new tools to make it productive and safe).
I won’t go into the full details of what we covered in the course (again, I highly recommend checking it out yourself if you are interested), but I do want to muse a bit more about some of the things I learned. I have a hunch it might even help in thinking about how our communities can navigate a lot of the social tensions we are facing throughout the world.
Having The Same Conversation
During a portion of the course when we were talking about restorative conversations, one concept strongly stood out to me. Dr. Hazel-Grace discussed it using the term “Complex Shared Reality”.
To paraphrase, Complex Shared Reality is the state of two or more people having a shared understanding of each person’s perspectives when they have differing experiences of facts and events.
This is the counterpart of something they called “Simple Shared Reality”, which is the state of two or more people having the same understanding of facts and events as each other.
The idea is that when people are talking about emotionally charged events, it’s helpful for them to share common ground. But a common experience is not always present in tense situations. In fact, it’s frequently so absent that it causes and amplifies tensions between us.
Think of a conversation about someone being late for a date as an example of how this might apply:
Let’s imagine that one person fully believes they were blown off while another sincerely believes they had agreed on a later time. The ensuing conversation could easily turn into a fight over reality, with each person feeling their own experience is being invalidated. This can be incredibly crushing to trust and communication.
Gaslighting is one potentially extreme example of the kind of damaging dynamics that can emerge when a person’s direct experience is called into question. Having your reality questioned pulls the ground out from under you, forcing a situation where you have to choose between trusting yourself or trusting the other person.
This can be a completely different conversation if there is able to be a shared understanding of each person’s differing experiences. With some care and perspective-taking, the same two people might start to see how they could have come away from the same planning conversations with different takeaways about the time of the date, and they can start to explore ways to clarify plans and agreements better in the future. It contextualizes the differences in their experiences and realities in a way that makes sense to both people.
That kind of shared understanding of differing experiences is what Dr. Yates is referring to with the term Complex Shared Reality. It’s the re-connecting state that can emerge when you fully illuminate and contextualize your uncommon ground.
Community-Wide Repair
The skill of being able to talk about how people arrive at their differing perspectives is powerful in any interpersonal dynamic, and during the class I became curious to think more about how this concept might be able to support communities in addressing ruptures in trust and communication between larger groups.
Especially when it comes to tensions between political factions, there is a tendency for conflicting perspectives to be discredited on the basis of disagreeing about fundamental facts and events.
We push away opposing ideas as completely false, without any chance to contextualize differences between our formative childhood experiences; differences in the perspectives of the people who accept, support, and love us; differences in our sources of information; and the differences between what we truly believe and what our political opponents think we believe.
In such conflicts, there is no shared reality. News sources supposedly stating facts and representing reality paint highly different pictures of the world from each other. A “simple shared reality” is clearly out of reach. But a complex shared reality — that might be possible to build.
Getting On The Same Wavelength
Years ago, I attended a Bioneers Conference at CU Boulder. In one of the workshops, a paper on “neural coupling” was being discussed in the context of political conversations.
When people understand each other in conversation, neural coupling is an interesting phenomenon that takes place where two or more people’s brains activate in many of the same ways and areas at the same times. This synchronization or “coupling” is lost when there is a misunderstanding or a gap in communication. It reflects the sharing of information in a way we can biologically track.
Research at Brown University has shown how politically opposed groups exhibit very different brain activity from each other when thinking about the “same” politically charged words, issues, and events. There’s quite fundamentally a difference in our perceptions of reality. That’s our uncommon ground.
My main takeaway from that Bioneers workshop was that political discussions between ideological opponents evoked completely different brain activity in each person until they started telling the stories of how and why they first formed their current perspectives.
As soon as politically opposed individuals were talking about their direct experiences, they began to share a common vocabulary with each other. They could talk about how they reached their current opinions using simple words describing relatable things like sensory experiences, formative childhood events, and close family members. Neural coupling then started to take place even between speakers holding opposing opinions.
They weren’t making the assumption that they had the same definitions for buzzwords (they didn’t) or that they had read the same articles about recent events (they hadn’t). They were simply sharing the stories that contextualized their political stances, and they went as far back in time as they needed to so that those stories were relatable even to their current ideological opponents.
Those shared stories became meaningful conversations. And for the first time, even if they still disagreed, these individuals were at least having the same conversation as each other. Listening happened. Empathy happened. Change started to become possible. Collaboration emerged. They had established a Complex Shared Reality.
Trauma-Informed Conflict
My guess is that even the most level-headed readers may be feeling the important roar of an inner protective force right now — the emotions that can’t tolerate the thought of having a conversation with someone whose beliefs encroach upon human rights and basic safety.
When you look at the most contentious issues in politics, they’re not trivial. We aren’t arguing about fluffy preferences. Most of the time, we’re arguing about the right for us and the people we care about to have security, safety, and basic rights. We’re talking about severely broken systems. We’re talking about the tragic misuse of power. We’re talking about survival.
Because of this, politics evokes our most primal survival-level responses. Our nervous systems are wired to prioritize a return to safety during fight-or-flight scenarios, and they pull energy away from the parts of our brains that facilitate rest, empathy, and creative thinking in order to do this.
I believe this return to safety has to be the first milestone we strive for in any future where we hope to have inter-group repair.
In Hazel-Grace Yates’ REPAIR model, the first step to healing any interpersonal rift has to be resourcing ourselves and regulating our nervous systems, something that has to happen before ever entering into an emotionally charged conversation. (This act of resourcing is the first “R” in “REPAIR”, which serves as the model’s acronym to help structure conflict resolution.)
In order for us to have any chance of even having productive political conversations, let alone achieving peaceful outcomes in the many global conflicts that have already escalated into deep violation and violence, there has to be a prioritization of security, safety, and nervous-system regulation for the people involved, especially those who conventionally have the least opportunity to do so.
Author Tricia Hersey brings this understanding into racial and gender justice, recognizing that the chance to slow down and attend to basic needs is especially important for those who have found themselves stretched thinnest by our current systems. And, as she says in her manifesto Rest Is Resistance, “Treating each other and ourselves with care isn’t a luxury, but an absolute necessity if we’re going to thrive. Resting isn’t an afterthought, but a basic part of being human.”
Is this rest, this chance to ease into a parasympathetic nervous system state, easy amidst the many valid reasons we feel so much tension? Absolutely not. But the whole point of the arguments we’re each making and the wars we’re each fighting is to ultimately chase the need to establish safety. And, ironically, lacking this feeling of safety means lacking the capacity to move our communities towards collective healing and change.
We actually don’t have access to the ability to have helpful conversations when we are stressed at the level of our basic survival responses. The parts of our brains that are capable of reaching a Complex Shared Reality can’t even activate until we feel a sufficient sense of safety. It’s incredibly important that we have compassion for ourselves surrounding this, making our own needs and nervous systems central priorities in our lives.
Especially as the U.S. enters this year’s upcoming election cycle, I believe we have to understand that taking care of ourselves and pulling out of survival mode is an essential step in preserving the capacity for our population to participate in democracy. And so is the core work of making basic security accessible to all people, especially those who have been pressed most heavily into downward spirals.
Keeping to ourselves and withholding our perspectives will only compound existing issues. The route to healing is not to “avoid conflict”, as this will just preserve destructive patterns and widen the rifts between us. As I learned in Dr. Yates’ course, that’s conflict too.
And entering into political conversations without finding some form of shared reality could escalate tensions even more. A powerful truth that is spoken to someone who holds opposing definitions can only come across as an inflammatory lie.
Our realities aren’t actually getting articulated when we speak to those with whom we lack any shared understanding. We may make progress among our in-groups where we share a social context and are having the same conversations, but this can come at the cost of contributing to much larger and more costly collapses in communication.
We need to reach at least a Complex Shared Reality before we can communicate even the most “obvious” concepts in an accurate way. And we can’t reach that state without first tending to our own wellness enough to feel steady listening to how our opponents learned to frame their world and define their political vocabulary.
So our civic duty is first to rest, to sleep well, to sail through our journals, to scream in our cars, to dance in our kitchens, to turn off social media, to talk with our dearest friends, to cry at our many losses over recent years, to sit under trees, and to listen to birdsongs. Well-being has to be the first priority.
Attending to our own calmness and restoration is not denying and avoiding the importance of our survival-level knowledge of what matters most, and it’s not reducing our engagement with the world: it is the necessary first step to give ourselves back the capacity that it takes to meet the world with both honesty and empathy. It’s actually the quickest path to systemic healing and change.
And we have to prioritize making this broadly possible for the people who have been systemically placed in positions where they lack the resources to offer this safety and stability to themselves and their families. So, if you find yourself in a position where you have leverage to spread those resources where they are most needed, please use that leverage. And please do so in the ways most guided and chosen by those who are needing that chance to rest.
One amazing resource for those who are learning to navigate their own nervous systems is an ongoing series of free trainings/sessions offered by Nkem Ndefo and Lumos Transforms. These trainings focus on providing trauma-informed methods for practicing self-resourcing tools and building a felt sense of safety even amidst systemic oppression and intense frontline work.
Calming Ourselves Back
Being in survival-mode is by definition not being in democracy mode. It prevents people not just from thriving, but also from even having the time and emotional bandwidth to vote, let alone to be part of broader movements for change.
It places an urgent focus on small personal decisions and reduces our capacity to see the big picture. It pulls us out of the important conversations and into insular bubbles of people who sooth us by agreeing with us. We ironically need to prioritize our personal well-being and felt-safety first in order to start to initiate change that establishes well-being and safety at the scale of our larger systems.
Communities in the U.S. and across the world are still reeling from collective trauma after collective trauma. Those of us who are here with the time to read — or in a lucky few cases, even to write — essays and poems and calls to action, we are likely in a position to have the agency to make a bit of change. Let’s make it.
And let’s be careful with ourselves in the process. The social myth of martyrdom says that we must make needed change by offering energy and money and support past the balance-point we have the capacity to sustain over time, sacrificing our health for the health of others.
That social paradigm serves to drain motivated changemakers out of positions of security and agency. It places the people whose perspectives we need most into a scramble for their own survival, and the pressure that scramble puts on their hearts and minds amplifies their pain and isolates them into the role of being misinterpreted as inflammatory radicals.
Instead, we need to know that the way to heal our communities is to heal by example. By being radically well in attentive and communicative ways, we can cultivate shared, equitable chances for others to do the same. We need to have a lot of grace for ourselves amidst the thousands of valid reasons we are angry and sad and scared, knowing it’s important to meet the needs behind each of these emotions. It’s time to be gentle and compassionate with ourselves.
That’s the first step out of this spiral. Then it’s time to talk.
Wishing you ease and wellness,
Alex
It’s a journey to move into healthy communication and relationships if they were never modeled for you.