conflict support
for families, communities and other shared risk ecosystems
“Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”
-Rumi
What if conflict is a magic portal to individual and collective liberation?
This is how I approach the sacred work of tending rupture within communities.
Conflict isn’t usually about an action someone has or hasn’t taken, though certainly patriarchal conditioning blunts our capacity to see our own patterns and care for how our actions may impact others. Conflict is the result of the immediate distrust that arises within us when someone else’s actions don’t make sense to us. Liberation work is about restoring trust in life so that we regain the capacity to turn towards one another rather than away when rupture occurs.
In my experience, most people who offer help with conflict miss a transformational opportunity by focusing on what happened, rather than why it happened. And the why is where the juice is. The why contains within it the individual and the systemic, our boldest visions and out darkest fears, our most precious values and the past traumas that make conflict so common and painful. It can lead us to our deepest truths; sometimes ones that have been hiding in plain sight for our entire lives and increases our capacity to build relationships based in trust with others.
Would you like support that:
Is radically nonjudgmental of everyone involved?
Reveals the foundational personal and systemic layers of your groups’s conflict so that you and others can see why it happened with more tenderness?
Offers you liberation from the patterns of ingenious protective behaviors that kept you safe in childhood but are now creating separation within yourself and your group?
Helps you to better understand your own needs and bring them forward to others with care?
Supports you in creating clear agreements that are more likely to stick because they’re rooted in human needs and actual group capacity rather than aspirational capacity or “shoulds”?
Meets you where you are, even if you’re terrified of conflict, and even if you’ve lost hope that your conflict can be transformed?
my process:
Impact Digestion Sessions:
When we’re experiencing the pain of conflict, individual support prior to considering mediation is vital. I’m baffled as to why this isn’t the norm when it comes to supporting conflict. When we meet 1:1, you’ll get to share your experience without needing to filter yourself. It’s an opportunity for you to be heard and deeply understood. The more raw, undigested material you can bring about what happened, the better - truly! Even judgments you’re afraid to acknowledge offer important information about what really matters to you and what needs you have that weren't met in the situation. We’ll then explore any narratives you may be holding about the other person(s) that could be causing suffering and blocking you from seeing them in their full humanity. This usually takes a single session. Sometimes this is where the work ends, and sometimes we move on to mediation. We will not move on to mediation until you and I both have a strong sense that doing so will be purposeful and generative.
Coming together:
After our first aid work, if everyone is willing to come together, we’ll meet for mediation. The individual “pre-digestion” work we’ve done creates a much softer relational field where authentic and compassionate communication becomes more possible. When I facilitate conflict, my goal is to continually create the conditions within which each party can be heard by the other person. In order to do this, I sometimes do very rude things like interrupt you, ask you to pause or to stop speaking altogether. While this can feel jarring or hard at times, it is always done with the intention of supporting you in being understood, and stopping you from saying things that will result in more impacts. That said, I won’t “correct” anything you say, or ask you to adhere to a rote dialogue format or make “I” statements or anything like that. We will strive to reach a shared understanding of what each party needs to move forward. When people have a mutual desire to move forward together, we focus on creating agreements that are rooted in the life-serving information we learned during out time together.
It feels important to share that engaging with conflict doesn’t always result in people staying in connection with one another. Togetherness can sometimes look like mutual acknowledgment that not staying in day to day relationship is what will actually meet the most needs. My goal in mediation is not resolution, it’s seeing what is possible in each unique circumstance, and whenever possible, helping people create togetherness in the outcome, whatever it may be.
I offer:
Impact Digestion Sessions: This is the first step in mediation, or a standalone process for people who have had a conflict that may not move into mediation. This process of tending to impacts from a rupture can bring tremendous clarity and relief from the suffering that results from a conflict without the other person(s) needing to be there.
Mediation: Mediation is a process through which I support individuals and groups in hearing one another and deciding together what’s next.
Financial Contribution
I invite you to make a contribution to my material sustainability so that I can do this work. If your own needs are adequately met, and you will not experience true hardship from offering money, an amount you could consider is between $125 - $250 USD for a session. If offering at the lowest end of the scale is still a financial hardship, you are welcome to offer less, even if that amount is zero.