Conflict Management

By definition, conflict means only this: we need to change our way of dealing with one another, because the old way isn't working ... It's a signal to get another way of dealing with the disagreement. (Colman McCarthy, I'd Rather Teach Peace)

McCarthy goes on to list nine steps for resolving conflict and decreasing or ending violence:

1. Define the conflict: Defining clarifies. When you clarify, you see. When you see, you can deal.


2. It's not you against me, it's you and me against the problem: By focusing on the problem, and not on the persons who have the problem, a climate of cooperation, not competition is enhanced.


3. List the relationship's many shared concerns, not the one unshared separation: In other words, turn to your mutual strengths instead of exhausting and alienating yourselves over a point of disagreement.


4. When people have fought, don't ask what happened: The question is irrelevant. The better question is “What did you do?” This elicits facts, not opinions, and allows misperceptions to be clarified.


5. Active listening is better than passive hearing: Listening well is an act of caring. Active listening tends to deflate the hostile winds that blow arguments into destructive courses.


6. Choose a neutral place to resolve the conflict, not the battlefield itself.


7. Start with what's doable: Restoration of peace can't always be done quickly. If the conflict has been brewing for some time, the issues may be complex and involve hurt-feelings, bruised egos, and a multitude of resentments. Work on one small doable at a time.


8. Increasing forgiveness skills decreases vengeance urges: Forgiveness looks forward, vengeance looks backward.


9. Purify your own heart: This is merely an elegant way of telling yourself, “I need to get my own messy life in order before I tell others how to live.” Jim Douglass says, “The first things to be disrupted by our commitment to nonviolence will not be the system, but our own lives.”