words that work

Interpersonal relationships provide an ongoing arena in which to practice NVC mediation skills, as well as a place to see how old patterns show up and make new choices in our behavior. Since much of this learning is about patterns that are habitual, it often takes some time to first notice the pattern and then find a way in to change it.

I look back at conversations that did not go very well—we ended up disconnected—to see if I can find where that disconnection starts, or at least where I can notice it in myself. It might be a way that I feel, something I notice in my behavior, or something I say. Identifying that point where disconnection starts (or where I notice it is already happening) can then serve as a cue in future conversations that I am disconnected.

Once I have the cue, then I can also figure out a way to bring myself back into connection with myself and the other person. It’s often just a first step that I need, a reminder, something to do that is different than what I’m already doing.

I will be sharing some of these points of disconnection in interpersonal conversations in upcoming blog posts. I hope that pointing out what I notice happening that precedes disconnection or indicates that I am becoming disconnected will help you inquire into your own patterns in interpersonal conversations. In addition, I’ll be sharing the first step that I have found effective to begin to bring myself back into being present, and hope it encourages you to take similar steps.

In this post, I wanted to introduce this idea as well as talk briefly about the progression that tends to happen from feeling caught in a pattern and wanting to change it (but unable to) to having the awareness in the moment to make another choice. This progression requires repeatedly going through the learning cycle, which you can read about in more depth in this article. In essence, though, the cycle is to reflect on a conversation that did not go as you would have liked and mourn the lost opportunity to do what you want. Mourning in this way helps you create the clarity about what you would like to do in the future, and you can then practice so that this new choice will be more available.

I find going through this process also tends to relax something in me so that the next time I’m in a similar situation, it’s easier to be aware of what I’m doing. Still, there can be periods of time during which I will have momentary flickers of awareness that don’t come up enough into consciousness for me to stop and choose an alternative. Repeating this whole cycle over time–having those flickers, using the Mourn Celebrate Learn process after, noticing what I want to do instead, even practicing it–eventually brings me to a point where I much more consistently notice in the moment and make the change I want to make. Thus, when you repeat this process every time you notice the same pattern come up in a conversation, it helps you shorten the time before you become aware that you are caught in the pattern and be able to eventually shift it through different choices you make in the moment.

Another way to support yourself in making the changes you want to make is through agreements. You can make agreements with yourself about how you want to act in the future, and also involve other people and ask for their support. If you notice the same pattern showing up with one particular person, you can make an agreement with them that when they notice you doing or saying something they will interrupt you, giving them the actual words to say. Making commitments to ourselves I find helpful, and our changes can come about even more quickly when we enlist the support of those around us.

Are you already aware of any patterns that show up repeatedly in your interpersonal conversations—perhaps with family members or work colleagues—that you would like to begin to shift?

Post by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles

We all project both positive and negative images onto other people. In our negative images we judge, label, and diagnose; in positive ones, we admire, label, and even revere. The effect is essentially the same; whether we are projecting our positive or negative images onto another person, we put them in a box. We limit their full humanity, consigning them to the boundaries of our label.

Now that I’m in the role of a teacher, I am sometimes the recipient of positive images from other people, and, as we all do, I have also projected my own positive images onto others, notably celebrities. For example, if I went to a gathering and certain people—political or media celebrities—sat down next to me, I would feel awkward and not know what to say. I would feel uncomfortable because of my idealized images of them.

I notice that I feel equally uncomfortable when someone has positive images of me. In this article, I’d like to share my reactions on both sides, when I’m the object and when I’m making someone else the object of positive images, as well as what I would like to be able to do in either situation.

My Idealized Images of Others

I feel very uncomfortable if I’m in a public place and a celebrity is there; I’ve been in various settings—airports, restaurants—where suddenly a flurry of activity happens because a celebrity of some sort is nearby. First I have my reaction and I’m uncomfortable and embarrassed about that, and then I notice the reaction of the people I’m with and it embarrasses me that they are reacting that way.

The reaction I have is thinking that somehow the person is better than me. I’ve been around movie celebrities whose work had touched me and I wanted to be able to connect with them in a very human way that did not put them up on a pedestal; that accepted all of who they are. I wanted to be able to give them feedback without it dehumanizing them or me, to say something like; “I’ve seen several of your movies and in this particular movie when your character was dealing with this issue, it really touched me, I’ve thought about it many times since and I just wanted to know that and to thank you very much for the work that you do.” I have wanted to give similar feedback to writers whose writing has helped me have insights or clarified distinctions that helped me live my life more in the way I’d like. Yet I have never able to give this feedback because I felt estranged. I imagine there’s some kind of barrier between us, and I don’t know how to reach out in a way that would maintain their humanity and mine.

There’s a part of me that sees that I’m doing it to myself—I’m the one putting up this barrier between me and the other person, and I get upset at myself because I can’t just think it away. I feel like I am putting them in a prison, and in doing so also putting myself in a prison. I desperately want to get out of it and I don’t have a magic wand to wave in that moment to escape.

I’ve also experienced times when this pattern does not happen. I’ve been in situations with people who are well-known or in the same fields and have not put up the same barrier, or not to the same extent. In one situation my kids were there and had a rapport with the person, which helped me have some connection. I have a friend I’ve known for 30 years who has now written a couple of books that have been very moving to me and he is becoming well-known in his field, and I have not blocked myself from being able to tell him that he wrote two books that shook my world. I sat on the airplane once flying across the Atlantic next to a Hollywood director, and we had a fascinating conversation the whole way; I had never heard of him before, and I didn’t feel uncomfortable or limited or alienated from talking to him about his work; I was just curious about his experience.

This is the kind of experience I want to have with any celebrity; I don’t want to interrupt these people in the midst of going about their business, but if we sat down next to each other on a plane I would want to feel comfortable to just banter for a few minutes. I would like to be at ease, to be able to engage and express appreciation and gratitude if that’s what comes up, or just be curious, as I was sitting next to the Hollywood director on the airplane. I would like to give that person the gift of my being at ease in their presence, to be able to just receive them however they are showing up in that moment, without any predetermination about what I would say or do. I imagine that would be a contribution because when the roles are reversed I find it uncomfortable to be around someone who’s uncomfortable being with me because they think I’m someone special.

One of my kids has this gift, of just being a satisfying human being to hang out with. I would drive him around when he was a kid to various events and, whether we were talking or not, being in his presence felt like a balm to my spirit. I would like to be able to give that gift to myself and then to everyone I meet, and not cut myself off from it by having a positive but dehumanizing image of someone.

When I’m the Object of an Idealized Image

When I’m the object of an idealized image and someone says something that’s generally laudatory to me, I feel immediately uncomfortable, and my first impulse is to flee. I get scared; if someone has an idealized image of me then I don’t get to be seen, and my first reaction is fear and flight. My reaction happens almost as quickly as if I had seen a rattlesnake in front of me, before any cognitive process takes place. I think that reaction comes from a sense that I don’t really get to exist to them; I’m not alive, I don’t get to be me, and I won’t be accepted for all the parts of me, including my foibles.

I then have all these thoughts about how, based on what the person has just said, they don’t really know me. If they say something about how kind or tender I am, I’m thinking “Well yeah, but how about his other part of you that gets grumpy and can be rude and mean and self-centered?” I tend not to accept their appreciation and I deprecate it in some way; I often give them the counterpoint to whatever compliment they’ve given me and turn it into a joke. For example, if someone says something about how touched they were by the depth of my care for someone, I may joke and say “Well, I wish it was always the case, but I fall way short of the kind of care I would like to have all too often, but thank you.”

What I would like to do instead is to be willing to accept what the other person is saying and guess their needs, maybe even empathizing out loud with them. I have this idea that if I don’t give them the counterpoint to what they said then I’m agreeing with them, but that’s not necessarily true. If I stay interested in what needs the person is meeting by saying what they are saying it helps me connect to them. I think often in the moment of speaking to someone we hold an idealized image of we don’t necessarily say what we mean or use the best words to convey what’s really true for us, we just kind of blurt something out. If I can connect to what’s going on for the person that is prompting them to talk to me, I can get beyond what they’ve said and my own immediate reaction to it.

I’ve taught myself to go toward someone who is giving negative feedback with a kind of care and tenderness. I have a similar reaction in those situations of fear and flight, but through practice I can now move through that reaction by staying focused on finding the need behind what the person is saying. When someone is bringing positive feedback to me I am not as effective at being able to lean towards them and find out with some richness and understanding what is motivating them to say what they said and what it really means to them underneath the words. I would like to pay that same level of attention, care, and curiosity when someone brings me positive feedback as when they give negative feedback.

What’s interesting to me is that even though these two situations—projecting my own positive images onto someone else and being the recipient of positive images—feel very different as I’m experiencing them, the needs I’d like to meet are very similar. I want to have connection and companionship with people, get closer to knowing them, and for them to get to know me. I want a kind of equality, to get to be me and be seen and valued for who I am. Whether I have the idealized image of another person or it is directed toward me, I would like to create a sense of shared humanity between us.

Post by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles

We’ve all experienced times when we thought we understood someone or they understood us, only to later find out that we are on totally different pages. We end up wondering how this could have happened when we thought we were clearly communicating with each other. Yet if we think about it, we might find that regardless of how important our communication is we often give it short shrift, assuming that the message sent and the message received are the same.

Instead of assuming, we can take a few simple steps when we want to ensure that they are the same. The communication between air traffic control and aircraft pilots provides a lesson in how to do this.

Here’s a short exchange between an Air Canada flight and air traffic control:

ATC: “Air Canada 452, good afternoon, taxi Whiskey and Delta for runway 06 left”
AC 452: “Whiskey and Delta for 6 left, 452″
ATC: “Air Canada 452 continue on Delta, hold short of 6 left”
AC 452: “Delta, hold short of 6 left”
ATC: “Air Canada 452 taxi into position 6 left”
AC 452: “Roger into position, 452″[1]

Though we may not understand the cryptic jargon, the pattern is clear; the receiving party repeats what they understood the message to be. In what can easily be a life and death situation, it has been instilled into the culture and the communication patterns that it is important to make sure that the message sent is the same as the message received.

This might seem abnormal in terms of the way we typically communicate, yet there are simple ways to make sure you are heard the way you would like or that you understand someone else that sound natural and commonplace. We can take these steps as either the person sending the communication or the person receiving it, simply through making a request.

Let’s start with when we are the speaker and want to know whether we have communicated clearly with someone. What we often say in a situation like this is something like “Do you understand?” and then accept the reply of “Yes.” Yet we actually have no basis for trusting that understanding has been reached; we don’t know what the other person has understood, and it may in fact not be at all what we intended that they understand. Instead of asking if the person has understood, we might instead say something like this; “I want to trust that you and I are on the same wavelength, would you mind telling me the gist of what you just heard me say?”

If you are listening to someone and they ask you whether you’ve understood, instead of saying yes, you can check your understanding by saying “Well, what I hear you saying is this…” If they do not ask you, but you still want to ensure that you’ve heard what they want you to hear, you can say something like, “Hold on, I just want to make sure I understand what you’re telling me, is this what you’re saying…?” Then reflect back what you heard. You don’t have to repeat everything the person said, just reflect the key piece as you understand it. Make sure you phrase it as a question, or state it and then ask “Is that right?” or “Is that what you were hoping to get across?” Doing so also helps the speaker to clarify and be more specific about what they are trying to say.

In either case, whether you are sending the message or receiving it, notice that these examples start with enrolling the person in why you are asking the question. Since these are not typical communication patterns, letting the person know the motivation for them is connecting: responding to the request might meet your needs for trust, understanding, or clarity, for example.

Checking that the message sent is the message received is helpful in a number of situations. When we want to make sure instructions are clear, such as when we are giving direction to someone who reports to us in a work situation, we might want some assurance that they have understood what we are asking. If we have been in a meeting where a number of action items have been agreed upon, we might use a similar format to summarize and make sure that agreements are clear. Asking a kind of wrap-up question, such as “Here is what I have down that we have agreed on…. Is there anything that I’ve missed?” helps everyone be clear about the outcomes of the meeting.

Confirming our communication is also important when we want to be heard about something that has affected us; perhaps a decision was made without our input that impacts our ability to do our work effectively. When we discuss the effect of the decision with our boss, we might want to take steps to ensure that he or she hears what we are really saying and not adding in an interpretation that we do not intend.

Making these types of requests in our communication supports understanding, being heard in the way we would like, and clarity of communication. In the next week, see if you can use these questions both when you are speaking to someone else and want to be understood, as well as when someone else is speaking to you. What do you notice?

Post by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles

[1] From http://www.canairradio.com/ttt.html

A few days ago I had an important conference call and in the days before the call, I was feeling anxious and distressed anticipating the call but unclear about why. I went for a walk the day of the call, and during the walk I realized I was feeling ashamed. I had the belief that the other four folks on the call were expecting me to be clear and ready to decide on something that was important to all five of us.

Instead, I was not clear at all about the decision.

In my culture of origin, confusion was not acceptable; it would show weakness. The prevailing norm was that you had to be clear, concise, on point, and tracking, and if you weren’t then you were “lesser than,” you were weak. Of course it was dangerous to be weak in every way possible—physically, psychologically, and emotionally.

Thus, as I unpacked all of this in anticipation of the conference call, I realized that I was ashamed that I was “weak” in not being clear about what I wanted to do, and I was ashamed that I was ashamed.

Up until about six months ago, I had not ever, to my memory, acknowledged that I felt ashamed. In my family of origin, you did not acknowledge that feeling—it was shameful to feel ashamed. This came to my awareness in reading a number of things, including Brene Brown’s book, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. I was talking about it in workshops a lot and realized that instead of acknowledging shame, I had always said I was embarrassed. Most of my life I had conflated shame and embarrassment.

As I walked, then, I imagined a whole dialogue of letting the others on the conference call in on my realization during my check in. Thinking through the script of that dialogue brought me a lot of relief, and then I realized I was now anxious about revealing this to people. After all, everything I was planning to reveal was taboo—being confused (and therefore “weak”) and being ashamed.

Nonetheless, after everyone else checked in, I told them my story.

It was scary to do so—my heart rate was up and my palms were clammy as I related the above to them. I then asked for feedback, and I was very moved by their feedback and really liked how the conversation went after that. I was so relieved to have shared what I said, especially because the contrast between how I had felt before and after was clear.

I was no longer affected by this huge issue of my lack of clarity about the decision; it was like this big burden was relieved from me. All of my tormented thinking about my confusion was removed and I could just be in the meeting and say, “I’m not clear and I would like to get clarity.” I could break it down into specific things I was not clear about and talk them through, getting collaboration from people on the call. We ended up making a decision that all five of us seemed pleased with.

As I reflected on this later, it made me think about how hiding our shame—being ashamed of being ashamed—is exactly what gives it more power. Revealing it and including others in our experience dissipates that power; the shame fades under the light of revelation. This is exactly the opposite of what the shame is telling us to do. Our shame instructs us to hide it, both whatever we are ashamed of and the fact that we are ashamed, and when we listen to it, we stay imprisoned under it. As soon as I revealed it, difficult though that was, all the anxiety and stress I had experienced faded away.

Liberation lies just beyond revealing the truth of our experience.

I encourage you to inquire into those areas where you feel shame, and see what you find. How, in a safe way, might you share these feelings with someone close to you, just as an experiment to see what happens as a result?

Post by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles

By Ike Lasater and Julie Stiles

At one level of dealing with the issue of overwhelm is just getting organized and creating a system to handle the “incoming” of things to do. Both of us are using some version of David Allen’s system known as Getting Things Done (GTD) for this aspect of handling overwhelm. In this realm, we have found at least three aspects of the process to be key:

1. Choosing what programs to use for email, calendar, and tasks. This requires knowing something about yourself and how you work. Do you want everything online so you can access it from anywhere? Do you want some things, such as your tasks, offline so you have them whether or not you have internet access? Also consider how those programs communicate with each other and sync across whatever different computers and mobile devices you use.
2. Beyond the tools you use, there is the task of getting everything you have to do into those tools, which often seems to be overwhelming in and of itself if you are starting from scratch.
3. Then, there’s creating a system that you can trust to get all of your tasks processed and reviewed on a regular basis so important projects and activities don’t get lost.

Each one of these pieces is important. I (Julie) have organized all my tasks multiple times, yet each time because I did not have a trusted system for processing and review, I soon felt overwhelmed again and stopped even looking at my task management program. Then I would blame the program (it wasn’t robust enough, didn’t have the features I wanted, etc) and some time later try another tool to get myself organized.

This time, I am working to come up with a system that will help me collect everything, review it regularly (daily, weekly, and monthly), and take action on the things that are important to me.

Of course, setting up these systems and maintaining them can bring up all of our resistance, which might show up in these forms:

• Overwhelm
• Procrastination
• Doing less important but “easier” things
• Escaping

Simply getting ourselves organized and creating a system won’t help with these. In upcoming posts, we will look at what we’ve tried in the past, a process we went through to identify what’s underneath the response we each have to our “incoming,” and an experiment we’ve developed to see if we can shift the pattern of overwhelm.

Until then, how are you doing with the systems side of managing your incoming?

By Ike Lasater and Julie Stiles

Ever sat in front of your email or task management program and felt overwhelmed? Too many emails, too much to do…where do you start?

Both of us have been confronting this issue recently. I (Ike) mostly find it when I go to my email. When I’m in a certain state I feel like I do not have the resources and resiliency to respond to perceived challenges, or “incoming” as aikido teacher Wendy Palmer calls it.

My email becomes the challenge and the thought that I need to read and respond to all these people causes me to cringe inside. I shy away. I was raised around horses as a boy, and if a horse sees something they are afraid of, they shy away from it; you cannot get them to move toward it. I get that same sense inside of myself; I pull away and just can’t get myself to go toward reading my email.

I’m afraid of opening up and reading email and having my ability to deal with them be overwhelmed, and that anxiety makes me shy away from even looking at email. If I do manage to get myself to open email, I might pull away from certain emails that I don’t want to deal with, those where I feel a dread and heaviness when I look at the subject line. Time makes it worse because, of course, emails do not exactly stop coming when I’m in this state. Before I know it, I have 600 emails in my inbox.

I (Julie) experience a similar pattern; it comes up around both email and my task list, but I’ll focus on my task list. When I look at my list of things I need or want to do, I feel myself internally begin to turn away, much as Ike described his “shying” away. I want to do them all (or I would not have bothered putting them on the list) or I need to do them to avoid negative consequences I don’t like.

But there are too many; I feel overwhelmed by the sheer number and the amount of time they would take. It seems impossible to do them all. I have no sense of how to choose or where to start. Of course, since I constantly add more things I need or want to do, the problem just continues to get worse.

I then avoid dealing with my task list at all because I don’t like the feeling I have when I look at it. I become reactive, dealing with the immediate things that I know need to be dealt with, but not tracking much else. Certainly, I’m not proactively planning to move toward the things I want, and I lose sight of what’s important to me.

We are exploring various approaches—from the systematic to the esoteric—to working with this issue and will be sharing them in a series of upcoming posts. We’d love to hear from you—if you experience something similar when you look at your email or task list, what have you tried?

We use a flight simulator metaphor in our trainings; we ask people to work in dyads and triads where they can have rehearsals and post-hearsals for the situations in their lives that they find difficult. If something has happened in the past that they would like to have responded to differently, if a pattern keeps repeating itself that they would like to change, or if a difficult conversation is coming up, these can all be put into the “flight simulator” of the dyad/triad practices.

In the book How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer, there’s a moving and vivid description that brought home for me the importance of having this kind of flight simulator for our lives. The book recounts the story of Captain Alfred Haynes on United Airlines Flight 232 in 1989. The DC-10 had an “uncontained failure” of engine number two due to a crack in a fan disk, and shrapnel penetrated through the tail section of the plane, cutting through all three of the plane’s hydraulic systems. With no hydraulics, the captain and crew had no way to control the aircraft’s trajectory, altitude, and airspeed other than through the thrust on the remaining engines. Capt. Haynes called into central North American air traffic control center where a team of expert pilots and engineers were on hand and they could give him no help; in fact, they initially thought what was happening was impossible because of triple redundancy of hydraulic systems.

Capt. Haynes did manage to land the plane at Sioux City airport, though with so little control it came in too fast and steep and broke into several pieces on impact. 111 people were killed in the crash (1 died later from injuries), the remaining 185 survived. After the crash and investigation, all of the data was entered into flight simulators and expert pilots, who knew the problems the flight had encountered, attempted to land the plane. It took 57 attempts before a pilot even managed to get to the airport runway and land; all previous attempts ended in disaster.

What Capt. Haynes managed to do was astounding; with no training in this scenario at all (the chance of all three hydraulics systems failing was considered so remote that pilots were not trained in how to respond), he made key decisions that saved the lives of over half the people on the plane.

When it comes to living our lives, this does happen occasionally; in the heat of the moment, we do sometimes rise to the level of our aspiration. Most of the time, however, we sink to the level of our training. We react in our habitual ways when triggered in a difficult situation, and end up with unsatisfying interactions and hurt feelings. Yet we can put our lives in this flight simulator of dyad and triad practice, and in a safe environment practice what we would like to do so that when we crash and burn we can reboot and do it over again, in the process not only learning the skills to respond as we would like but increasing our capacity to hold conflict and connect in the heat of the moment. We can learn how to live our life the way we would like to live it.

Post by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles

I received an email recently from Jan Blum, a mediator and facilitator who has done John Kinyon’s and my trainings. She now leads a weekly telecircle, and here is an excerpt of what she sent:

“As a result of our telecircle, I am beginning to see and accept that conflict pops up everywhere and looks like it’s an unavoidable part of individuation…. Conflict even happens, ongoingly, inside of each of us.  Rather than seeking to prevent or avoid conflict, I’m now beginning to see conflict as a delicious opportunity for connection, for getting in touch with what really matters to me and to the other person.  Like, bring it on!!!

“…What stimulated my consciousness about this is that I just received an email from a dear friend who was saying how much he longs to stay out of conflict and how determined he is to never fight with anyone.  I noticed how sad I felt about this, worried about the price he is paying by the various strategies he’s using to prevent disagreements…and then I began to laugh.  How I have changed!!  How glad I am that conflict no longer scares me, and that I am starting to feel joy and happy anticipation when someone begins to express their pain…welcoming the aliveness…. And, our weekly practice is the stimulus for the transformation.”

I really like what Jan has to say about how conflict pops up everywhere in our lives; it’s why we have begun using the phrase “Mediate Your Life” for our trainings. She speaks eloquently to the change that is possible in how we hold conflict, from avoiding it or finding it frightening to “joy and happy anticipation” and seeing it as an opportunity to connect with ourselves and others. This shift is available to everyone, and Jan also points to the key to creating the shift: practice.

If you have already been introduced to NVC mediation and would like another practice opportunity, I encourage you to contact Jan to find out more about her telecircle and other offerings. Her email address is LearningGiraffe@yahoo.com.

In my last two blog posts, I talked more personally about how to work with bullying on an internal level. In this post, I wanted to take a broader perspective and show how to weave together the four contexts of mediation that we train to in dealing with a single issue.

The four contexts, as many of you know, are internal (within your own head), interpersonal (when you are in a conflict with another person), informal (when you stick your nose in other people’s business without being asked), and formal (when you are asked formally to mediate). With complex issues that we are personally involved in, all four contexts can easily come into play.

It is often good to start with internal mediation, as it helps you communicate more clearly through all the other contexts. Internal mediation also weaves through all of them, as you can constantly be checking in with yourself and connecting to your feelings and needs. Whether you are a student being bullied or witnessing your peers being bullied, a parent concerned about your child, or work in a school and care about the children, doing your internal work first can be very powerful. Use internal mediation and the enemy image process to get clear about what you want to do and how you want to support the people you care about. Besides the tools in the last posts, you can also enlist a support team to help you get connected with your feelings and needs and decide how you want to proceed.

If you witness someone being bullied and, after connecting with yourself, decide you want to say something to the bully, you are in the realm of interpersonal mediation, where you are a party and thus playing two roles simultaneously—mediator as well as participant in the conversation. Similarly, any conversation where you are making a request of someone to intervene can also be seen as an interpersonal mediation. For example, if you are a parent concerned about your child being picked on at school, you might want to have a conversation with the teacher or an administrator at the school and request their help with the issue. You can approach this as an interpersonal mediation, which in essence means that you go back and forth between empathizing with the other person and expressing your own needs, until together you find a strategy that meets both of your needs.

Informal mediation, or, as Marshall Rosenberg calls it, “sticking your nose in other people’s business without being asked” might come about if you intervene in a bullying situation, or if you are not part of a discussion between others about the issue but you step in to lend your skills. This context generally requires that you be more expressive about your reasons for intervening, trying to connect people with the needs you are trying to meet by doing so.

If you were asked to mediate or facilitate a conversation, you would be in the context of formal mediation. Perhaps a parent group, the administration of a school, or a student council wants to have a discussion about the issue and would like a facilitator to make sure the conversation stays on track. In formal mediation, you actually draw from all the other contexts at the same time. As mediator, you stay present with your own feelings and needs throughout the conversation, you engage with each party individually as you would in interpersonal mediation, and if things get heated you might intervene in the same way you would informally.

As a concerned person wanting to make a difference in your community, you can use your understanding of these four contexts to navigate your way through all the conversations necessary to make the difference you want to make. Each conversation is a mediation, whether it’s with someone who is bullying or being bullied, with their parents, with the teachers and administrators at the school, or in efforts to get community involvement. For each conversation, you can do internal work to prepare yourself and make sure you have no enemy images of the others involved, and then enter into the conversation ready to connect and care about others and their point of view.

This post was written by Ike Lasater with Julie Stiles

It’s easy to demonize the bully; that kid or adult who bashes another person because they are gay or straight, poor or rich, white or black or brown, Christian or Muslim or Jewish. When we do so, however, we disconnect not only from that person, reducing the likelihood that we can intervene in a way that will make a difference, but also disconnect from ourselves, from the part of us who is the bully. When we are disconnected from ourselves and others, we become more willing to treat someone as less than a person; to, in fact, act toward them in similar ways to the actions we are protesting from them. One way to re-connect is through using the Enemy Image Process. Using this process to get in touch with our own feelings and needs can help us become clear about what we would like to do in the situation and act in accordance with our values.

We have an enemy image anytime we hold an image of someone else that prevents us from feeling compassion and connection with them. The Enemy Image Process (EIP) has a simple structure; empathize with yourself, empathize with the other, and requests.

Let’s take a situation where you have seen two teenage boys walking along and one of them accosts another teenage boy, and go through what the EIP might look like.

You can empathize with yourself by going through the four components of NVC as Ike did in his last post. The observation could be what you saw, for example, one boy shoving another boy, saying to him “get out of the way, faggot.” Since this is empathy for you, you might use as your observation the thoughts that you notice in your mind when you see the bullying happening or think about it afterwards, perhaps something like, “I hate seeing that, I want to shake that boy and wake him up, or have him experience that so he knows what it’s like. Why can’t he see what he’s doing? Is he really so clueless? What kind of power trip is he on anyway? I’d go over there right now but I’m afraid of what his reaction might be.”

Then, check in with your feelings, trying to name them as accurately as you can. You might feel anger, sadness, or maybe some fear, or some combination of feelings. If you are doing the process some time after seeing it happen, you might also have some disappointment if you didn’t do something at the time.

Next, find the needs that lie behind the feelings. Your needs might be for safety, compassion, caring, and understanding that underneath our differences, we are all the same. Feel into those needs, imagining what it feels like to have those needs met.

At this point you might have experienced some shift already in your physiology; perhaps you feel a little clearer or more relaxed. You can then turn your attention to empathizing for the young man who was doing the bullying, through inquiring into what needs he might be trying to meet in his actions that you are judging.

As you think about it, putting yourself in his place, you realize that he probably has little understanding or knowledge of the person he is acting toward in ways that you don’t like. He might, due to the way he was raised, have prejudice built into him such that he isn’t able to see another possibility. You realize that his actions are likely coming out of a deep fear and pain. He may be trying to protect himself or fit into a particular group that he wants to fit into by distancing himself from a group that he sees as opposed to it. As each guess of a feeling or need occurs to you, feel into how that lives within you; how the fear of otherness, the pain of separation, the needs for community, protection, safety, and understanding occur for you.

It does not matter whether these guesses are correct. What matters is that in making them and feeling them within yourself, you are transforming the prior image you had of him. You are humanizing him.

As you put yourself in the young man’s shoes, you might find yourself getting triggered again, and need to return to empathy for yourself. This back and forth, between empathy for yourself and empathy for him, can continue until you feel some peace within yourself, until you no longer have the judgmental thoughts you began with.

At this point, you can consider what requests you might have. These requests can be for yourself and others. You might have a request of yourself to have a conversation with the young man, you might ask others to support you prior to having it by role-playing the conversation, you might decide to talk to his parents or teachers and request that they have a conversation with him. The list of possibilities, once we are on the other side of our judgments, is generally much longer than it was prior to going through the process.

Whatever you decide to do, you are more likely to act in ways that are satisfying to you because they are in alignment with what you value. Going through the enemy image process helps you separate a person’s actions from their being; in doing so, you are more able to treat the bully with the compassion and care that you would like to see from him or her.

This post was written by Julie Stiles.