“If Children Are Playing on a Playground and they're fighting, the Very First Thing That We Tend to Do Is Separate them. Separation Works to Stop the fighting, but It doesn't Work to Settle the Issues That they're Fighting O

a highly intuitive methodology and so what we need to do is to figure out how to access what we know, but don't know that we know.  One way of doing that is by tuning yourself to the story and seeing if you can finish it before they do.

The third thing is what I call the #1 rule in conflict resolution, which is to show up. And that means as much of you, as you can possibly bring to the conversation that you are having in that moment -- all of you, and if there's any part of you that you can't bring, that's a kind of attachment. What you want to do then is to take a look at that and see what blocks are in the way. This is another point, which is that every internal blindness results in something that you can't see externally. If there's something you can't see inside yourself, you won't be able to see it outside and vice-versa. If you've missed something in a conversation, there's some reason why you missed it and if you focus on it, if you really try to get to the bottom of it, then you have become more attuned to parts of yourself, personalities even, that exist inside of you.

Good actors are able to do this. Acting essentially means that the roles we act out already exist inside of us in some form. There's another part to this, which is simply following the little trail of breadcrumbs that people leave in their conversations. And I mentioned before about places where there is great depth or a peak in the conversation -- like any of the power words, insults or places where people get highly energized. And if you just follow those, you’ll be able to do something creative with it.

There is another point about this, which is, it is important to have as much training possibly as you can get, and then to jump in there. Leap before you look, if you will.  You can do as much looking as you can but none of the looking is actually going to help you, once you make the leap. And to place yourself in a position where you don't know the answer, couldn't conceivably know the answer, nobody could know what's going to happen next, and follow it. In order to do that, you have to first polish your own intention and attitude, so that it is really impeccable and spotless. This is something where it just has to be genuine for you.

Preeta:  Yeah, that's wonderful. I'm wondering that these tools for transformation are obviously tools you have developed over the course of your lifetime, and if you could speak to what in your life led to their development?

Ken:  Well, I would say there are several things. The first is that I have to give credit to the women in my life for teaching me the importance of emotional intelligence. And I kind of remember the very first time in junior high school when I realized that girls knew stuff that I didn't. I was on the phone every night talking to girls who somehow just seemed to have some deep knowledge. So I would say out of intimate relationships, has come a lot of learning.

The second is the social experience of being in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the student movement of the 1960s.  I was very much an active participant in that. I believe in the values that all of those things stood for, but what I realized was that it's a little bit like separating the kids on the playground. You can get a certain distance through demonstrations, confrontation.  If what you want to do is to stop people being lynched, that's one way to do it. But if you want to change people's hearts and minds, you have to actually engage them in conversation.

The third source for me was being a judge and trying to do justice, but somehow not being able to do that, not understanding even how to get there because the law is so formal. There were two personal experiences that I had. One was an offer from the governor of California at that time, to be appointed to the Superior Court, and I had to give the answer the next day. I was torn about whether to do this or not. I had a sort of prophetic dream that night. I dreamt that I was on the stand as a judge and there was this kid who was testifying about some crime he'd committed and I realized he was lying. And then I looked at the defense counsel, realized he was lying, looked at the prosecutor, realized he was lying, and looked at myself and saw I was lying too. So I got up from the bench, took the kid by the hand, sat down with him on the floor, and said, “Tell me what happened. Tell me who you are.” It was a really intense, powerful dream and I knew I couldn't do this. So I called and said that I wouldn't the next day. The second major one was that I was appointed to be the first judge on the television program ‘People's Court’. And we did a pilot for the program in the course of which I mediated a dispute. I'd done some mediation as a judge and here there wasn’t any point in judging because it was very clear to me that the 2 people could reach an agreement. I got them to a place of agreement and they were thrilled but the producers fired me because they wanted to have victory and defeat -- that was one of the important dramatic elements for them!

I would say the strongest part of the lessons for me was after I became a mediator and began doing juvenile victim-offender mediations between kids who committed crimes and their victims. And those were just so incredibly powerful. Having been a lawyer who handled criminal cases sometimes, I knew what happened to kids who went to prison. This was just completely different. Nobody went to prison. People apologized, they gave retribution and restitution, and there was redemption for the kids as a result. Because they got to a place where they could pay back for what they had done, and they had to do that, in order to be free of it. They had to make themselves whole. ‘Making the victim whole’, that's the way it was phrased, but the truth is, it was never as much about the victim as it was about the perpetrator, and helping that kid get to a place where they didn't have to walk around covering up their guilt forever, with further criminal acts. So those are some of the main ones.

Questions/comments from other callers follow

Carol: Must people have a true interest in resolution for successful mediation to occur?

Ken:  No. Here is what I would say, probably as characteristic of this. Almost everybody wants to be free of the conflict and almost nobody wants to come together to talk about it. So they don't have to believe in it.  All they have to do is to be willing to come together and willing to say what is true for them.

For example, I do marital mediations and I also do divorce mediations. Divorces are places where people have just given up or they’ve become so exhausted trying to solve the problem, that they just can't do it anymore. One part of every conflict story is the idea that nobody could do anything about this. Mediation can't possibly work and I can't tell you how many times I've been told that. And sometimes, it doesn't work -- because the mediator may lack the skills, or because it’s too deep, or because it's gone on too long and people aren’t willing to change, or because they don't know how to, or are afraid to. There are thousands of different reasons, but what is most important is that out of this conversation comes some deeper understanding of, at least, why is it that we actually are stuck, and that's a step forward.

 
Lisa:  Has this work helped you with your own conflicts inside yourself?

Ken:  Oh my God, yes! One of the really delicious reasons for learning mediation is that you get to work on yourself. In fact, you have to work on yourself!  We think of conflicts, like we think of a lot of things in the world, as external. The truth is that everything external is processed internally.

What happens for me is that, especially earlier in my experience, there would be places where I would get stuck, where I couldn't figure out what was going on and would make mistakes. You can't do this work without making those kinds of mistakes. But every single one of those mistakes is one that I take to heart and work on. Then it happens, of course, that you are busy meditating at work and then go home and discover that you haven't really walked your talk, as completely as you ought to have. Aren't there some things that you could do better in your relationships with other people? And the answer is, yes absolutely, and I continue to work on that, even today.

Mish: First, it seems like some thrive on confrontation and some shun it -- wondering where does one’s basic nature determine how you handle conflict? Second, do you feel that there is a direct correlation between one's aversion to conflict and the number of wounded places within?

Ken: Beautiful! In the first place, we all have a different chemical and genetic makeup and they've shown with mice that some are more risk-averse than others. On top of that, there is what is called epigenetics, which is the influence of environment on genetics -- that is what happens in your environment can change the expression of your genes. So, for example, if you have a male mouse, which is subjected to stress and there's no connection with the female mouse next door, except through the air system, so the odor that comes from the urine of the male mouse is transferred over to the female mouse.  The babies born to the female mouse will have higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, than if there had been a male mouse that hasn't been subjected to stress. So there’s genetic predisposition, there's epigenetics and there's experience. So that’s the first piece -- that there's some kind of natural sensitivity we have to conflict, that every one of us can improve upon as we go through life.

On the second question -- the more wounds you have experienced, the more the threshold for your pain is altered and the more sensitive you are. My approach to what happens when there is ‘catastrophic suffering’ is forgiveness -- as a spiritual practice and a form of conflict resolution. What these sufferers have uniquely available to them is the ability to dedicate some part of their lives to making sure that no one suffers the way that they did. And everybody who has really suffered will instantly recognize the truth of this. This is the way out, instead of pretending that somehow you can go on with your life and everything will be OK. You have been given a kind of gift. It wasn't a gift you wanted. It wasn’t even a gift that you would necessarily choose, but once it has been given, what to do with it?

And that becomes possible in conflict resolution, especially with kids who’ve committed crimes or people who’ve experienced great trauma in their lives. With ‘Mediators beyond Borders’, we have a project in Rwanda that is using ‘Trauma-Informed Mediation’ because everybody in Rwanda has been traumatized. And there are conflicts in which people get re-traumatized, and so we're combining mediation and trauma professionals, and teaching both sets of skills simultaneously. We need to be deeply respectful of suffering and not blame the victim for what has happened. But having said that, we also need to say to them -- there's something that you can uniquely contribute that the rest of us can’t. People who have gone through a war in the Middle East where there is an organization called ‘Combatants for Peace’ and it consists of the members of the Israeli Defense Force, Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad forces -- all of them former fighters who’d fought each other, coming together to say that we've got to do something different. Nobody can say that like they can, just like nobody could produce peace in Northern Ireland, other than the IRA and the Ulster Constabulary.  They were the ones who did it and it was out of their suffering and their pain that the peace process came to a realization.

Preeta:  As we close, I have one question -- How can we, the larger ServiceSpace community, support your work?

Ken:  Actually, if we can describe it as our work.  Here is my belief about this – globally, we are now facing problems that can no longer be solved using law or military force or ordinary diplomacy. We require something new, and I believe that what we have to do as a species is to figure out how to solve problems collaboratively. 

It's easy to do it with North Korea. It's happening right now with Iran, with Russia, and I would say that the most important thing for us to do, is to resist the notion that someone of us is the enemy. My way of saying this is the following: All of these are conflicts between them and us, but we have to get to a point where we realize -- there is no them. There is just us. When we realize that, we begin to move in the direction of dialogue and conflict resolution and communication. So whatever it is people do, that will be terrific. You can support organizations like ‘Mediators beyond Borders’ or ‘Partners for Democratic Change’ or ‘Essential Partners’, which does dialogue work. Help turn our political process in a conflict resolution and dialogue direction. If we can do that, then we will have done something really amazing.