SALVE – A Somatic Approach to Self-soothing for Internal and External Conflict with Kai Cheng Thom (Part 2)
Part Two of Kai Cheng Thom’s explorative and empathic approach on the topic of Embodied Conflict Resolution.
“At the base level of the body and of sensation, the reason that conflict is always present in any given group is because we are always scanning, we’re always intercepting, and we do this to assess danger levels.”
Swimming in the Conflict
When we think about conflict and the web of human relationship, it can be helpful to use the metaphor of swimming in the sea together.
Consider that we're swimming in an ocean of relationship. When we are in a group, the potential for conflict is always present. No matter how lovely we are or how thoughtful we are or how much we adore each other, there is always conflict present in a room, whether active, explicit, or not. Why is that?
At the base level of the body and of sensation, the reason that conflict is always present in any given group is because we are always scanning, we're always intercepting, and we do this to assess danger levels.
The body is always picking up on whether or not our physical or socio-emotional needs are being met. Maybe they are getting met, but we're worried, or we're picking up hints that those needs might not get met. The more complex the group, the deeper the relationships or the larger the group or the more politically mixed or socially mixed the group is, the bigger those fears become.
Implicit and Explicit Conflict
When we start to pick up hints of the possibility of unmet needs, we start to feel the sensation of that fear of conflict begin to emerge. Some interesting things happen as we try to navigate this sea of potential conflict that we're always swimming in. It depends on how we were raised and our own personal orientation to the word conflict, but the dominant culture in which most of us live tends to be a stigmatization of conflict or active conflict, including the pressure not to have conflict. What we do in response to this is try to keep the implicit conflict implicit and not explicit.
Sometimes mediators will call this artificial harmony, which is when we have all this potential for conflict swimming in the background, but we are not acknowledging it out of fear of it. Coming back to the metaphor, we might think of all those implicit conflicts - those unmet needs - like fish swimming around, kept underwater. There's a lot of pressure there! We often shove those conflict fish back down. That would be an example of a smaller interpersonal conflict that we tend to shove under the water, but the metaphor still applies when we talk about larger social conflicts as well. There can be a lot of pressure to not talk about things like racial injustice, homophobia, or transphobia, and that's quite socially weighted. It relates to power, privilege, and the status quo. That's implicit conflict.
We might think of explicit conflict as the fish who’s had enough. It decides that it’s not going to be underwater anymore, and it leaps up above the surface. We tend to fear that big fish. It's like a shark. We might think, it’ll swallow us whole! Maybe because we’ve had experiences of being devoured by a big fish in the past, so we try to keep all the fish underwater. However, you might have noticed that the longer you keep a fish underwater, the more it wants to jump. The bigger it becomes, the more strain there is to keep it under and the more likely it is to surface. At some point, it will surge to the surface in an uncontrollable, intense way.
Taking a Step Back
Some useful things to remember are that, firstly, inside every giant fish, there's a little fish at its heart, and that little fish is an unmet need. This thing that we fear, this terrifying, explicit conflict that's so unpredictable, is an unmet need or a series of unmet needs at its heart.
Have you ever experienced conflict with a loved one and thought Ugh, you’re just not getting it, you’re not hearing me. That's an unmet need. You probably want to feel heard and understood. The next need might be something like an organizational mediation that can bring the fish to the surface in general.
When we decide to name these things, we bring the fish to the surface intentionally.
If we can anticipate and prepare for it, then usually the nervous system is able to integrate more smoothly what is happening, which then allows us to get curious, asking what is the need that is going unmet here?
The Window of Transformation
This is an adaptation from Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Pat Oden's window of tolerance model.
The window of tolerance has become a very foundational tool for conceptualizing nervous system responses to stress, theorizing that the nervous system has two main branches of response to stress. The first branch being sympathetic-dominant with hyperarousal, meaning that the body heats up and can have a rapid heart rate: the fight or flight response.
The other branch is parasympathetic-dominant, but still also somewhat sympathetic, which includes a lowered heart rate response to stress. We often call this “freeze,” the unmoving response - the response to stress that's trying to survive by shutting down.
The Window of Transformation is conflict-specific. It takes an embodied lens to how the nervous system responds to conflict - when the fish jumps above the water or when we start to detect a fish jumping above the water. What does the body start to do? It will generally engage an activating response or a deactivating response.
Conflict Resolution Strategies
The conflict strategy we might use with our boss at work is often different from the conflict strategy we use with our children because the body does different things automatically around different people.
Conflict is almost always relational.
Most will default to the strategy that feels the most survivable in the moment of conflict. The body will do whatever is most survivable at that moment. In the same way that somatic trauma therapy teaches us to understand trauma as a process in the body, we can start to think about conflict as a process in the body. We tend to focus on the relational in conflict because the relational is very important, but what will dictate our relational behaviors tends to be whatever is going on in the body, and whatever is going on in the body in conflict tends to be extremely painful.
Most of our strategies are oriented toward getting through the pain of what's happening in our bodies and then getting rid of it as quickly as possible. If we're always focused on what's happening in our bodies and trying to get rid of the terrible sensations, which will be our default for survival, that is actually pretty different from attending to the other person or people that we’re in conflict with and considering what might be happening for them, which is difficult when we feel like we’re having a heart attack from facing the conflict up close.
Learn more about anti-oppressive conflict management to facilitate transformation in community and organizational settings with our 25-hr Embodied Conflict Resolution Certificate.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THIS TRANSFORMATIVE PROGRAM AT OUR FREE INFORMATION SESSION ON MAY 7TH
Join us live and online. Meet Kai Cheng Thom, have your questions answered, and discover if this program is right for you! The session will be recorded, so if you can’t make the live event, register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.
