The benefits of working through a conflict with a neutral mediator
Two monks once walked alongside a river. As they got around the next bend, they saw a woman on the other side of the river. She was carrying a basket full of fresh vegetables from the market, and she was clearly distressed. She called out to them, asking to help her across the river.
Now those monks had taken vows to never touch a woman. Without a word, the older monk stepped into the river, crossed over to the other side, picked her up and placed her gently on the other side, before continuing on his journey alongside the other monk. After about an hour of walking in silence, the younger monk asked: “As monks, we are not permitted a woman, how could you then carry that woman on your shoulders?”, to which the older monk replied: “I set her down on the other side of the river, but you, brother, are still carrying her”.
You may be familiar with this well known Zen story. Like the older monk, so do you always have a choice when it comes to how you react when you face an issue or a conflict. You can choose to ignore the conflict, run from it, fight it, or resolve it and move on. What do you think is the healthiest thing to do?
Unresolved conflicts create traumas, big and small, throughout life
Any conflict in your life creates a trauma – big or small, consciously noticeable or not. So you can either work through it, then move on. Or you can carry it for the rest of your life. Working through it does not mean to deal with it and forget about it. It means: deal with it, make it conscious, then let it go, and learn from it. Or, you can prolong it into eternity without attempting to resolve it, you can hope for it to just “kind of disappear over time”, or you can run from the situation or person that you are in a conflict with. If you choose the latter, this may well build up as lifelong chronic stress. And chronic stress caused by any trauma has a tendency to rear its head in the most inopportune moment (inopportune to your conscious, but opportune to your subconscious).
The 95/5 Principle
If you run from it, or hide, or stay in it – you don’t learn from the conflict, and if you picture your nervous system as a glass of water with all sorts of pebbles in it (=conflicts, traumas, issues), and you drop pebbles in to the top of the rim, without any capacity to intake any more, your glass will be overflowing and cracking up.
Do you know that in principal, 95% of who we are is stored, programmed, unconscious thinking and experiencing? And only 5% is truly creative, conscious, imaginative? Research shows that for the first 7 or 8 years of our lives – starting in the third trimester of pregnancy – we are in a state of hypnosis, our brains are in theta brainwave state. We copy others, we absorb without any filters.
To illustrate this: We are in effect downloading software programmes, uncensored, unchecked, onto our harddrive (our brain and body). These programmes of acquired behaviour, knowledge and experience are used throughout the rest of our lives, unless we become conscious and aware of them and change what we want to change.
To mirror this back onto a conflict you find yourself in: Due to these programmes that are uniquely downloaded to you, including bad ones, you put yourself on constant autorepeat. You think you are in control of your actions and behaviours, but you are not. So when you hit a conflict in life, your body goes into one of two biological imperative modes: growth or protection. This biological imperative is shared by all living things -we want to survive against all odds.
So, if you put yourself into repeat behaviour every time a conflict occurs, without looking at it consciously, and without working through it – you will stagnate and get stuck in a “fight, flight” or even a “fight, flight, freeze” status. You will also react via autopilot to any potential conflicts before they even happen, via your sensory triggers that constantly compare situations in your life to what your system has learned and encountered in the past. This keeps you in a spiral, and it can potentially store accumulative traumas and add to your chronic stress. And we all know how that affects our health over time!
What can you do instead?
Use your 5% of change-friendly, creative consciousness! With the help of a professional mediator, you can deal with the issue or dispute in a processed, clarifying, liberating way. Just like the monk in the Zen story – he made the decision to assist the woman, inspite of conflicting regulations, as it felt like that was the right thing to do, and then he let it go. So assist yourself. Go against your learned programmes of how to deal with conflict.
With the help of a professional mediator, you can deal with the issue or dispute in a processed, clarifying, liberating way.
For it to work, you and the other party (parties) to the dispute need to participate in this type of alternative dispute resolution. In a mediation, both you and the other party (parties) own the solution. The mediator guides you through the process and makes sure there is a balance of power, and that core principles of fairness, confidentiality and more are applied. But you are the ones who own the solution to your dispute. And when you find a mutually agreeable solution, you are starting to download new programmes of understanding, and behaviour, onto your harddrive. And this, in turn, helps you deal with any new conflict in a much healthier way – you will tell yourself that you have successfully found solutions before, and mended broken relationships sustainably, so why not now? Right?
Mediation, somatic experiencing and neurolinguistic programming
Mediation is a voluntary process, so yes, you would need everybody in a conflict to willingly participate. If you need help with that, a trained mediator can assist you in how to approach the situation. If the other party or parties do not want to attempt a resolution of the conflict, you cannot however force them. In such a situation, there are other ways for you to work through it, change perspectives and let it go. In this case, I suggest you work with a coach, a somatic experience practitioner, or find out more about neurolinguistic programming; one of the modalities that work very well with changing our internal programmes, is to “rewrite your history” with an NLP-coach.
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