(me and Dad in San Diego's Balboa Park a year or so after the divorce)

Conflict Suppression, Denial, Avoidance, Engagement, Resolution, Transformation and Transcendence

If you've been reading this series, you already know my family's conflict resolution technique of choice -- denial.  Conflict denial works best when the parties aren't in contact.  The social psychologists call this "autistic hostility."  

When you're in a state of autistic hostility, writes Morton Deutsch, the E.L. Thorndike Professor and Director Emeritus of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teachers College, Columbia University,

[y]ou think you've been hurt by the other, you're angry, you break off communication with the other, you don't talk about it with the other, you ignore the other.

I have autistic hostility towards coffee. I don't know why, but as long as I can remember I have had an aversive reaction to thinking about it. I, as a result, never drink coffee. I avoid any taste of coffee, like coffee ice cream. I may be mistaken about coffee. Maybe I would like it.

Maybe if I experienced it, if I had contact with coffee. If I had communicated, so to speak. If I allowed to coffee to communicate with me, it would change my attitude. That's one thing that happens sometimes in conflict. You maintain your hostility autistically, within yourself, without any necessary reactor.

We Make Stuff Up

If you're a trial attorney, you know all too well that juries, in the absence of information, just make $#%^@ up.  Did you fail to construct a link in your evidentiary causal chain?  If the jury likes your client, your story, your presentation, your place in the social order, your expert or anything else about the product you are selling -- your case -- they'll forge that chain for you.  If not, not.  

When adults are in a state of autistic hostility, they tend to demonize one another -- an extremely common result of litigation.  

When children lose contact with a parent, however,  they tend to idealize the missing caretaker.  With no feedback mechanism against which to test a parent's merits, teenagers tend to retain the idealized images created in childhood, which tends to delay the healthy recognition during early adulthood that one's parents -- though loved and loving -- are simply fallible human beings like everyone else.  

In Dad's Case, Idealization Was a Piece of Cake

I could write Dad's biography, but a skeletal outline will suffice.  

Nebraska farm until age seven or so.  Dustbowl.  The family abandons the farm, fills the Model-T with nine children and all of their worldly possessions, heading for  Portland, Oregon where logging work work beckons. 

Dad's Dad -- a farmer with arthritis -- can't take the cold and the damp.  The family heads down south, picking fruit in the fertile fields of the Imperial Valley along the way. 

They land in the "back country" of San Diego -- first Julian and then Ramona. 

My granddad never works again.  My grandmother raises chickens and takes in laundry. 

Dad drops out of high school at 14, works as a Western Union messenger in downtown San Diego, delivering, among other things, whiskey to whore-houses.

(throughout this narrative, the reader must recognize that all great story tellers like my father are notoriously unreliable narrators; the essence is usually true; the details are often the stuff of fantasy)

World War II.  Merchant Marines. 

Marriage and children.  

Dad earns high school diploma when he is 35 and I am seven.  Two years later, he high-tails it out of town.  Sacramento.  Second wife and family.  

Dad moves to Los Angeles.  Goes to law school (!!!) without spending a single day in a college.  

He passes the Bar at 42 years of age and sets up a solo practice in Beverly Hills ("where the rich people are").  

Dad becomes a Juvenile Court Referee and then a Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner, sitting as a Judge upon the stipulation of the parties. 

He amasses wealth by buying foreclosures in the San Fernando Valley. 

Rafts rivers, climbs mountains.

Not much need to make anything up.

Legendary.

Dad.

Every Conflict Takes Place in a Context, Culture and Environment -- from Conflict Revolution

Let us begin with a few simple, yet profound and far-reaching truths. First, every conflict takes place not only between individuals, but in a context, culture, and environment; surrounded by social, economic, and political forces; inside a group or organization; contained by a system and structure; among a diverse community of people; at a particular moment in time and history; on a stage; against a backdrop; in a setting or milieu.

Second, none of these is conflict-neutral. Each contributes, sometimes in veiled and unspoken yet profound ways, to the nature, intensity, duration, impact, and meaning of our conflicts. And each, depending on circumstances, can play a determining role in the success of the conversations, interventions, and methods used to prevent, resolve, transform, and transcend conflicts.

Third, nearly any social, economic, or political issue can trigger or aggravate interpersonal conflicts. Indeed, social dysfunctions, economic disparities, and political incongruities are nearly always experienced as personal conflicts, leaving the systems that regularly create them in the shadows, unnoticed and unresolved. Moreover, nearly everyone is capable of taking even the most abstract, obtuse differences personally and, as a result, is less able to learn from or transform them.

Fourth, social, economic, and political systems, by reason of their embattled history and internally divided nature, generate chronic global conflicts and with them a culture of conflict avoidance. These give rise to a set of adversarial attitudes and behaviors regarding global problems that limits the ability of individuals, groups, and nations to work collaboratively and democratically, even in small ways, to overcome their differences and solve them.

Fifth, every conflict possesses elements and characteristics that are self-similar on all scales, so that a common set of attitudes, emotions, ideas, and behaviors connects purely internal conflicts with those that occur in relationships, families, communities, organizations, societies, economies, and nation-states. This self-similarity on all scales allows us to identify ways of adapting resolution techniques that have proven effective for resolving disputes on an entirely different level.

Sixth, nearly all conflicts, no matter how petty or personal, possess veiled social, economic, and political features that inform their evolution and eventual outcome. These include social prejudice, economic greed, and the autocratic exercise of political power. When these hidden aspects are identified and analyzed, they become fertile sources of methods and techniques for preventing future conflicts, reaching successful resolutions, transforming social, economic, and political relationships, and transcending chronic conflicts at their source through learning and systemic improvement. As a result, nearly all conflicts can trigger revolutionary changes in individuals, organizations, and institutions.

Even in entirely interpersonal conflicts, people may respond negatively to social or cultural differences, develop biases and stereotypes, interact based on unspoken social assumptions and expectations, or be influenced by status, wealth, and power. They may quarrel over money, compete for scarce resources, or disagree over the way power is being used. They may differ regarding future goals or prior history, critique or defend the status quo, or advance points of view that reflect conflicting roles and responsibilities. Each of these sources of discord conceals a subtle social, economic, or political element that leaves it less open to resolution.

Seventh, except when social, economic, and political issues are explicitly raised, it is rare for these contextual, environmental, or systemic elements to be openly identified, acknowledged, or resolved, either by the parties or their mediators. Instead, they linger in the background, generating distortions and misunderstandings that make matters worse.