"At the center of my vision is the recognition that above all, it is the community surrounding a Conflict that is the source of its resolution. The community holds the crucial responsibility to resit overreaction to difference, and to offer alternatives of understanding and complexity. We have to help each other illuminate and counter the role of overstating harm instead of using it to justify cruelty."
"The values required for social repair are the same values required for personal repair."
"It is not that I was lying, bu that I was defended. I blocked access to my own real feelings. I did this to defend a story about myself that I felt safe maintaining, even if it wasn't true. But sometimes the other person saw the truth that I was unable to access or be accountable for. Part of peace-making is acknowledging that we can't know everything about ourselves, and sometimes we reveal things to others that we are not ready to accept."
"There is something in the person who hides behind email that wants these offenses to be true. They want to feel victimized. Then they don't have to look at themselves critically or think about the other person with complexity. There is no guilt or responsibility if one is an email victim."
"While unrecovered trauma is so often a prison of inflexibility, some people do have choices about how to respond. And someone else might make that shift possible by daring to imagine what to us may feel unimaginable. Which can be love."
"At any conflicted moment that is available to interpret one's self as somehow transgressed, there is often the option of not seeing it that way. Or of asking the other person what they mean."
"Being in a negative moment with another person can be destabilizing, hurtful, and stressful, especially if a person's self-concept requires them to think of themselves as perfect. But it is not, by definition, Abuse. It could be Abuse, if one has power over another, but if not, it's a Conflict. And being in a Conflict is a position that is filled with responsibility and opportunity."
"People who describe themselves as "Abused" when they are actually in Conflict are not lying; they usually don't know the difference."
"A shallow relationship with a friend, relative, co-worker, or advocate means that they will not take the time to ask the meaningful questions and to help the person involved overcome shame, anger, and disappointment so they can get to a complex truth about their own participation and how to achieve repair."
"This placement of the authority to 'stop violence' into the hands of the police produces a crisis of meaning. The police are often the source of violence, especially in the lives of women, people of color, trans women, sex workers, and the poor. And the police enforce the laws of the United States of America, which is one of the greatest sources of violence in the world... The law is designed to protect the state, not the people who are victimized by the state. So while police intervention can importantly separate violent adults from their victims or each other after violence has begun, this job of 'stopping violence' has shifted from stopping the causes of violence to reacting punitively to the expressions of those unaddressed causes."
"Once we stop being determined to produce a victim and are instead focused on learning the truth of what actually happened, we become willing to accept the discomfort of recognizing two people as being Conflicted and embrace a more humane and acknowledging vision of social relationships."
"People have the right to change partners, but there are many kinds of available paths to creating change. Taking responsibility, recognizing the other person's anguish, allowing for transitional indulgences, going through a process with third parties even if uncomfortable, can dissipate pain."
"Instead of encouraging more open communication between lovers, the government is imposing itself as a substitute for learning how to problem-solve."
"This is what Supremacy Ideology does: it provides the empowered with delusions of superiority, as the ideology itself masquerades as reality. This is why some people feel righteous in calling the police instead of facing their own anxieties, and why others reinforce them in this terrible decision."
"Silence can itself be an escalation. Little children give their parents "the silent treatment" because they don't know how to negotiate: how to listen, to respond in a way that is transformed by having listened, to change in order to meet the other."
"We all have an ideal imagined self and a real self, and there is always a gap between the two. I've never met a person who was exempt from this. The process of moving forward in life requires, I guess, constant adjustment on both sides. We each come closer to a more mature understanding of who we really are, some kind of acceptance, while at the same time working to change the things we can in order to get closer to our desired self. In this way, the gap narrows from both sides: acceptance, and change."
"Privacy, or rather invasion of, is when the government collects data on you without your consent. Shame, to me, is hiding information that reveals common human experiences, contradictions, and mistakes. Sometimes this is imposed from the outside through stigma."
"In fact, both studies found that people who come from guilt very much want to negotiate, are able to apologize and admit fault, can make concessions, and are invested in positive resolution. People coming from shame, on the other hand, direct anger, aggression, and blame towards the other party."
"As Sarah Ahmed says, learning from Audre Lorde: while actually dealing with the substance of Conflict may initially feel more upsetting than repressing it, the response to high levels of distress should sometimes be to create even higher levels of distress. In this way, internal and external domination systems are revealed, and this ultimately dismantled."
"There is narcissism to Supremacy, but there is also a narcissism to Trauma, when a person cannot see how others are being affected. Although the triggered person may be made narcissistic and self-involved by the enormity of their pain, bot parties are in fact equally important. And it is the job of the surrounding communities to insist on this."
"Using the word 'transference,' she implied an attachment of an emotion to people who are not the source of that emotion. In this way, we externalize internal conflict."
"All of these systems recommend the same tactic: delay. And in order o delay, they all agree, one needs to be in community: a relationship, friendship circle, family, identity group, nation, or people who encourage us to be self-critical and look for alternatives to blame, punishment, and attack. We need to be in groups that are willing to be uncomfortable and take the time to fully talk through the order of events, take all parties into account, and facilitate repair."
"His friends have to parent him as well as his actual parents, because that is where real values are established, in the conflict between what our families tell us and the reality of the world."
"Do what feels right is unfortunately considered the individual's best guide to ethical action. But this can be a capitulation to the controls of impulsivity, rooted in trauma and egged on by bad friends and negative family relationships. There is a gross distortion in this ideology as an excuse to do what you want. Pretending that what is comfortable and easiest is inherently what is right is a tragic self-deception."
"Finally, ultimately, when groups bond over shunning or hurting or blaming another person, it is the state's power that is enhanced. Because the state doesn't want to understand causes, because the state doesn't want things to get better, it doesn't want people to understand each other. State apparatuses are there to maintain the power of those in control and punish those who contest that power; that is what bad families do, and that is what bad friends do."
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