Arbitration & Mediation

Negotiating Life's End: Part Five

By Victoria Pynchon

(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.  Family stuffs Model-T with nine children and all 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.  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 grand dad never works again.  My grand mother 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.  

Moves to Los Angeles.  Goes to law school (!!!) without spending a single day in a college.  Passes the Bar at 42 years of age.  Sets up solo practice in Beverly Hills ("where the rich people are").  Becomes a Juvenile Court Referee and then a Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner, sitting as a Judge upon the stipulation of the parties. 

Amasses wealth by buying foreclosures in the San Fernando Valley. 

Rafts rivers, climbs mountains.

Not much need to make anything up.

Legendary.

Dad.

Tomorrow.  Surrender.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on June 03, 2008 (boomark / email).