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The ABC's of Conflict Resolution: "F" is for Friend

By Victoria Pynchon

My Twitter account tells me I have 1600 'friends' and my Facebook page suggests that I accept someone new as a 'friend' nearly every day.  Despite our modern online age, however, people do not become 'friends' at the push of a button. We start friendships tentatively, with small admissions of fallibility that won't entirely rip away the costume of the person we're pretending to be.

'I'm actually shy' I tell an incredulous acquaintance. 'The bravado masks it,' I admit, waiting for a reciprocal revelation signaling a common desire to take the relationship in a more intimate direction – one in which I signal my willingness to be trusting and demonstrate my ability to be trusted.

"Me too,' my potential friend might acknowledge. 'I'm actually driven by fear. I know I seem confident, but all this apparent success makes me feel like a fraud. Worse, I'm always feeling guilty that I'm not a better, more attentive mother to my children because I'm so busy pursuing my own success. That's selfish, don't you think?'

My acquaintance is not only reciprocating our growing intimacy, she is deepening it. I was merely talking about my professional life. She's now drilled down into her relationship with her children. We are taking baby steps to friendship, testing one another's ability to move beyond our 'public' selves and open up the door to our private lives and secret fears. We are putting something of ourselves on the line – something vulnerable and valuable – in the hope that we will have just one person – or  one more -- who knows and cares about us 'warts and all.'

When you consider how vitally important friends are to our emotional well-being, it's surprising we don't have more friendship 'owners manuals,' or, for that matter, 'friendship counseling.' The book stores are filled with advice manuals for marriages and parenting, but few are the titles advising us on the care and feeding of our friends – people who actually outlast marriages and endure long past the time our children leave home. What happens when friendships go bad and what, if anything, should we be doing to tend our friendship garden?

 

I made a new friend in school just a few years ago. Our intimacy was forged in our mutual mid-life career crises at the Straus Institute in Malibu. We'd both decided to earn our Legal Masters degrees in dispute resolution with the intention of becoming mediators. Rod and I became friends for the same set of obvious and mysterious reasons that people fall in love. We were engaged in an activity that threatened to throw our more or less well-ordered lives into turmoil but which engaged both of us deeply; we were surrounded by law students decades younger than we were; we were being taught courses by people who often had much less 'real world' experience than we did; and, we were understandably anxious about our decision to throw a couple of perfectly decent occupations out the window.

My friendship with Rod had a honeymoon period just like any romance would. There was that small stretch of time when we searched for and identified everything we had in common, reveling in our compatibility and ignoring the quite obvious differences and potential conflicts that might arise between us. Rod was conservative in dress and manner, for instance, while I was far less less restrained. Though not many years older, Rod's age put him on the 'other side' of the profound cultural shifts of the late 1960's and early 1970's. I was in high school during the 'Summer of Love' and in college when the women's movement took the country by storm. Rod was already married during those years, raising children while I was raising Cain.

Like the first lover's quarrel, friendships also have their early disputes. I wasn't, however, expecting so devastating a breach as the one that was heading in my direction. Rod's and my masters program required us to spend a significant amount of time 'interning' with local judges, arbitrators or mediators. We'd both met a local Superior Court Judge at Straus and we we liked him quite a lot.  We secured permission to work with him as a team and showed up in his chambers one warm Spring morning.

Judge Jones was smart, voluble and funny. I felt completely relaxed in his presence.  It was there, in the Judge's "office" that  I'd apparently used the word my 86-year old mother was still trying to remove from my salty trial lawyers vocabulary.

'F***.'

There are so many ways to use this word that I cannot recall how I used it on this occasion. 'It was f***ing awesome' I might have exclaimed or 'I can't f***ing believe it.'

The next day, Rod called me at home, prefacing his remarks with words no one wants to hear – 'I need to talk to you about something.' This phrase is never followed by 'let's have dinner' or 'I have tickets to a Grateful Dead concert; would you like to join me?' I stiffened in my chair, took a deep breath and said, 'O.K.'

'I don't think I can continue to be associated with you,' Rod said. I remember that word 'associated' because it stung pretty badly. Really! I've behaved badly from time to time. Really badly. But no one ever told me they didn't want to be 'associated' with me before. Tears sprung into my eyes.

'Because?' I asked.

'Because you said ‘f***' in Judge Jones' chambers,' he replied firmly. 'I just can't allow myself to be affiliated with anyone who behaves in such an unprofessional manner. You've been in this legal community for more than two decades but I haven't. I'm just establishing my reputation and I don't think I should be building it based on a relationship with you.'

I could have said, "fine; it makes no difference to me one way or the other" and cut the conversation - along with the relationship -- off immediately.  I could have and in most circumstances likely would have responded that way. But Rod and I were studying conflict resolution for goodness sakes. And I valued his friendship, despite, or maybe because it was so new to both of us. He made me laugh at myself when I was being overly earnest. He reminded me of my good qualities when I was feeling insecure. And he was the only person I knew who was willing to talk for hours about the intersection of the social psychology of conflict with the adversarial legal system. It would be a real loss if our still new friendship suddenly disintegrated.

 'Would you be willing to talk about why my use of the word ‘f***' disturbed you so much,' I asked as my husband circled my chair trying to intuit why tears were streaming down my face.  'Was my behavior really so unforgivable that it's worth throwing away the entire friendship away?"

In this moment, Rod and I were experiencing what the social psychologists would call a 'rupture' in our relationship -- the kind of discord that we first experience as infants with our caretakers. I didn't just feel unhappy.  I felt ashamed.  Were I a toddler, shamed by my mother for running out into the street only to be snatched out of harm's way at the last moment, I would have done what all toddlers instinctively do. I would have physically reached out for affection.

The process of "rupture and repair" is what makes us flexible and adaptable.  It helps us trust others to be reliable and permits us to form and maintain intimate relationships.  Toddlers we're told, naturally seek to repair the break in the emotional parent-child bond caused by any expression of parental disapproval. The social scientists call this process 'self-righting.' It is natural and universal.  A responsive parent helps her child return to a normal emotional and relational state – one in which love and trust are greater than disappointment and betrayal.

This is what I was attempting to do with Rod. I wasn't defending my 'right' to use the word ‘f***' in the presence of the Judge.  I was attempting to affirm my belief that Rod's and my disagreements were reparable and our friendship reliable.  I was also attempting to "right" myself from the sudden shock and embarrassment of such strongly expressed disapproval.  I was trying to "self-right."

Though many of us react to shaming with anger or withdrawal, I didn't want to take either of these worn paths.  I wanted to do something different with conflict this time.  Even though I felt hurt and angry, I summoned up the (after all really small degree of) courage it took to be accountable for behavior that might offend many reasonable people.  I apologized for embarrassing him in front of the Judge.   I assured him I was willing to finally drop the "F" word from my vocabulary if it would save our friendship.

In response, Rod admitted that he'd always been a bit of an 'old fogey.' He told me that he genuinely liked and respected me. He too was reaching beyond his ordinary limits to repair the break we'd just experienced.

In this manner, Rod's and my friendship made it past its first challenge and like a bone that has been broken and healed, the connection between us was strengthened.  We not only assured ourselves of the continued benefit of one another's friendship, we'd proven our willingness to move past our own pride and self-interest to make peace in the face of discord.  

Friendship, like romantic love, goes bad when we're unable to recover from the disappointment we feel when the rubber of our idealized images of one another hit the hard road of our fallible human nature. If we choose to respond to these small crises with anger or withdrawal, we never learn how resilient and reliable our relationships with our fellows can be.

In the ABC's of Conflict Resolution, F is not only for 'friend.' It also stands for fixing and forgiveness.  It represents fallibility and the fearlessness that friendship sometimes requires.  In my relationship with Rod, it stood for all of these things. And to the delight of my mother, it never again stood for F***. 

Look for A is for A**hole, the Illustrated ABC's of Conflict Resolution due out from Janis Publications in the Spring of 2010.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on December 04, 2009 (boomark / email).