"It was hard, but I needed to hear it. Now I'm telling it other people, too."
"I was overwhelmed. But I thought about it a lot the last few months and it helped me change my perspective".
I heard these sentences from two different people in the last few weeks. With both, I had individual conflicts last year related to the genocide in Gaza.
Last summer, I was frustrated that many of the conversations I had didn't seem to go anywhere. I realized that there is a lot of room for improvement in how I approach conflict resolution. And this is still true. I can always work on how I take responsibility for my side of the conflict and its resolution.
However, the reactions above showed me there is an additional factor I haven't been taking into account enough: Time.
And this makes a lot of sense.
Most of us don't have a lot of experience with generative conflict, so when someone approaches us with something, our nervous systems aren't used to a positive outcome. The first thing we often do is closing down. Defensiveness, conflict avoidance.
It can take a while to calm down and let the information in. The words and the emotions the words carry need to move through the body. Especially when someone says something we don't want to hear about ourselves, something that touches our shadow, it can take a lot of courage and time to open up to it and let it in.
If what they said is true, what does it say about me? It probably means letting go of a part of our identity we've been holding onto a bit too tightly. The system needs time to reorganize around this new information. Patterns aren't changed by words alone, they are embodied.
I was really surprised by the reactions above. I hadn't talked to each of them about this specific situation and thought this was just conflict avoidance. It made me really happy to hear that they took our conversation seriously and thought about it. It was actually quite humbling. Just because I don't hear anything from a person, it doesn't mean they're not taking in what I've said.
It's OK that things take time.
It took a while for Pia and me to cultivate a conflict culture where it's OK for us to take the time, process everything and then get back together, when we're ready. It saves us a lot of potential hurt that can happen when we're trying to solve things before we're ready.
It's easier to surrender to the process when there is trust that both are willing to work through this. And this takes practice. And time.