Compassionate Conflict Resolution - WK 4 Dealing with our Inner Parts
Week 4 - Internal Parts
Meditation - bringing kind thoughts to our inner child. Think of a time you had fun as a child, maybe at the park or sitting in your grandmas lap or even playing with a favorite toy. Feel the happy, playful, loving energy. Just take some deep breaths in and deep breaths out and continue to send kindness and appreciation to that part of yourself.
That is the fun, happy, curious part of our self that we need to protect. When we perceive someone threatening our inner child by saying something mean or acting angry, we can get very defensive very fast and then the opportunity to have a loving, productive conversation is gone.
By staying calm we can protect our inner child and have the potential for a healthy conversation.
Let’s review: listen, repeat, validate and explore (LRVE) but its hard to LRVE someone that is being ugly to you.
How can we stay in our safe space and not let our defenders get triggered. More to the point, how can we recognize and manager our defenders so they don’t undermine our efforts to deal with a difficult issue?
Perhaps by just channeling Mr. Rogers, taking some deep breaths in and out and/or remember, their anger is not your responsibility. It’s just your responsibility to be kind and compassionate to yourself and to those around you.
We like to think of ourselves as rational adults but when someone hurts our feelings we are like “well they hurt my feelings so what was I supposed to do”? When we say “they hurt my feelings”, we are saying others are responsible for how we feel and by extension, we are responsible for how others feel. That will only lead to conflict and pain. Others are not responsible for my feelings. I am. I am not responsible for others feelings. They are.
What parts do you have that get in your way of being compassionate to those that are not nice to you?
Blamer, critic, pleaser, chameleon, yeller, shut down, fixer… ???
If we can identify our defender and bring kindness and compassion to that part we can redirect that energy in a way that is more helpful.
Also, realize that when we are angry at someone that is angry at us, we are probably carrying their anger. When we realize it is not ours to carry, we can create a healthy barrier around us and only let in the energy that we want to let in. In doing so, we can protect our younger parts without being rude or ugly to the person that is being rude to us.
Listen, repeat, validate, explore
stay in your kind compassionate space and see if the other person will meet you in your calm space rather than meeting them in their angry space
remember its not your job to be responsible for the other persons negative energy, just your job to channel your mr rogers kind compassionate energy.