Compassionate Conflict Resolution - Wk 5 Defenders
Week 5 - Defenders
Meditation -breath kindness and compassion into yourself. Be curious what you feel in your body. Use gentle moment (maybe stretching your arms, neck, shoulder or whatever feels tight) while doing some slow deep breaths in and out. Prepare yourself for receiving healing and insight.
We are going be talking about your internal Defenders, the parts that try to protect you from any actual or perceived attack. Those parts developed in your childhood and now the tools we continue to use them even if those tools no longer serve us.
Our defenders want to help us but may only have limited tools. By being curious what they are currently doing and whether or not that is helpful, we can begin to explore better ways to achieve our goals of feeling safe, treating ourselves with compassion and trying to treat others with compassion, even and especially when they don’t deserve it.
Defenders include The Angry One, The Talker, The Blamer (among others) but when those three get together it can be a tangled mess to untie. By using kindness and curiosity towards ourselves we can teach each our defenders better tools to defend ourselves and create more positive bonds with others, rather than breaking down those bonds.
The Angry One, with love and compassion, can become the passionate advocate.
The Talker, with love and compassion, can be the validator (learning to better validate you as well as whomever you are speaking).
The Blamer, with love and compassion, can learn to take ownership for poor words or actions, learning out to apologize with kindness and sincerity, realizing that placing blame on someone else also is giving away our power (as we can’t change others but we can change ourselves).
For more examples, see Ch. 9, Crisis to Calm (on amazon).
2 take aways from today’s discussion.
all our parts want to help us. If we an be curious and compassionate to those parts, we can help them learn more effective tools to use (breathing, safe space, stretching, etc) to ground ourselves (see also Ch 3 Crisis to Calm) and then react in a way that reflect more compassion and curiosity to the person we are talking to.
our emotions are neither good nor bad. They are just a reflection of the way we experience our reality. We can choose to react to our emotions in a way that is more skilled or less skilled but accepting our emotions and giving ourselves space to process those emotions is the first step to emotional healing.