So, wait. Have you ever used Circling to resolve conflicts? Or, seen it used this way? Or, know anyone (whose word you trust) who has used it this way?
I have seen… maybe a dozen attempts to use it this way that I can remember (at least vaguely). Some of them were successful, some weren’t; many had the flavor of “well, we haven’t resolved anything yet but we know a lot more now”. (Also I’m not counting conflicts about where the group attention should be going, which are happen pretty frequently.)
Some of the conflicts were quite serious / high-stakes; described somewhat vaguely, I remember one where a wife was trying to ‘save her marriage’ (the husband was also in the Circle), and over the course of an hour or so we got to the label of her felt sense of what was happening, figured out an “if X, then Y” belief that she had so deeply she hadn’t ever looked at it, and then when she asked the question “is that true?” it dissolved and she was able to look at the situation with fresh eyes.
I don’t remember being one of the primary parties for any of those conflicts; the closest was when I organized a Circle focused on me to work through my stance towards someone in my life that I was having a conflict with who wasn’t present. (I thought that was helpful, but it’s only sort of related.)
Also, I noticed a day or two ago that maybe I should back up a bit: when I’m talking about “resolving conflicts,” I mean something closer to “do work towards a resolution” than “conflict goes in, result comes out.” Like, if we think about democracy, there’s a way in which candidate debates help resolve an election, but they aren’t the election itself.
There’s not an arbitration thing going on, where you take a conflict to the Circle, talk about it for a while, and then the facilitator or the group as a whole or whatever says “well, this is what I think” and then that’s the ruling. Instead it’s much closer to Alice and Bob relating to each other in a way that conflicts, and that getting explored, and then sometimes Alice and Bob end up relating to each other in a way they agree on, and sometimes they don’t.
There’s also a clear way in which Circles are a conflict-generating mechanism, in that Alice and Bob can be unaware that they disagree on a topic until it comes up, and now they can see their disagreement clearly.
I have seen… maybe a dozen attempts to use it this way that I can remember (at least vaguely). Some of them were successful, some weren’t; many had the flavor of “well, we haven’t resolved anything yet but we know a lot more now”. (Also I’m not counting conflicts about where the group attention should be going, which are happen pretty frequently.)
Some of the conflicts were quite serious / high-stakes; described somewhat vaguely, I remember one where a wife was trying to ‘save her marriage’ (the husband was also in the Circle), and over the course of an hour or so we got to the label of her felt sense of what was happening, figured out an “if X, then Y” belief that she had so deeply she hadn’t ever looked at it, and then when she asked the question “is that true?” it dissolved and she was able to look at the situation with fresh eyes.
I don’t remember being one of the primary parties for any of those conflicts; the closest was when I organized a Circle focused on me to work through my stance towards someone in my life that I was having a conflict with who wasn’t present. (I thought that was helpful, but it’s only sort of related.)
Also, I noticed a day or two ago that maybe I should back up a bit: when I’m talking about “resolving conflicts,” I mean something closer to “do work towards a resolution” than “conflict goes in, result comes out.” Like, if we think about democracy, there’s a way in which candidate debates help resolve an election, but they aren’t the election itself.
There’s not an arbitration thing going on, where you take a conflict to the Circle, talk about it for a while, and then the facilitator or the group as a whole or whatever says “well, this is what I think” and then that’s the ruling. Instead it’s much closer to Alice and Bob relating to each other in a way that conflicts, and that getting explored, and then sometimes Alice and Bob end up relating to each other in a way they agree on, and sometimes they don’t.
There’s also a clear way in which Circles are a conflict-generating mechanism, in that Alice and Bob can be unaware that they disagree on a topic until it comes up, and now they can see their disagreement clearly.