“It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.”
— Zora Neale Hurston
Personal Conflict Resolution Therapy (PCRT) is an approach to resolving interpersonal conflict that came into focus with the publication of “Why We Fight (Because We Don’t Connect)” (Stoller, 2023). The “P” in PCRT distinguishes it from the sociological field of conflict theory (Bartos & Wehr, 2002), which follows Marx to focus on social issues, and intrapersonal Modern Conflict Theory (Brenner, 1994), which is a psychoanalytic framework following Freud (Christian, 2011).
The PCRT approach rests on the observation that conflicts aren’t about issues, they’re about emotions. Conflicts are not resolved when opposition is resolved or immediate needs are satisfied. The combative nature of conflict is transmuted when the adversaries share each other’s emotions as their own. Rational solutions do not stabilize emotional conflicts. Journalist Amanda Ripley (2021) gives personal stories of “the mysterious force that incites people to lose their minds” in her book High conflict: Why we get trapped and how we get out.
PCRT’s critical insight is that intellectual explanations disguise a conflict’s cause and obscure its resolution. Most long-standing conflicts are a disjunction between reason and emotion, and this disjunction is only made greater by alternately attempting to explain, constrain, and resolve it intellectually. Compromise fundamentally fails for conflicts that are not emotionally understood by both parties. (Voss, 2017).
While Freud proposed levels of consciousness below our awareness, Jung, Maslow, Assignoli, and others developed theories of higher consciousness. Their work, known as transpersonal psychology, synthesizes social, logical, pathological, and transcendent awareness. PCRT follows Assignoli (Firman, 2011; Rosselli & Vanni, 2014) in asserting that one’s higher levels can be known. More than just being knowable, self insight is necessary for enduring resolutions to conflict.
In 1994 Steven Hayes proposed what has come to be called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the essential goal of which is “to treat emotional avoidance, excessive literal response to cognitive content, and the inability to make and keep commitments to behavior change” (Hayes, 1994). Hayes called ACT a Third Generation therapy. Approaches previous to this and other 3rd generation therapies viewed emotions as digressions; distractions that were destructive to clarity, and which needed to be controlled.
PCRT is a Fourth Generation, transpersonal therapy (Sutich, 1969). It eschews the idea that there is one correct and healthy self in any person. PCRT sees a person composed of competing selves, and emotions as essential to their expression and complementary to intellect.
Emotions represent a foundation of awareness that has evolved through inherited aptitudes, social conditioning, and formative experience. To be resolved, they must be understood and addressed at each of these levels.
Other fourth generation therapies include regression therapy, parts therapy, family constellation therapy, psychedelic-assisted therapy, and eye movement and desensitization retraining.
The Conflict is Not The Problem
The Personal Conflict Resolution approach recognizes problematic behaviors, but instead of aiming to change them, PCRT explores them through channels of heightened awareness and varieties of experience. The conflict is not the problem. The problem is a failure to fully appreciate its context, and find positive guidance from it.
The conflict provides a means to explore unresolved feelings and unpleasant perceptions. It provides a context in which parties can work to build a common feeling, rather than an adversarial context in which each tries to reframe the feelings of the other. The result of a shared context is not a consensus or compromise, but a shared appreciation of personal experiences.
Personal experiences are never real in an absolute sense. They are each person’s future projections, and they may be compatible or incompatible with those of another person.
Our perceptions are exaggerated pictures based on past anxieties, present needs, and future desires. Sharing emotional understanding enables us to establish greater congruence. This may not resolve the conflict, but it will provide a foundation for agreeable future actions.
We fixate on our most prominent perceptions. This feeds back to heighten our emotions. In analogy with the 17-th century paintings of Jan Vermeer, a hyper-attention to detail deceives us into believing that what we’re looking at is real. In Vermeer’s paintings, unrealistically bright details and subtly distorted perspective magnify our emotions of calm or disquiet, balance or imbalance, invitation and foreboding (Cabañes, 2011).
Similarly, a person in a heightened emotional state succumbs to a kind of tunnel vision, fixating on certain memories and associations and believing them to be real. PCRT accepts these perceptions relative to a person’s emotions, but works to build a more inclusive picture of the truth.
PCRT gives emotions a voice so that they can play a foundational role. The emotions may be problematic, and their desires may be negative or destructive, but they must be explored to uncover their origins and intentions. They cannot be judged on a practical basis alone.
Emotions are not superficial, although they may speak a capricious message. They are the summation of a particular perspective that has become part of a person’s reality. They are not a complete, comprehensive, or entirely correct perspective, but they convey aspects of a person’s reality.
Emotions fight for acceptance. And fights are emotional by definition, as opposed to debates, arguments, or disputes. Conflicts that have become combative are fundamentally expressions of emotion. These emotions will remit and may be assimilated once that aspect of one’s personality feels it has been fully heard.
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