Connecting through Conflict

By George Lakey

He was a big guy who looked as if he could be a line-backer for the National Football League. He was headed for the door, anger pulsing from his body. I got to the door first and blocked it.

“You look really frustrated . . .” I began, but he cut me off: “Damn right I’m frustrated, and mad as hell, and I’m getting out of here!”

“You’re mad, and look at the other participants - frustrated as can be,” I continued.

“Right! Anybody would be. Nothing is happening here and you’re just sitting there!”

“You have a right to be mad. The group hasn’t found its way forward yet. You’re part of the group. The group needs you.”

After more of that kind of dialogue the football player returned to the group, and I resumed my facilitator chair, trying my best to channel the Buddha. “It’s the group’s work to do,” I reassured myself. “I’ll keep praying for them, and see if I can keep everyone in the room.”

The period that followed seemed interminable, filled as it was with painful attempts by various participants to bring the group together. The attempts were mostly reasonable. None of them worked.

“Let’s try forming small groups to generate ways of moving the group forward,” one student said. “We need more unity,” another suggested, “so let’s hold hands and sing.” Another student challenged someone making jokes: “Stop being such a clown! You’re distracting us!” Students launched dozens of initiatives to try to get the group out of its stuck place, and all of them failed.

The informal leader of the group, a quiet student who had been trying to maintain the morale of his despairing friends, finally threw up his hands. “I don’t know what to do!” he said with anguish in his voice. He began to cry.

The energy shift was tangible. Suddenly, the group was a community. Participants circled around their sobbing leader, touching him and each other. Tears were in many eyes. Facial muscles relaxed. The tension ebbed. I noticed the football player smiling with relief.

The storm was over.

What was it about?

As often as I’ve seen it, there’s no way I can be jaded when I watch a group put itself through pain in order to become a community. The process I witnessed with the group of students is now well-established theory in social science. It begins when a group starts to form and participants try to fit in. The group may then begin to storm, which M. Scott Peck calls chaos in his book The Different Drum. Finally, with any luck the group moves into the stages of norming and performing, which is also called community.

Groups don’t always take hours to storm— one small group I was in used only ten minutes for it—but storming is as unpredictable as, well, the weather.

Even though I facilitate groups where this sometimes happens, and I know the theory about it, when I’m a participant in a group that moves into chaos I’m just like the other participants: frustrated, disgusted, angry. Like the others, I come up with bright initiatives that don’t work. I do this even though I know the theory says they can’t work while a group is storming, however effective those tools might be at another time. At that moment, however, I’m not in theory-land. I’m gripped by the group’s mind, and the group’s mind is playing for bigger stakes than theoretical models. The group wants community, and chaos is the way to get it.

You may have been brought up in a pain-avoiding culture like I was, so we might ask for some easier route to becoming a deeply connected community. The dark night of the soul is OK for those medieval Christian mystics, the mantra “No pain, no gain” is OK for athletes, but why can’t our Quaker groups just slide into community through potlucks and being nice to each other and complaining together about politicians in Washington?

We’re so human when we want the beloved community to be in easy reach! It’s the superficial bonds that are easy: meeting members from the same class background, of the same race, listening to National Public Radio. What invites the kind of robustness that was the hallmark of 17th century Friends is their orientation to conflict, which was to appreciate conflict and engage in it.

The heart of the matter is, as usual, spiritual.

The football player and his fellow participants were frustrated because they spent hours trying every way they knew how to move things forward, as if they could get to where they wanted to go through doing. When their informal leader, the person who most of them held in high esteem, threw up his hands and surrendered, he vicariously surrendered for all of them.

The experience of community, it turns out, is not primarily about doing, but rather about being.

And once participants experience themselves as a community, then all kinds of doing become possible, which is why consultants call that last stage of group formation a “high-performance team.” The football player’s group, which spent at least four hours in chaos instead of attending to the curriculum, went on to learn a day’s worth of material in the following three hours. I could barely keep up with them. They were like babies, like an open system, with a growth curve to die for.

And in a way they did die for their growth curve, for their excellence and deep connectedness. What died was the ego’s insistence that we can control the most valuable aspects of life: connection, happiness, enlightenment. Quakers join other mystical traditions in knowing that spiritual union happens more through listening than talking, more through experiencing than formulating, more through surrender than control.

That’s what makes conflict such a powerful doorway to spiritual growth, a place where social science and spirituality come together. Conflict calls us to the moment and makes possible joyful membership in a powerful group that is deeply connected. For many of us it brings up our fears and desperate yearning for control, our wish for a procedural way around a confrontation that needs to happen. But if you want to grow, stop avoiding conflict and start embracing it.

The doorway of conflict has a sign above it: Let go. Let God.

About the Author(s)

George Lakey serves on the Worship and Ministry Committee at Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, is author of the Michener Lecture New Theory, Old Practice: Nonviolence and Quakers available from QuakerBooks.org, and founder of Training for Change (www.TrainingforChange.org), which offers training to nonviolent activists around the world.