Conflict
and Attorneys
by
Joseph Shaub, JD
Our
world is rife with conflict. Some
manifestations are so enormous, so global in nature, that we are simply
overwhelmed. We feel powerless to comprehend, much less manage, it’s
scope – its capacity to turn a society upside down.
I write this on September 12, 2001, and the events of yesterday
threaten to trivialize the personal or interpersonal.
Who knows when our world will return to a semblance of normalcy?
In a month’s time, when this column runs we may have
compartmentalized the trauma – or we all may have been hammered again¼even
more stunningly.
However,
on the assumption – actually the hope – that the personal retains
its relevance in the face of a mad world, let’s turn to the subject of
interpersonal conflict.
Attorneys
live in a world of conflict. Professionally,
it’s our raison d’etre, yet in our own lives we are undone,
again and again, by conflict. In
our representational capacity dealing with conflict is a snap, but the
picture shifts when the personal conflict involves us as
participants. Suddenly we
become as disarmed as anybody else, and subject to the same mistakes of
perception and schemes of avoidance - because conflict is viewed in our
culture as being associated with discomfort and personal risk.
This is why attorneys who will dive headlong into other
peoples’ strife will avoid conflict when they cross the threshold of
their front door.
Bush and Folger in their influential work,
The Promise of
Mediation - Responding to Conflict Through Empowerment and Recognition
describe conflict as “a real or apparent incompatibility of parties’
needs and interests.”
Finding
some acknowledgment and satisfaction of each person’s needs is viewed
as the problem to be solved.
However,
in workshops I have given both inside and out of the legal community,
when participants are asked to call out words that they associate with
“conflict”, virtually everyone volunteers “pain,” “anger,”
or some other negative attribution and only rarely will someone
contribute “opportunity” or a like idea. The tendency to equate conflict with a win/lose struggle, is,
of course, intensified in the legal community in which understanding
another’s position is chiefly valued as a means to undermine that
position.
I
think this is a legacy of the adversarial ethic in which we are trained.
Many a lawyer has heard the frustrated cry of a spouse or
intimate partner, “You’re not in court here,” or “Stop trying to
‘lawyer’ me.” The
strong inclination toward affective disconnect and argument is a very
common strategy among attorneys when stressed and in conflict with
another. Yet, as Stone, et al. observed in Difficult Conversations
(discussed in an earlier column), every conflict has its emotional
component.
Aside from the tendency to debate, perhaps the most common
strategy for dealing with conflict among lawyers (and others) is simple
avoidance
and the key tool for this is the
emotional triangle.
Murray
Bowen
once observed that the two-person emotional system is inherently
unstable. When everything
is going well, and there is no unhappiness or stress between them, two
people remain in comfortable relationship with one another.
However, in the words of Bowen, “since a relationship is easily
disturbed by emotional forces within it and from outside, it usually
does not remain completely comfortable very long.
Inevitably, there is some increase in anxiety that disturbs the
relationship equilibrium. A
two-person system may be stable as long as it is calm, but since that
level of calm is very difficult to maintain, a two-person system is more
accurately characterized as unstable.
When anxiety increases, a third person becomes involved in the
tension of the twosome, creating a triangle.
This involvement of a third person decreases anxiety in the
twosome by spreading it through three relationships.”
As Bowen continues to note, “The key element (of the triangling
process) is side-taking.” (That’s
why discussing a problem with a confidante isn’t “triangling”
unless one’s purpose is only to get “you’re right, they’re
wrong” feedback.
Every
time we are irritated or hurt by another person and we turn to a third
person to complain (and to get their support for our position), we are
engaging in triangling. Maybe
you’re angry at your spouse or lover and you complain to a friend -
maybe you are put off by a colleague or boss at your firm - think of the
times you have complained to someone else, rather than confront the
issue and risk conflict. Usually,
doing this makes us feel better - reduces our visceral discomfort for
a time. Yet the
original problem is allowed to fester and the relationship is almost
invariably damaged.
Relationships, whether personal or business, seldom
disintegrate suddenly as a result of some dramatic event.
Rather, they die through a slow suffocation process, in which the
participants withdraw their identification with, and commitment to, the
relationship.
Every time a
person silences himself in order to keep the peace (or talks the other
down in order to impose the peace), an incremental bit of damage is done
to the relationship.
Accumulated
over time, these small insults result in a realization one day that
you’re just “done.”
Such erosion of a relationship is often more consciously
experienced by only one of the participants.
So, while the relationship is dying for one person, the other may
be blissfully unaware of the ongoing damage until, like any structure,
when the foundation is worn away, it simply collapses, leaving one of
the people in shock and disbelief, wondering what happened.
Of
course, the problem with the practice of law, as many have observed, is
that the profession is so challenging, so consuming, that it can
neatly act as a distraction for us, while the significant personal
connections in our lives become attenuated, and then snap - again,
leaving us wondering how it all could have happened.
Yet why do we do this?
Why
do we avoid conflict in these ways?
