Mental Health + Conflict
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Mental Health and Conflict
A few years ago my family gave me a large framed collage of photos of me sleeping through significant family events when I was a child: birthday parties (including my own), vacations, holiday dinners. My ability (and willingness) to sleep through these gatherings has always been a joke in the family and the gift was intended to be lighthearted. When I look at this collage, I see something else: a child who was constantly in a state of stress, who had difficulty feeling safe enough to sleep at night, who shielded herself and coped with stress by sleeping—a socially acceptable form of shutting down. I see myself feeling powerless in the conflicts and stress of my family and sleeping as an extreme manifestation of the rest of my family’s tendency to avoid. I see someone who would grow up to be chronically depressed, ill, and battling exhaustion.
When it was no longer acceptable (or cute) to fall asleep, I shut down in other ways: put up walls, kept things to myself, hid behind books, looked for ways to retreat. These were manifestations of the stress and chronic depression that are mutually reinforcing. That stress and depression meant that I was/still can be: emotionally and physically exhausted, resistant to being vulnerable, irritable/dismissive, sincerely unable to engage/be present.
Mental health (and illness)—whether biological or induced by social determinants—plays a significant role in our ability to engage responsively during conflict: to communicate our needs, to hear the needs of others, to be open to change, to try to do things differently, to understand risk and safety and trust. Mental health contributes to why conflict is aggravated, when it peaks and rests, and how/whether people are able to engage with a conflict directly. We can’t treat conflict and mental health as separate concerns—conflicts can inflame symptoms of mental illness, and our ways of surviving mental illness can aggravate conflict. Mental illness can also be a super power in conflict: a way of building empathy, interdependence, and communication about our needs for safety, belonging, access, connection, and grace. Acknowledgement of the vast diversity of our needs for mental health can lead to shifts in culture, care, nurturance, and belonging—all of which will make our engagement with conflict richer, more empathetic, and more transformative.
What is my part in my conflict + mental illness?
In a responsive approach to conflict, we (someone who is mad, mentally ill, crip, disabled, unwell) are responsible of building awareness about ourselves and communicating with others in ways that facilitate life-affirming change. We are responsible for expressing our needs as adaptable requests—meaning that we understand what we need not in isolation of other people, but in conversation with them. That means:
Learning about how our mental health and survival strategies impact our ability to be present in conflict
Learning the difference between a need (something that must be fulfilled for us to be safe and healthy), a requirement (a specific thing that will meet that need for survival—such as access to clean water, a specific medication, a specific way of being held/touched/moved), and a coping strategy (a means of feeling protected)—so that we can be flexible and courageous when possible and convicted and empowered when necessary
Finding ways (with the support of others) to have pride in our difference, heal, cope, thrive, accept, and build resiliency so that we are able to meaningfully address conflicts in relationships when they arise
Communicating what we need and require from others in order to be safe, to listen, and to express ourselves
Being open to others’ needs conflicting with ours and finding ways to facilitate everyone’s needs being met to the best of our abilities
Taking responsibility for and trying to prevent the harm we might cause by employing certain survival strategies (defensiveness, avoidance, combativeness).
What is the other person’s part?
In a responsive approach to conflict, we should expect other people to listen to and honor our needs and work with us to have those needs met. With people close to us, we should expect them to recognize changes in us (how impacted we are by our mental health) but we should not expect them to know what we need if we haven’t let them know. We should expect to be treated with dignity, respect, compassion.
Be aware of their own needs and integrity
Be open and honest about what they can and can’t do—trying to meet your needs if it is possible and doesn’t compromise their own wellbeing or integrity
Listen to your needs and be willing to pause, reflect, and change approaches if something isn’t working
Honor your self-determination and agency—not control, manipulate, infantilize, or coerce you
If someone is unable to do their part, that could mean that they have their own struggles that they’re trying to manage. Or, it could mean they aren’t ready or in a place to be empathetic or responsive—in that case, the question becomes whether or not the risks of engaging in the conflict are worth the potential benefits of continuing with the conflict. That decision falls on each person to make for themselves.
What is our communities’ part?
Community is essential to mental health and generative conflict. Community can be family, friends, neighbors, social groups, organizations—whoever the people are who surround you and the others involved in a conflict. We should ask the people around us who are not directly involved in a conflict for support in creating conditions where generative conflict is possible—preferably before a crisis arises.
To share nourishment (body, mind, spirit) as we move through a conflict
To connect us to resources that will help us learn, grow, and understand each other’s mental health needs and culturally responsive ways to meet those needs
To build relationships where, if a conflict arises, we ask how we can support those involved in having their needs met—rather than stoking the fire with indignities, gossip, divisiveness, and retaliation
To create anti-oppressive principles and culture, where we expect each other not to control, coerce, punish, or abuse one another when conflict arises
To hold each other in being accountable for showing up for conflict in ways that honor one another’s full humanity, dignity, and self-determination
What is society’s part?
We have a society that is deeply traumatized and neglected by the violent conditions of capitalism and white supremacy—a society that is ableist and does not provide the conditions for people with neurodivergence to thrive. We are in a global pandemic of depression, anxiety, and isolation that come from those conditions. Whenever we have a conflict that involves mental illness and trauma we have to ask—what are the structural conditions that cause chronic stress and trauma? Whenever we have a conflict that involves neurodivergent people we have to ask—what are the structural conditions that make relational engagement inaccessible or block connection? These conditions both produce and inflame conflict and can make conflict feel like it is too big for us to address—this is not the fault, burden, or sole responsibility of the person impacted by trauma or who is neurodivergent. We are responsible for creating a world where conditions for mental health, wellbeing, thriving, and diversity are flourishing. That’s why we need conflict transformation—
To address the root causes of trauma and pervasive violence: capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, imperialism, and so on—through collective organizing.
To transform the medical industrial complex, so that care for our mental health is free, accessible, and liberatory.
To transform the concept of family and community, so that care for each other is collective as a matter of culture, structure, and resource distribution.
To transform society itself so that neurodivergence is celebrated, understood, embraced, and made a natural part of how our relationships, institutions, and communities function.
Society is made up of us. As communities, conflict transformation means continuous engagement in the struggle for structural transformation that prevents stress, violence, discrimination, isolation, alienation, precarity, and disconnection.
Curious about what I mean by a responsive approach to conflict? A responsive approach is a self-aware approach to conflict that seeks understanding, embraces difference, creates time, and actively and directly engages in relational decision-making to create transformation through self-connection, connection in relationship, and connection to community. I teach this approach in Conflict Skills 1. If you’re interested in learning more, registration for January 15 - February 5 is still open for one more week.
Opportunities to Learn + Act
Mental health, conflict, culture
Fireweed Collective is offering upcoming workshops on anti-oppressive mental healthcare and active listening. They have options for BIPOC-only spaces. Check out their upcoming events here.
Fireweed Collective also has an awesome workbook called Madness and Oppression that can be downloaded or purchased here.
In It Together: A Framework for Conflict Transformation In Movement-Building Groups. This toolkit from Interrupting Criminalization provides provides a step-by-step diagnostic tool to assess conflict in movement-building organizations and groups and provides strategies, tools, and resources to transform that conflict—includes helpful opportunities for transforming culture
The Creative Interventions Toolkit (which has always been available free online), is now available in a print book through AK Press and I am so excited. This toolkit is how I built the foundations for the work I do today. Includes ways of addressing violence in non-carceral non-pathologizing ways. Buy it here.
Mapping our Madness is a zine by my friend and brilliant artist, organizer, human: Momo—download it free here.
General:
Check out my friend Matt Haugen’s new newsletter about political ecology: Terrain. Matt is an experienced organizer and I learn a lot from his challenging perspective on the environment and politics.
My brilliant friend Dr. Austin McCoy wrote a fantastic piece for Truth Out, 2022 Could Be the Year of Labor and Racial Justice Coalition-Building.