Hi Tee and Everyone
Thanks for pointing out how “holding tension” can feel like being asked to be stoic about our pain and not taking action. That thought crossed my mind too.

I see “staying with what’s hard” not as passivity, but as a kind of active presence, a doing by not doing, motion in stillness…

Alessa’s image of the mother cat beside the feral kitten captures it well. From the outside, it may look like nothing but inwardly it’s a profound act of presence experienced by both. Anyone who’s sat with someone in pain, especially a child, and not jumping to words, knows how much effort and courage that takes… That doing “nothing” can be a form of deep engagement.

In conflict, I often find both the feral kitten and the nurturing presence within myself. The pause to hold the tension within allowing me to witness and nurture my own reactivity, my own pain… Once I’ve held the tension within, I may better hold the tension without, with the other I’m in confect with… Naming and action may arise but not until presence has been honored. (A kind of as below so above, as above so below situation)

I feel this as a rhythm that when engaged with and held, something new can emerge and that emergence often is action arising from integration, not reactivity. Perhaps a third way, a previously unthought of way to handle conflict?

Online, I’ve noticed a subtle expectation that naming a hurt or setting a boundary should lead to resolution. When it doesn’t, the conflict can feel unresolved… I get that… But maybe that’s an unreasonable hope in language-limited spaces. Sometimes, naming the hurt is the most courageous thing we can do, and it has to be enough, if only for our own inner peace. We can’t control the outcome, but we can honor the truth of the moment. Note that I’m referring specifically to online spaces where my expectations are different then other forms of relational engagement.

What further complicates the issue is that conflict often stirs up old ghosts. We’re not just reacting to the present, but to past wounds the other person can’t see just as we can’t see theirs. In such circumstances misunderstanding is likely if not inevitable and can feel like malice… Yet I wonder how much of the hurt is that ache is of the past not being recognized or acknowledged in the present as we want it to be in this moment…

In a space where we work on past traumas, even the most empathetic won’t be able to understand our ghosts or banish them, that is our work to do.

Your right, Staying with what’s hard isn’t the whole story but maybe it’s the beginning of a different kind of story, one where action arises from presence, and resolution isn’t the only measure of healing?

Sometimes when you find yourself struggling in a yoga class and all you feel you mange well is the child pose… showing up for yourself, as the instructors says, counts..

Hi Peter,

thank you for your thoughts.

I see “staying with what’s hard” not as passivity, but as a kind of active presence, a doing by not doing, motion in stillness…

Alessa’s image of the mother cat beside the feral kitten captures it well. From the outside, it may look like nothing but inwardly it’s a profound act of presence experienced by both. Anyone who’s sat with someone in pain, especially a child, and not jumping to words, knows how much effort and courage that takes… That doing “nothing” can be a form of deep engagement.

This is very true, Peter. When a parent can simply sit with a child who is having a tantrum, and/or hold the child, without wanting to make them stop, yelling at them or judging them, but instead, loving on them and being present… that’s very healing.

Sitting with someone in their pain without trying to fix it can be very transformative. Because we feel seen, heard, accepted and not judged. Ideally, we get that in therapy too: unconditional positive regard, i.e. the therapist will never attack us or judge us for feeling a certain way. Even if we start projecting on them, accusing them of being like our parent (which is called negative transfer, I believe).

The job of a therapist in those moments is to hold the space for the client, without getting angry or defensive or offended. A good therapist will not defend themselves, but will try to explore the client’s feelings and the reasons behind the negative transfer. The client is not judged, but supported.

Well, that’s what happens in therapy. However, when the negative transfer happens in real life, on a public forum, it’s hard for the people who are wrongly accused to remain calm and switch into a therapist mode. Because a) we’re not therapists, and b) we’re not in a therapeutic relationship with the person.

True, this shouldn’t stop us from having unconditional positive regard. And I think Alessa had that, throughout the conflict. She’s shown compassion and understanding for the person. But she isn’t the person’s therapist, so she needed to set boundaries for herself. Because being faced with unfair accusations is hard, specially if done in public (at least it is for me, because it kind of magnifies things).

Dear Peter, I’d like to express something I haven’t expressed so far. It’s about how I felt about your reaction to the conflict, back in July/August. It seems you wanted to calm us down, to have us pause, right? You posted a poem about two mirrors reflecting each other. And you said that we should be mindful of our own stories and our own wounds when interacting with each other.

And I’ll be frank with you, Peter, it didn’t feel good to read that, because it felt like you blame us both equally for the conflict, that we’re both reacting from our own wounds. You haven’t acknowledged that perhaps one person is wrongly accusing the other. It felt like you assigned equal blame to both, telling us that we’re simply mirroring each other.

And that felt hurtful. Because, yes, I was defending myself, I didn’t react like a therapist would. But I didn’t accuse the person of things she hasn’t done, whereas she has accused me. And it felt unfair to hear that we’re both equally guilty for what was going on.

So this is what I want to express to you. My goal is to share my feelings and let you know how I felt about it. You’re welcome to share your feeling with me, if you’d like.

What further complicates the issue is that conflict often stirs up old ghosts. We’re not just reacting to the present, but to past wounds the other person can’t see just as we can’t see theirs. In such circumstances misunderstanding is likely if not inevitable and can feel like malice… Yet I wonder how much of the hurt is that ache is of the past not being recognized or acknowledged in the present as we want it to be in this moment…

Yes, the conflict we’re talking about stirred up old ghosts. But it stirred up more old ghosts in one person than in the other two involved in the conflict, resulting in the person accusing the other two of things they haven’t done.

I’ve been just thinking recently that the whole thing could have ended as a misunderstanding, because I apologized for suggesting something ill-fitted, which has clearly upset the person. I apologized twice. And if my apology had been accepted, we could have moved on, or even “agreed to disagree” (about compassion and radical acceptance as a way forward in healing).

But instead, my apology was rejected and I was further accused of harming the community. And this certainly didn’t feel like the person wanted to let things calm down. Quite the contrary, it meant escalation.

In that moment, the conflict shifted into a higher gear, because the person went on the attack, and I decided to defend myself, instead of glossing over it.

Perhaps I should have said something like: “I feel that you’re accusing me of harming the community. That feels really hurtful and unfair.” That would have been expressing what’s bothering me and naming harm, and doing it in the “I” form. That’s how non-violent communication is done. Maybe that would have stopped further attacks, I don’t know.

The way I see it: one party wanted to escalate and came up with unfair accusations. The other party defended themselves without consciously using non-violent communication skills. The third party was quite mindful and was using non-violent communication skills, but it didn’t help, because the attacks kept coming.

In a space where we work on past traumas, even the most empathetic won’t be able to understand our ghosts or banish them, that is our work to do.

Absolutely. If there’s unresolved trauma in us, and we react from old wounds, we might perceive even the most empathetic, the most well-meaning person, as the enemy.

Online, I’ve noticed a subtle expectation that naming a hurt or setting a boundary should lead to resolution. When it doesn’t, the conflict can feel unresolved. … Sometimes, naming the hurt is the most courageous thing we can do, and it has to be enough, if only for our own inner peace. We can’t control the outcome, but we can honor the truth of the moment.

I agree. Conflict resolution is not the same as taking action (e.g. naming harm, setting boundaries) when faced with something that is bothering us. The person can indeed respect our plea or not, hear what’s bothering us, or keep ignoring it.

Conflict resolution doesn’t depend on us only, but on the other party as well. But I think it’s okay to do something, to say something, rather than just keep silent and stoic and process everything within ourselves, not addressing the harm openly.

Your right, Staying with what’s hard isn’t the whole story but maybe it’s the beginning of a different kind of story, one where action arises from presence, and resolution isn’t the only measure of healing?

I agree, action should arise from that calm place within us, not from fight-or-flight. It should arise from us being connected to our true self, i.e. presence, as you call it. That’s ideally.

However, even if someone is not 100% in Zen mode, but is a little bit activated, I think we should be able to discern who is being harmed and e.g. wrongly accused in a particular situation, and who is the one doing the unfair accusations. I don’t think we should lump them all together and conclude that they all react from their wounds.

There should be discernment, because otherwise people who are being attacked and unfairly accused can easily end up being accused for not reacting perfectly, or even for defending themselves. And that’s not fair, because the victim feels doubly accused.

resolution isn’t the only measure of healing

While writing the post I’ve been reflecting on how much power we sometimes give to virtual spaces over how we feel about ourselves. It’s understandable, but I wonder how healthy that is, or how skillful in the Buddhist sense.

True, our own healing shouldn’t depend on whether the conflict is resolved or not, whether the other party has heard us. However, in a public space, be it online or offline, it’s good when we’re seen by others, not necessarily by the party we’re in conflict with, but by objective bystanders who can give us an honest feedback about how we’re coming across and whether we’re doing something hurtful or not.

Because when you’re being accused of being the abuser, and you’re perhaps not super self-confident and harbor feelings of guilt and doubt about yourself – you might even start believing that you are actually harming the person. You might start doubting yourself. So it’s better to receive feedback. And I’m grateful to people who did give me feedback and expressed their support.

But if the Buddha is right, and much of what we experience is illusion, then how much more so in a digital space where tone, presence, and nuance are stripped away?

Yeah, if we have a lot of unresolved trauma, there’s a higher chance that we’ll perceive things wrongly and see harm where there’s none. In that sense, our experience is an illusion. But not all of our experience is an illusion. There are situations where there is objective harm, where we’re being wrongly accused. It’s not our perception, but reality.

Sure, it’s more difficult in online spaces because we only rely on words and emoticons, but even so, I think we can still convey our feelings and our intentions pretty well. I don’t think language is the barrier, but our wounds are the barrier. Our own illusions.

But the thing is: not everything is an illusion. Sometimes harm is real. And we need to be able to respond to it in the best possible way… which is what our recent discussion is all about 🙂

Phew, this was long…. I hope it’s not too much, although I realize I’ve put everything into one post. Please don’t take this as an attack, Peter, just me expressing my thoughts and feelings. Please feel free to share yours.

P.S. I also realize we’re using Alessa’s thread for all this. I still hope Alessa is fine with this conversation. Are you, Alessa?

Hi Peter,

thank you for your reply and your honest sharing as well. It means a lot ❤️

And thank you for hearing me and acknowledging that your response in that moment might have caused me some pain:

I understand now that what you needed was to be seen clearly, not as equally responsible, but as someone who was trying to respond with integrity and felt hurt by how things unfolded. That matters, and I did see that… I just didn’t express it well

Thank you, Peter. Thank you for expressing it now. I appreciate it.

Yes, I’ve tried to respond with integrity, but I realize that later I became defensive, since things escalated, and I didn’t respond from a calm place, but was activated. Still, I’m glad that you noticed the dynamic and that it didn’t feel like I was equally responsible for what was going on.

From the outside, I sensed a lot of “ghosts” at play, even my own, and so becoming confused, I probably made a mistake by engaging.

If you’d like to share some more about those “ghosts”, please do. I understand if you don’t want to elaborate, but if you’ve seen something in me that you want to address, please say so. I welcome honest feedback (although it might be uncomfortable to read it haha 🙂 ).

My concern wasn’t about who was right or wrong, but to create a pause. That said it wasn’t the time to suggest that conflict can sometimes offer a chance to see the other in ourselves. As you rightly call me out 😊, catching me in my stoic, detached mode, a mode I slip into when witnessing conflict. My ‘safe space’ go to… hasn’t always served me well.

It seems it made you uncomfortable to witness conflict. And so you wanted to make it stop, right? It stirred something in you… And then you did something you probably automatically (unconsciously) do when feeling uncomfortable emotions: you detach, you sort of numb your pain, right?

And perhaps the way to numb your pain is to tell yourself that you need to turn within and examine yourself, rather than fully feel the pain and blame the other party. So your impulse to go within and self-examine might be actually a defense mechanism? (This is just a speculation, please correct me if this doesn’t ring true).

If so (if your impulse to pause and self-reflect is a defense mechanism), then it makes sense that you would suggest the same to us when witnessing the conflict: that we too should turn inwards and self-examine, rather than “rush to assign blame”, as you put it back in August.

Does this make sense to you, Peter?

You’ve made an important distinction between therapeutic settings and public forums. In online spaces, where our presence is limited to words, that difference matters, especially when emotions run high. We shouldn’t expect online space to be therapy settings.

Well, we should treat people kindly. And I think that for the most part, we do that here on Tiny Buddha. But this was a pretty extreme situation. It involved negative transference (I’ve looked it up, that’s the correct term, not “negative transfer”:) ), where the person felt that we were harming them, the same as their mother did.

At the time I haven’t recognized it, I was too activated to be able to respond as a therapist would: with empathy and detachment. I couldn’t not take it personally. And so I defended myself.

But anyway, I think we should react (or better say, respond) to negative transference. We shouldn’t just let people keep venting like that, because it harms others. But I guess the ideal way is to be aware of it and not take it personally, but to respond like a therapist would. But I think Alessa’s response was phenomenal too: setting boundaries in a kind, compassionate way.

I still believe in the value of holding tension, not to avoid action, but to make space for clarity and care.

Yes, holding tension, as in: pausing, not reacting impulsively (from fight or flight), self-examining, and then responding, if necessary.

But I also see how, especially in virtual spaces, that kind of invitation can feel abstract or even dismissive when what’s needed is direct acknowledgment.

Yes, if we use it to avoid conflict altogether (e.g. as a defense mechanism, because confrontation would be too painful), that’s when it misses the mark.

To be candid, I often view virtual spaces as places where, in some way, we’re talking to ourselves, processing, hoping to be met. I don’t see that as a bad thing; I’ve learned a great deal by asking, “What part of myself am I seeing or not seeing in this engagement?”

I hear you, and it is valid to do it, of course. Self-examination is super important. But as I said, if we use it to hide from something, it becomes counter-productive.

Recognizing that as projection, through this dialog, has helped me see how easily I can bring my own stories into a space without realizing it. When I forget that, I’m not as careful as I’d like to be in how I engage with others.

Something to work on, thanks for create the space for reflection and to see more clearly.

I’m glad, Peter, that certain things became more clear to you. I hope you will continue to self-reflect, even regarding those parts that might be difficult to look at. If you ever want to talk more about any of this, I’m here.

I’m grateful for your candor and for trusting me enough to express your feelings.

You’re welcome. And thank you for being a safe person whom I can express my feelings too. I greatly appreciate that, Peter 🙏

Hi Peter,

thanks, I’m glad my reflection was helpful to you.

The reason Maya causes so much suffering is that it is very real. I would argue more real then a physical object we can see and touch. The illusion is that we do not, or our senses cannot, see or know everything about the moment, we cannot know what is in heart of another, but ego consciousness thinks it can and does, and reacts accordingly. That is the illusion. This is a point in conflict where a pause can help.

Oh I see what you mean by illusion. Indeed, we can’t know what is in someone’s mind and heart and why they’re doing something hurtful even. However, it doesn’t mean that what they’re doing isn’t hurtful. So I think we need to separate the two: hurtful actions and the reasons behind them.

People usually hurt others due to their own wounds and illusions (as the saying goes, hurt people hurt people). Still, it doesn’t change the fact that their actions may be hurtful. Those actions shouldn’t be excused, even as if have compassion for the person doing them.

This is a point in conflict where a pause can help.

Yes, I see how important that is: to separate the action from the person doing it. To judge the action, but not the person. In Christian circles, there’s a saying “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”

I think that pause is necessary for that reason too: to separate the person from the “sin”. To see that they’re reacting from their wounds. And so, to be able to keep our heart open, and engage in non-violent communication. To see the person, acknowledge their pain, and yet express how their words or actions are hurting us. And again, I think that’s what Alessa did very successfully.

What I often see when witnessing conflict from the outside in is that at some point communication breaks down partially because those involved are no longer seeing the other, perhaps seeing the other through their pain or past (ghosts).

Yes, I understand you now. And it’s true. When we can only see our own pain, and forget that the person is saying or doing hurtful things because of their own pain – that’s when communication breaks down and we go into a full-on defense mode. And there’s no dialogue any more…

The invited pause was to note the moment and create space to honor that pain and then return to dialog… having polished ones own “mirror”.

I see what your intention was: it was the invitation to return to dialogue. However, I believe that the mirror metaphor wasn’t really applicable there, because we didn’t mirror each other. One person was accusing the other of something they haven’t done, while the other person didn’t do the same. There was no symmetry. So when you were talking about mirrors that are reflecting each other, that was actually hurtful, because it implied symmetry, i.e. equal “blame”, equal responsibility.

At least that’s how I interpreted your poem…

In hindsight I should have avoided metaphor… though it is how I relate to language and in a way life

Yes, metaphors can be really useful and often say much more than words, but in this particular case, I don’t think it was the best choice of metaphor. But for you, you say you didn’t really focus on who is right and who is wrong (or perhaps better say: who is more responsible for the situation), but simply wanted the conflict to calm down and dialogue to resume. And so you called us both to polish our “mirrors”, which for you meant to stop and reflect. While for me, it meant something different…

To be candid when witnessing conflict, I’m not that interested in the notion of blame, as I lean heavily into the only person you can change is yourself. In that way I see all interactions revealing, in some way, my own reflection. To be honest the idea of blame didn’t even occur to me until you pointed it out.

Hmm sorry for correcting you, but you actually invited us not to rush to assign blame, on August 8 🙂 But I think I know what you’re talking about. You may be referring to what I said in my previous post:

And perhaps the way to numb your pain is to tell yourself that you need to turn within and examine yourself, rather than fully feel the pain and blame the other party.

Actually, it was a clumsy way to express myself. What I meant is that sometimes, people do hurt us, but we might be so afraid to feel that pain that we quickly start rationalizing and even convincing ourselves that it wasn’t really painful, or that we shouldn’t be feeling pain, or that there’s a reason why the person said what they said (and that we should actually work on ourselves because there’s some truth in what they said), etc etc.

So instead of acknowledging that something was really painful, we try to escape that pain by denying that it was painful, or by trying to change ourselves rather than simply say “this is hurtful”, or even more directly: “you’ve hurt me”.

I was talking about blame in that context: acknowledging that someone actually did something that hurt us, and that it might not necessarily be our fault. That it’s their responsibility, not ours.

It doesn’t mean that we’ll keep blaming the person for the rest of our lives, but simply to be clear with ourselves about what happened, and who is responsible for it.

as I lean heavily into the only person you can change is yourself. In that way I see all interactions revealing, in some way, my own reflection

That’s absolutely true: the only person whom we can change is ourselves. However, not all interactions reveal you, because say someone hits you while you’re sitting peacefully, minding your own business – does it reveal anything about you? Have you in any way contributed to them hitting you? Should you learn something about yourself from this interaction?

I hope you get what I’m trying to say? That not every exchange is a reflection of ourselves, although many are. But sometimes it’s not about us, or it’s mostly not about us, but it’s another person’s wound, another person’s blind spot, another person’s lack of empathy etc. And that’s why they behave the way they behave. Simply speaking: it’s not our fault, it’s theirs.

I wonder how this sound to you? And Peter, if you prefer not to talk about this topic, I’ll respect that wish…