THE INTERACTION BETWEEN EMOTION AND CONFLICT

This section focuses on key emotions (negative and positive) such as fear, anger, humiliation, guilt, hope, confidence, and warmth, illustrating how they affect conflict and are affected by conflict.

This section begins with the subject of fear, as a basic emotion processed in our “old” brain. From there, we will move on to more complex emotions.

Fear and How It Affects Conflict and Is Affected by Conflict

The voice of intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all, it is silenced by ignorance. (Karl A. Menninger)

Fear can lead to an avoidance of conflict (“flight”), or to a counterphobic aggressive response (“fight”), or to a desire to avoid disaster by reaching an agreement. It can hamper constructive conflict resolution or enhance it when it sharpens our senses and alerts our thoughts.

As discussed earlier, fear is basic. Its seat in the brain is the amygdala. Fear warns us. It jolts us into alertness in a split second, sending stress hormones soaring, making our vision narrower and more focused. Our old brain takes over to save us from immediate danger. We may gain short-term safety. However, there is a price to pay.

In 1998, Adam Bixi was interviewed by this author in Somaliland. He described growing up in the Somalian semidesert, learning as a very small boy to be con­stantly alert, even at night, for dangerous animals and “enemies” from other clans.

Earlier, we saw that feelings can be hot or cold and automatic or controlled. We have a hot “go” system and a cool “know” system. The cool “know” system is cog­nitive, complex, contemplative, slow, strategic, integrated, coherent, and emo­tionally rather neutral. It is the basis of self-regulation and self-control. Fear, as well as acute and chronic stress, accentuate the hot “go” system. The hot system is impulsive and hastily reactive and undermines rational attempts at self-control. Intense fear causes “tunnel vision,” reducing the range of one’s perceptions, thoughts, and choices, risking that we make suboptimal decisions.

In other words, the hot “go” system represents a double-edged sword. It may save us from immediate danger. However, in case of a complex conflict, fear easily operates malignly. Fear and humiliation have the potential to link up in particularly disastrous ways. In Rwanda, fear of future humiliation, based on the experience of past humiliation, was used as justification for genocide. In his speeches, Hitler peddled that he feared future humiliation by the World Jewry. The Holocaust was his horrific “solution.”

To conclude, we are well advised to cool down when we experience fear dur­ing a conflict, in order to avoid disastrous tunnel vision and reap the potential advantage of fear, enhanced alertness. Likewise, we should help our opponents in conflicts and in negotiations to calm their fears. In negotiations, operating with threats—making others afraid—may undermine constructive solutions rather than provide advantages.

Let us consider the example of Eve and Adam. At some point they both seek counseling. The counselor begins with reducing the level of threat and fear between them. The therapist works on transforming their fears into alertness and motivation for change. Adam is afraid to lose power and Eve is afraid to be empowered. Tackled in a calm manner, these fears can be translated into deep personal growth for both. However, this is possible only in an atmosphere of warm firmness that provides safety, an atmosphere of respect, love, under­standing, empathy, and patience, all of which the therapist needs to make avail­able, aided by the larger social support network.

Anger and Hatred, and How They Affect Conflict and Are Affected by Conflict

We easily get angry when we feel hurt. Sometimes we even kick a chair that stood in our way and gave us a bruise. Yet, anger is a more composite set of mental processes than fear. It unfolds in a complex fashion in time and entails cognitive and emotional elements. Our brain does three things. First, it maps a comprehensive representation of the thing, animal, or person who has hurt us; second, it maps the state of our body, for example our readiness to fight; and third, it maps the kind of relationship we have to the perpetrator and how we might respond. For example, we usually refrain from hitting our boss or a sumo wrestler.

We react with anger—rather than sympathy—when we believe the other person, either through neglect or intentionally, treats us with disrespect. The more we feel hurt, the more we get angry. We get angry when we deem that the person who hurts us has sufficient control over the situation to avoid harm­ing us (the so-called controllability dimension). We get even angrier when we infer that the other intended to hurt us. Indeed, research shows that we want to harm others, either overtly or covertly, when we believe they could have avoided hurting us. It is one thing to be pushed accidentally by a drunken man, another to be harmed deliberately by an apparently clearheaded man.

Our beliefs as to why others behave as they do are being addressed by attribution theory, one of the dominant paradigms in social psychology. Fritz Heider (1958) is regarded to be the first attribution theorist. This theory has been elaborated since and has been instrumental in shedding light on biases of which we are unaware and that can hamper conflict resolution—we know, for exam­ple, the fundamental attribution error or the actor-observer bias. The funda­mental attribution error and the actor-observer bias refer to the tendency to attribute behavior coming from the other (for example, hostile remarks) to the other’s personality dispositions rather than to transient circumstances (such as your belittling remarks) while you attribute your own hostile remarks to cir­cumstances (such as his hostile remarks) rather than your own dispositions. During a contentious conflict, this may lead each side to overestimate the other’s hostility as well as one’s own benignness. (For further discussion of attribution theory see Gilbert, 1998; Jones and Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967; and Ross, 1977.)

For both Eve and Adam, anger can lead to destruction—or open a path to personal growth. Adam is angry that Eve is not submissive enough, while Eve does not dare to be angry at his wrath—frightened by him, and the possibility and the strength of her own anger, she seeks relief in subservience. The thera­pist attempts to transform the explosive fury that Adam projects onto Eve into deeper reflection on his own growth. The therapist ultimately invites Adam to relinquish using anger as an easy-to-use escape route and instead face deeper feelings of hurt and pain that lie buried. She explains to Eve and Adam that the new normative universe of mutual respect for equal dignity defines concepts such as love, loyalty, cooperation, attachment, connection, and relationship in profoundly new ways.

If we consider intergroup or international relations, the world will benefit from everybody getting firmly angry in the face of abuse instead of disengaging and looking away. What we have to heed, though, is that anger must be trans­lated into Mandela-like strategies—rather than hatred and violence—to render constructive results.

Humiliation and How It Affects Conflict and Is Affected by Conflict

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by

the humiliation of their fellow beings. (Mahatma Gandhi)

Fear is basic, anger more complex, and humiliation even more so. The act of humiliation involves putting down, holding down, and rendering the other help­less to resist the debasement. The feeling of being humiliated emerges when one is unable to resist the debasement and one deems it to be illegitimate as well as unwanted. What counts as humiliation and the consequences of humiliation are determined by emotional scripts that vary from one historical period to another, from one cultural sphere to another, from one person to another, and within a single person as he or she reacts at different times to the same humiliation.

Morton Deutsch (2006) explains how Nelson Mandela “kept his self undis­torted by preserving his dignity and refusing to submit, psychologically, to the definition of self that the oppressors tried to force upon him” (Deutsch, 2006, p. 38). Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela described the following incident after landing on Robben Island:

We were met by a group of burly white wardens shouting: “Dis die Eiland! Hier gaan jiell vrek!” (This is the island! Here you will die!)...

The wardens were demanding that we jog, and I turned to Tefu and under my breath said that we must set an example; if we give in now we would be at their mercy I mentioned to Tefu that we should walk in front, and we took

the lead. Once in front, we actually decreased the pace, walking slowly and deliberately. The guards were incredulous (and said) “... we will tolerate no insubordination here. Haas! Haas!” But we continued at our stately pace. (The head guard) ordered us to halt and stood in front of us: “Look, man, we will kill you, we are not fooling around..................................... This the last warning. Haas! Haas!”

To this, I said: “You have your duty and we have ours.” I was determined that we would not give in, and we did not, for we were already at the cells. (Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, 1995, pp. 297-299)

Deutsch concludes: “By his persistent public refusal to be humiliated or to feel humiliated, Mandela rejected the distorted, self-debilitating relationship that the oppressor sought to impose upon him. Doing so enhanced his leadership among his fellow political prisoners and the respect he was accorded by the less sadistic guards and wardens of the prison” (Deutsch, 2006, p. 39).

Feelings of humiliation can be the “nuclear bomb of the emotions,” a term coined by Evelin G. Lindner (2002). Lindner’s research suggests that feelings of humiliation may acquire the quality and strength of obsessions and addiction. They can dominate people’s lives to the extent that their actions become destruc­tive for themselves and others. If instigated by humiliation-entrepreneurs, such as in Rwanda in 1994, feelings of humiliation can fuel mayhem in ways that make even the purchase of expensive weaponry superfluous. In Rwanda, everybody had machetes at home for agricultural use. When people are intent to perpetrate atrocities—and feelings of humiliation may be most instrumental—costly military weaponry may not be needed for people to proceed in perpetrating mayhem.

Vamik D. Volkan (2004) in his theory Ofcollective violence, in his recent book Blind Trust, puts forth that when a chosen trauma is experienced as humiliation and is not mourned, this may lead to feelings of entitlement to revenge and, under the pressure of fear/anxiety, to collective regression.

The view that humiliation may be more than just another negative emotion, but may indeed represent a particularly forceful phenomenon, is supported by the research of a number of authors, such as James Gilligan (1996), Linda M. Hartling and Tracy Luchetta (1999), Donald C. Klein (1991), Helen Block Lewis (1971), Evelin G. Lindner (2000), Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen (1996), and Thomas J. Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger (1991).

Until very recently, however, few researchers have studied humiliation explicitly—the phenomenon of humiliation typically figures only implicitly in literature on violence and war. When humiliation is treated explicitly, it is often used interchangeably with shame or conceptualized as a variant of that emotion. Humiliation has only very recently been studied on its own account, among others, since 1996, by Evelin G. Lindner (2000), and by Jennifer S. Goldman and Peter T. Coleman (2005). Humiliation is a complex phenomenon of acts and feelings that can occur without shame being involved. As in the case of Nelson Mandela, people who face humiliating treatment may sternly reject feeling humiliated or ashamed. And even when they feel humiliated, victims of torture and maltreatment recount that part of their success in being resilient was not to feel ashamed while indeed feeling humiliated.

Considering feelings of humiliation may shed more light on violence and ter­rorism than other explanations. We do not perceive conditions such as inequal­ity, or conflict of interest, or poverty as automatically negative. As long as all players accept justifications (poverty as “divine order,” for example), there might be pain, but no shared awareness of a problem that needs fixing, no conflict, and no violent reactions. And conflict, even if it occurs, is not automatically destructive either—it can be solved mutually and creatively. It is when feelings of humiliation emerge that rifts are created and trust destroyed. If feelings of humiliation are not overcome constructively, cooperation fails. In the worst-case scenario, violence ensues.

As Lindner (2006) explains, at the current historic juncture, two new forces bring humiliation to the fore in unprecedented intensity. Globalization (or the coming-together of humankind), in concert with the human rights revolution, increases the significance of feelings of humiliation. As long as people live far away from each other, in isolation, relative deprivation goes undetected. But today, Western soap operas and Western tourists walking about are teaching the less privileged of the world to recognize their own deprivation. At the same time, the human rights call for equal dignity teaches underlings around the world that their poverty, their relative deprivation, is no longer to be accepted as divinely ordained, but represents a violation of their very humanity. When

a deprived person identifies the rich of the world as perpetrators of her viola­tion, when she suspects that the rich peddle empty human rights rhetoric to maintain their powerful positions, poverty turns into humiliation. Currently, the gap between the poor and the rich, locally and globally, grows wider. The underdogs in the world, and those who identify with them, listen to empty human rights rhetoric from elites and feel humiliated by the emptiness of the sermon: “to recognise humanity hypocritically and betray the promise, humili­ates in the most devastating way by denying the humanity professed” (Stephan Feuchtwang, November 14, 2002, in a personal note).

Thomas Friedman (2003), New York Times columnist, states, “If I’ve learned one thing covering world affairs, it’s this: The single most underappreciated force in international relations is humiliation.” Aaron Lazare (2004) writes: “I believe that humiliation is one of the most important emotions we must under­stand and manage, both in ourselves and in others, and on an individual and national level” (pp. 262).

What happens when feelings of humiliation emerge? Blema S. Steinberg (1996) posits that feelings of humiliation may trigger narcissistic rage and acts of aggression meant to lessen pain and increase self-worth. Steinberg analyzes political crises and cautions that international leaders, when publicly humili­ated, may instigate mass destruction and war. Roy F. Baumeister (1996) sug­gests that perpetrators of violent crime combine high self-esteem, albeit brittle, with poor self-regulation, particularly when it is challenged. Walter Mischel, Aaron L. DeSmet, and Ethan Kross (see Chapter Thirteen in this book) explain that rejection-sensitive men may even get “hooked” on situations of debasement in which they can feel humiliated.

In our example of Eve and Adam, Adam may be such a rejection-sensitive man. As long as Eve merely fades into subservience at his onslaught, no open destructive conflict and no cycles of humiliation occur. An unwise therapist could create such cycles of humiliation if he were to nurture feelings of humil­iation in Eve that would lead to nothing but tit-for-tat retaliation. Eve would merely learn the same dysfunctional handling of humiliation as Adam engages in. The therapist needs to lay out a vision for a “Mandela-like” handling of feel­ings of humiliation for both Eve and Adam.

Cycles of humiliation occur when feelings of humiliation are translated into acts of humiliation that are responded to in kind. In cases of collectively perpetrated mayhem, Hitler-like humiliation-entrepreneurs invite followers to pour their frus­trations into a grander narrative of humiliation that uses retaliatory acts of humil­iation as remedy. Only “Mandelas,” individuals who know how to build dignified relationships, can avoid this. Massacres typically are not just efficient slaughter, but generally more cruel. Rape, torture, and mutilation often precede killing. Many soldiers engage in these actions, even though nothing suggests that they are rapists in civilian life or are drawn to sexual sadism or sadistic violence. The extreme cruelty is therefore hard to explain with average forensic theories. In the Rwandan genocide, for example, killing was not enough. The victims were humiliated before they died. Why else would an old woman be paraded naked through the streets before being locked up with hungry dogs to be eaten alive?

To conclude, feelings of humiliation affect conflict in malignant ways when they are translated into violence d la Hitler, or modern terrorism, and set off cycles of humiliation. However, feelings of humiliation do not automatically trig­ger violence. There is no rigid link. Feelings of humiliation can also be invested into constructive social change. Nelson Mandela showed that there is a con­structive script that proceeds from being humiliated and feeling humiliated to beneficial engagement in change, as opposed to retaliation with brutal humiliation-for-humiliation. Mandela was certainly exposed to humiliating treatment for twenty-seven years in prison, but he did not unleash genocide on the white elite in South Africa. Nelson Mandela did not allow himself to feel humiliated at the attempts to humiliate him, or, if he did feel humiliated, he did not allow himself to translate these feelings into violent retaliation. In contrast, in Rwanda, the former underlings killed their former elite in genocide.

Conflict, in turn, affects feelings of humiliation through the way conflict is managed. If managed in a respecting manner, the probability for finding constructive solutions is high. If managed in condescending, patronizing, and arrogant ways, even if this is done unwittingly, feelings of humiliation will undermine any constructive cooperation. This insight can be institutionalized. At a societal level, to secure peace, in his book The Decent Society, Avishai Margalit (1996) calls for institutions that do not humiliate.

Guilt and How It Affects Conflict and Is Affected by Conflict

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our human­ity. Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. I believe that the horrifying deterioration in the ethical conduct of people today stems from the mechanization and dehumanization of our lives, a disastrous by­product of the scientific and technical mentality. Nostra culpa! (Albert Einstein)

Guilt is an elaborated emotion and a topic for psychology, psychiatry, ethics, criminal law, and other related fields. To feel guilty, we need self-awareness and the ability to measure our behavior in relation to standards. Self-conscious eval­uative emotions such as pride, shame, or guilt are not possible earlier than the second or third year of life. However, as discussed earlier, elaborated emotions are very culturally dependent. The concept of guilt might never evolve, at least not in the Western sense—in some cultural spheres a word for guilt simply does not exist.

In its simplest description, guilt may be understood as an affective state of regret at having done something one believes one should not have done. Humiliation, humility, shame, and guilt are related concepts. When I feel ashamed, I accept that I fell short. I blush when I break wind inadvertently; I can be ashamed even if nobody notices. Norbert Elias (1897-1990) places the emerging “skill” of feeling shame at such transgressions at the center of his theory of civilization. Being able to feel shame is prosocial, as is the ability to feel guilt. When I feel guilty, I accept that I have committed a moral trans­gression. People who are not capable of feeling shame or guilt are seen as “shameless” monsters. We all hope that the desire to avoid shame and guilt will safeguard social cohesion and foster humility before social and legal rules and the need to cooperate for building a sustainable world. We deem humility to be a virtue, and shame and guilt as hugely important, with guilt, according to some scholars, superseding shame due to its greater potential of leading to empathy and sensitivity toward others. Guilt can render healing for perpe­trators, victims, and larger society, through remorse, apology, forgiveness, and restorative justice.

Shame and guilt societies have been differentiated (Ruth Benedict, 1887-1948). In a shame society, it is said, I seek to maintain my good name in the eyes of the others, while in a guilt society I have internalized moral norms into my superego and feel guilty when disobeying them. “Face” and “face-saving” are usually associated with Asian culture. Chinese scholars, how­ever, explain that shame and guilt shade into each other, both directing peo­ple into self-examination in social situations and motivate people to evaluate their behavior and adapt it.

Guilt can be abused, however, as a tool of social control, because guilty peo­ple feel less deserving and are less likely to assert their rights and prerogatives. Some children, as well as some groups, are taught to feel guilty for their very existence or for certain characteristics of their appearance. Such cases represent a pathological occurrence and destructive application of guilt.

To revisit Eve and Adam, Eve is kept in timid subservience not least by feel­ing guilty. She partly believes Adam’s complaint that she ought to be more docile. Their therapist brings clarity into the normative confusion of the couple. Indeed, in traditional normative contexts of ranked honor, a woman is expected to efface herself. However, times have changed, and subservience no longer rep­resents the same kind of virtue, at least not in cultural contexts influenced by the human rights message. Eve is entitled to develop a more comprehensive and expansive personal space—not arrogantly attacking Adam in retaliation—but applying a spirit of firm and respectful humility. Adam, on the other hand, is no longer required to feel ashamed and guilty for not succeeding in keeping his wife meek and lowly—and he no longer needs to bypass his shame at his fail­ure and cover up with violence. He is entitled to feel proud to be a male who supports a strong woman at his side. He may even come to feel guilty and apol­ogizes to his wife for not having grasped this insight earlier. An exchange of mutual respect for equal dignity, in a spirit of shared humility, leads to a new and nourishing relationship between Eve and Adam.

To conclude this section, feelings of guilt can prevent people from doing evil. Feelings of guilt for past omissions and transgressions, if acknowledged, reme­died by apology and forgiveness, can be a powerful healing force in conflict. What is needed for shame and guilt to be healing forces is the courage to face them and gauge them with candidness, humility, and warmth. If not acknowledged and worked through constructively, if bypassed, feelings of shame and guilt can help maintain destructive conflict. In turn, conflict can impinge on feelings of guilt. Feelings of guilt can be pushed toward violence if conditions inhibit their acknowl­edgement and healing. Moreover, deliberately creating “pathological guilt” by making opponents in a conflict or negotiation feel guilty. So as to weaken them may rather undermine long-term constructive solutions, successful negotiation or solutions to conflict depend on firm commitments from strong players. Guilt can best be borne to healing, if embedded in respectful restorative justice.

Hope and How It Affects Conflict and Is Affected by Conflict

C. Richard Snyder (2002) developed hope theory. Snyder’s work is related to and overlaps with theories of learned optimism, optimism, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and coping. Snyder reports that higher hope is consistently related to better outcomes in academics, athletics, physical health, psychological adjustment, and psychotherapy.

Interestingly, hope can be learned. Most people lack hope, Snyder points out, because they were not taught appropriately during childhood; many experienced having their nascent hopeful thinking strategies destroyed. Snyder recommends the building of cultural and institutional frames that highlight insights from hope theory “When laws are implemented so as to allow a maximal number of people to pursue goal-directed activities, then citizens should be less likely to become frustrated and act aggressively against each other” (p. 261). As a result, higher hope will lead to better social adjustment with one’s extended family, one’s friends, and larger social networks, and public health and general well­being are likely to increase.

Hope is not to be confused with naive and unrealistic expectations. On the contrary, this would be a recipe for hopelessness. A strategy of hope entails con­tinuously weighing opportunities (or the lack of opportunities) and strengths (or their failing), and finding optimal solutions. In a conflict situation, in nego­tiations, setting too high levels for expected outcomes could be disastrous. Hope is not an illusion born out of misguided daydreaming or wishful thinking, but a strategy of successful adaptation.

Let us revisit Eve and Adam. Adam undermines Eve’s social support network. She is to live for him alone. He systematically humiliates her and destroys whatever confidence is left in her by telling her that nobody but him could love her. She is to be worthless without him and his love. Both believe that this strat­egy, if only intensified sufficiently, will lead to a happy relationship—however, it brings only violence and tears. Their therapist reformulates their definitions and strategies of hope. Among others, Adam understands that by inducing hope­lessness in Eve, both lose. The therapist rekindles Eve’s confidence in herself and Eve’s life begins to flourish. The therapist also helps Adam to gain confi­dence in his ability to keep a strong woman as a partner and enjoy her fresh zest of life—rather than be frightened by her newly won strength. Both learn to nurture higher hopes for their relationship and work for newly defined, shared goals.

To conclude, we need to learn hope and develop cultures of hope and insti­tutions for hope to support us as we strive for constructive conflict resolution. This means creating more alternative goals, more potential pathways, and more endurance, in us, for us, and in our societies. If we succeed, we will have peo­ple gravitating to wider social networks that benefit everyone. Positive emotions will follow. Ironically, pessimists are oblivious of these insights. By lamenting, they indulge in increasing the burden of conflict instead of lessening it and thus risk tipping the situation toward downfall. We have to learn constructive opti­mism and hope, because only this will render beneficial framings. A cancer patient, if told that she is in deep crisis, might survive if mobilizing maximum hope. She might die if surrounded by pessimists. For the world, we need con­structive hope that models emergency and crisis as a challenge and not as the end of the world.

Confidence and Warmth, and How They Affect Conflict and Are Affected by Conflict

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. (Octavio Paz)

As long as we live in isolated, homogenous cultural spheres, we can usually guess correctly what our fellow human beings are trying to tell us with their words and actions. We tend to behave with a certain amount of “confidence,” secure in the certainty of our environment. However, this illu- sionary definition of “confidence” is not beneficial to us. If we reflect for a moment, we know that even our children and our spouses represent “other cultures.”

What we have to learn is to confidently float in uncertainty rather than cling to assumed certainties. We have to become confident voyagers and not rigid vindicators, according to David Ricky Matsumoto, Seung Hee Yoo, and Jeffery A. LeRoux (2005):

Those people who cannot control their emotions reinforce and crystallize their pre-existing ethnocentric and stereotypic ways of dealing with the world that are limited. This is a no growth model, and these individuals are not engaged in a journey. This is a model of stagnation, with no growth potential inherent in such a process. We call these people “vindicators,” because their worldviews are established solely to vindicate their pre-existing ethnocentrism and stereotypes, not to challenge them and grow. (p. 18)

We must learn to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity confidently. When we do not understand our counterpart, jumping to conclusions out of a need to “be sure” will produce failure. Guessing what our spouses (or terrorists) “want” and basing our actions on such speculations simply does not work. We have to learn to stay calm while we use frustration creatively, with imagination and inspira­tion, and for that we need curiosity, courage, and patience (Satoshi Nakagawa, personal communication from Jacqueline Wasilewski, June 25, 2005).

Muneo Yoshikawa (1987) has developed a double-swing model that concep­tualizes how individuals, cultures, and intercultural concepts can meet in con­structive ways. It relates to what Peter A. Levine (1997) calls pendulation, the swinging back and forth between our own point of view and that of the other that allows us the potential for understanding each other. Successful pendula- tion can produce solidarity and social integration; without it, we have alienation and lack of social integration. Double-swing pendulation—from you to me, back to you, back to me, and so on—has to be conducted with warmth and respect for all conflict parties. Respect and warmth are the glue that keeps people together while they move back and forth. Respect and warmth do not befall us; they can be learned.

To conclude, to wage good conflict, we must design our efforts in ways that keep the double swing connected. Healthy identity in unity and pendulation are interdependent—neither independent and isolated, nor engulfed. Both parties in conflictual relationships must avoid going too far, walking over the other or allowing the other to walk over them. Adam walked over Eve and Eve allowed him to do so. In therapy, both understand that when all players in a conflict learn to invest respect, warmth, and calmly floating confidence rather than fran­tic righteousness, conflict can be framed benignly. In the beginning, Eve and Adam threw monologues at each other and tried to prove to the therapist that the respective other was evil. Then, slowly, they began to listen to each other. They tried to grasp the other’s feelings and thoughts. They learned to use both sides of the double swing. Finally, they emerged mutually enriched. Now, they recognize that their conflict was based on solipsistic misperceptions of the other, due to each of them looping in only one side of the double swing. They know, furthermore, that their conflict continued because of their immature and self­defeating conflict-solving strategies. And finally, they understand that they suf­fered from a high degree of normative confusion. In a haphazard manner, they had jumbled together the contradictory normative frames of ranked worthiness versus equal dignity, helplessly oscillating between the contradictory emotional scripts that are related to those normative universes. Today, Eve and Adam no longer wish to participate in an order of “higher” and “lesser” beings, but attempt to treat each other as worthy of equal dignity.

Not only Eve and Adam’s conflict, but also community conflicts and global conflicts can be conceptualized along similar lines. Not least, Germany has gained international respect by apologizing to the world and acknowledging that Hitler’s strategy of presenting and viewing himself as a “savior” and responding to perceived humiliation with mayhem was disastrous.