What to Expect

The CC experience is a facilitated dialogue session customized to your particular family, community, conflict, and goal. Though a variety of techniques and add-ons may be utilized, all virtual meetings are built on the following foundational elements:

The Participants

Everyone involved in a conflict is in attendance, and given an opportunity to express their concerns and desired outcomes with equal value and validity. This is not always present in natural conversation, and so the facilitator may utilize various techniques to create structure as necessary.

The Tone of the Forum

Your facilitators will take great care to ensure that dialogues avoid the trappings of hierarchy, bias, or judgment—this is not only good manners but has practical effects as well: establishing a level playing field can be transformative and surprising when working through conflicts that have underlying power-issues at stake (and most do).

The Introductory Ritual

Each session begins with an exercise unrelated to the conflict at hand, designed to separate the space of the work from the space of the real world. This may be a breath exercise, a game, a yoga sequence, or a custom “ritual” designed to fit with your community; it can be small, silly, poignant, didactic, etc.—all is malleable—but it plays a significant role in the operation of the dialogue to follow, by establishing safety, confidentiality (if desired), personal and professional boundaries, and most notably, a container that encourages freer levels of expression, tolerance, and open-mindedness than might be present in the systems we typically engage in outside the established forum.

The Facilitator

The facilitator is not a member of the conflict, but she is a member of the group, present to keep order and guide fair discussion. She will moderate and use strategies designed to foster connection and understanding, which at times stray from conventional ideas of fairness and equity. (See below, “The Solution”). “Neutrality” is often used as a commandeering ideal in mediation and judicial systems, but on some level when dealing with people intimately it is unattainable, and part of the facilitator’s job is to be humbly aware of her own inherent biases or personal history as may relate to the conflict at hand. As such, she is not neutral, but rather “omnipartial”—partial to all, yet mindful of various value systems at work. “Omnipartial” might also be defined as empathetic to the people, their desires, and their opinions, regardless of whether their value systems differ. A skilled facilitator can separate the participants from their own inherent biases and values.

The Solution(s)

We cannot know, and in fact, the method emphasizes that we must not know, how a conflict should be resolved up front. The purpose of the process is to open the participants to a compassionate conversation, and to allow them to discover and create their own outcomes—personal autonomy is important in reaching a satisfying result, and those with a vested interest are the best suited to reveal nuances and think creatively and constructively. Solutions—yes many—often happen organically, but not because the facilitator strives for them, or because one participant is pushing harder, or because anyone is labeled right or wrong, but rather because a well-facilitated dialogue demands it, by creating a flow that naturally deescalates emotion, unpacks conflict, reveals its components from multiple angels, tosses out the nonsense, resolves the wins, and rearranging what’s left in a way that best suits everyone involved.