I grew up in a family with very different perspectives. I grew up between two countries, not really feeling like I belonged to either. This made it very difficult to find and feel at home, and it made me search – for home as a place, as another person, as an educational program, as an ideology, somewhere where I could feel whole. I was searching for certainty, for peace.
But the fight always appeared. The triggers came. Critique and judgment were my weapons of protection but also destroyers of my peace. I found others with the same weapons, thinking we were fighting for peace but really just building bigger armies.
Thankfully, more pain came. A big breakup in 2013 shook my foundations to the core and made certainty impossible. I couldn’t pick up any new weapons and was thrown into the present moment. I just had to be in the pain.
But there was also a war raging, and instead of being in my own pain, I joined an activist movement. We were all united in our fight against the bad guys. It felt good for a while, I got the peace of belonging, but it created a big fight within my family. How could I be promoting peace if I was in conflict with my own family, the people closest to me? Thank God for this question, which accompanied me out of the activist circle and into a closer inquiry, an inquiry with my own self. There, again, I had to really meet pain. In doing that, I cleared the pipes for the love to flow again.
And this continued and still continues to this day. It’s my human journey. I find my path, my certainty, my peace, and then the friction comes. I learned the blessing of this friction, that brings me back to myself. That brings me back to love.
When we have disagreements with partners, with people at work, with family members, we think these need to be solved. But from my experience, they don’t need to be solved, they need to be used. They are our best resource. We also think that all parties need to be a part of this process. They don’t. Only you do. This idea that the conflict will stop if someone else does something different will surely keep the conflict going. Because it already does not accept the other as they are. I’m not saying boundaries are not needed, and not every relationship can or needs to be restored. But there are a lot of relationships out there (intimate or otherwise) that actually can find love again. And it doesn’t take both parties, just one.
It is so difficult to be in the pain of disagreement. I know it so well. But in my experience, learning how to use it towards healing can change the world. Right now, disagreement is our biggest resource. And God knows there’s enough of it, we just have to learn how to use it.
If you’re struggling out there with disagreement and fighting, and you want to talk it through, this is what I do in my work. I usually work with groups, but I’m venturing out to take on a few one-on-one sessions to try this out. If you are interested, reach out! It’s the most important work we can do right now.