Opinion

“It is only in the heart that one can see rightly” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – “Le Petit Prince”

Some years ago, I was tasked with consulting an Iraqi politician about a dialogue process. He shut me down by telling me he thought the West’s hidden agenda was to divide Iraq to steal its riches. Back then I did not know how to react well and sought to explain him our good intentions – all the while trying hard to cover up my feelings of unease, anger and shame.

Becoming aware of our own emotions and capable of regulating them should be a basic skill for peace practitioners and part of our professional training. Why? First, it helps us stay sane in the face of conflict. Second, we need to be firmly in touch with our emotions to succeed at building connection and promoting empathy with people in conflict. (Re-)establishment of connection and empathy is what ultimately helps people to listen to, understand each other and to find mutually acceptable solutions for their conflicts.

Our biological capacity allows us to feel the emotions of other people. To me, connecting to another person thus means that he/she can sense that I am feeling him/her. To do so, we need to be in touch with ourselves, which requires capacity to witness what is going on inside of me, my thoughts, emotions, and body reactions, without getting overwhelmed or enmeshed. We can train our awareness of this emotional resonance and learn to differentiate it within our emotional experience.

In conflict, people tend to get overwhelmed by emotions. This also happens to peace practitioners. When emotions become difficult to bear, we may disassociate from them and stop feeling them. This will hamper our capacity to connect and do our job. Even if subtly, those we work with will sense the disconnect. If I play it professionally while boiling on the inside, you will sense incongruence.

Such disconnection can be sparked by older experiences of separation that have piled up in the blind corners of our personalities – also referred to as shadows or sometimes individual or collective trauma – impeding our capacity to connect as they get re-triggered. The good news in this: peace practitioners may enhance their capacity to connect with others by bringing awareness onto and reconnecting with our own blind spots, with the hurt, injured, scared, hardened, and disconnected aspects of our personalities, strengthening our self-empathy and the capacity to remain present.

I am by far not the first peace practitioner to advocate self-reflection. I stand on the shoulders of giants such as Ben Hoffmann, Marshall Rosenberg, Scilla Elworthy, Dekha Ibrahim Abdi and Simon Mason, Garry Friedman and Jack Himmelstein, Rudi Ballreich, the Dalai Lama, William Ury, or Thomas Hübl. They all have been encouraging peace practitioners or leaders to engage in inner work.

Yet how come we still do not see such practice rooted and institutionalized in our field? How come peacebuilding organizations have not established a culture of self-reflection and inner work, as we see in other social and psychological professions?

Reflecting on my own journey, I wonder: For how many of us is the calling to work for peace an echo of a call to search peace within? Could indifference towards the role of our own emotions and personality patterns be a collective blind spot in peacebuilding?

Life instilled in me the insecurity that relationship and connection is not naturally given. This left me with an urge to harmonize and reassure myself about my relationships, which finetuned my senses to conflict. Coming into our profession, mediation seemed a natural fit for a person like me who finds it easy to empathize with others, who senses what is going on in a room, and who feels an urge to work for peace. Until I realized how often I was triggered by other people’s behavior and struggling to find my own peace. In hindsight, I believe that me setting out to solve other people’s conflicts was a subconscious step towards facing my own struggles. It certainly helped me to start looking into the mirror. Which in turn allowed me to grow professionally, I dare say. I have more refined tools today to build connection with others in the face of conflict.

Our field should invest into the development of a culture of emotional awareness and self-reflection. The leaders in our organizations need to step up as role models, living and promoting inner work as part of the professionalization of our field. The expertise to create respective offers such as training and coaching, supervision, intervision, or psychological debriefings is readily available.