Rupture and Repair Under Fascist Conditions

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“We have a great opportunity in our movements to learn how to be opponents without being enemies,” says Tanuja Jagernauth. In this first episode of a two-part conversation, Tanuja and I discuss the language people use to describe harm and conflict, the difference between disagreement and abuse, and how organizers can move through conflict with more clarity and care under fascist conditions.

Music: Son Monarcas, HATAMITSUNAMI, and Daniel Fridell

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout. It has been reprinted here with permission.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes.

Conflict is inevitable in movement work. When people are trying to build together under conditions of fear, exhaustion, repression, and constant urgency, we are going to disappoint each other, misread each other, frustrate each other, and sometimes hurt each other. That doesn’t mean all conflict is the same, and it doesn’t mean every rupture should be understood in the same way. But as our communities struggle to organize and reorganize themselves under fascist conditions, many people are moving through conflict while stunned, traumatized, exhausted, or simply expecting others to be guided by the same values and intentions they bring to the work. In that state, it can be hard even to know what questions to ask, let alone how to distinguish between disagreement and mistreatment, hurt and harm, activation and danger, or behavior that calls for curiosity and repair versus behavior that needs to be interrupted and confronted.

Today, we will be hearing from organizer, circle keeper, writer, theater maker, and yoga educator Tanuja Jagernauth. Tanuja is a longtime friend of the show, and she is also the co-facilitator of Understory, an emotional and spiritual support group for activists that she and I have been organizing together for about two and a half years. This episode is the first of a two-part conversation about conflict in movement spaces. In this installment, we talk about the language we use to describe harm and conflict, how that language can be misused or weaponized, and how we can reorient ourselves to respond constructively in difficult situations. Conflict can be generative. It can help propel us and our movements forward. But for that to happen, we need to identify the patterns that are holding us back, and the boundaries, agreements, and understandings that can help keep us steady and help us build in right relationship with one another.

If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support Movement Memos, you can subscribe to Truthout’snewsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to Movement Memos on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help.

Truthout is an independent news organization, publishing stories that the craven corporate press won’t touch. We are a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, and we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you. So thank you for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

KH: Tanuja, welcome back to Movement Memos.

**Tanuja Jagernauth:**Thank you so much for having me, Kelly. It’s always wonderful to be here and in conversation with you.

KH: I’m so happy for the chance to think alongside you. How are you doing today?

**TJ:**I’m hanging in. I am a fun combination of rage and disgust at what we’re seeing happen all around us. And I’m also feeling really hopeful and really heartened by the way that I continue to see Chicago show up and the way I continue to see movements show up. So it’s all here, a nice little combination of rage and hope.

KH: I am right there with you, and so grateful to be in community with you here in Chicago, where people are doing so much powerful and important work. Intense movement work can bring people closer together, and it can also generate conflicts that we are sometimes ill-equipped to navigate. I want to dig into that subject and offer some tools and understanding for people who are grappling with interpersonal dynamics as they organize their way through this fascist moment. But first, for folks who may not remember our previous conversations or be familiar with your work, can you say a bit about what you do?

TJ: Sure. And in the context of our conversation, I’ll say I am a lifelong learner. I’ve been living in Chicago since 2001 when I came as just a wee Volunteer in Service to America. Long story, but I have a long background in studying conflict and being called in to support folks to resolve conflict. So I feel like I’ve had a wonderful opportunity to learn so much from movement leaders across the decades, and I feel really humbled to be able to continue doing that work.

I am a theater maker, I’m a writer and a yoga educator. And as somebody who is a descendant of indentured laborers, I just feel like this conversation about addressing our own generational trauma wounds, our own present life wounds while we also fight to build the next world, super, super personal and relevant to me. And I come to this conversation with a lot of humility and with a lot of gratitude for everyone who has helped me to learn how to navigate conflict better.

**KH:**Well, I really appreciate your work around the subject that we’re going to address today, which is conflict and conflict resolution. You mentioned your work as a theater maker, and I think folks should know that you also recently authored a play that was performed at Free Street Theater called Rupture & Repair, which offers an artistic vision of what conflict transformation can look like, and how the lessons we learn from those experiences can help us build the world we’re meant to live in. I really appreciate all the ways you urge us to view conflict as something that can help shape us for the better.

I think we need that approach right now, because while our movements are always in conflict, we are all under so much pressure right now. There is so much strain. There is so much unpredictable violence that people are witnessing and experiencing. Responding to what we’re up against – together – is always going to result in conflict, and I think responding under these conditions has left a lot of us raw and unready for the mess of trying to understand each other and mend what’s broken.

What are you seeing in the realm of conflict and how it’s playing out in movement spaces?

**TJ:**Thanks so much, Kelly. And yeah, from my humble vantage point, and I say this with love and I say this with self-recognition of my own part in all of this, you mentioned Rupture & Repair, I didn’t set out to create that show about conflict transformation because I felt like I had it all figured out and I’m an expert here. It really was driven by a true question around what does conflict transformation and repair actually look like? And can we all do better at approaching conflict and staying present with each other when we’re in conflict? Versus what I am seeing, which is a lot of defensiveness, honestly, when folks bring feedback to one another. And I’m really curious about how we can all build little cultures of giving and receiving feedback with one another.

Unfortunately, we have access to really beautiful transformative justice language, restorative justice language, abolitionist language. And I’m seeing these beautiful words become weapons in the hands of our comrades who are wounded, who are trying to get by, who are truly doing their best with what they have, the time they have, and so on and so forth. And at the same time, this pattern of weaponizing language against each other is actually just reinscribing the systems of violence that we’re trying to transform. Okay, so I really want to invite us in to do better on that front.

And at the same time, Kelly, I am seeing more folks embrace this challenge to learn about conflict, practice, and learn about generative conflict. I’m seeing, and I’m so grateful for this, more people embracing engagement of the body toward conflict transformation. So shout out to Generative Somatics, shout out to Healing Justice Lineages, shout out to everyone really who’s been working on that front for decades and decades, asking us to please incorporate our bodies in our work.

So I’m seeing a mix of things, Kelly. And ultimately I do have hope because I see people really fighting hard. Kelly, you’re one of these people to create spaces for political education. I’m grateful every two weeks you and me and a handful of people meet through Understory to try and practice different frameworks with each other in a space that I hope feels safer and a space where we can really hold the work that we do sacred and where we can hold our relationships sacred. So I’m seeing that too. I’m not just seeing us fumble and grasp for survival in these systems.

KH: I really appreciate you naming both sides of that, the ways in which we are messing up out here, and the ways in which we’re trying to build what needs to exist, and to hold each other in our humanity. And I’d love to talk more about Understory at some point.

But first, I want to zero in on what you’re saying about weaponizing language because I feel like that’s been a huge problem for quite a while now. Discomfort gets conflated with unsafety, and harm often gets conflated with abuse. So let’s talk about that distinction for a moment. How do you distinguish between harm and abuse and why does that distinction matter in movement spaces?

**TJ:**Yeah, thank you for that question, Kelly. In general, I think I’m going to offer us, we need to define our terms with one another. I think I can offer up some definitions that I’ve collected and that I use in my work, but I also think it’s so important for formations to take the time to get clear about what definitions of terms they’re going to use when they talk to one another. So first I want to say that. And harm is one of these words, unfortunately, kind of like community, kind of like healing, where it’s not clear what it actually means, and it is so context-specific. So I’m really glad we’re digging in. And I’m going to offer three different ways to think about harm and three different ways to define harm.

The first comes from Spring Up. They are a radical liberatory education collective that I’m actually studying with right now. I’m taking their 60 hour mediation certification program. It’s a one-year program. I highly recommend it. The folks that Spring Up, I find to be really thorough, really principled, grounded, and also embodied in what they are trying to do. So Spring Up’s definition of harm is “When the actions of a person, people or systems have a negative impact on a person or people, and that creates unmet needs and obligations.” And they recognize that this can be rooted in differences in power.

Power is always going to be present in our work together. I would invite us to even define power in our formations, right? How does it move? What does it look like? How do we share power? And then what does power over look like in our group? If I behave in a certain way, what behaviors will be interpreted as me trying to seize power or hoard power, right? We really need to understand power. So I appreciate that definition from Spring Up.

From the In It Together toolkit, which was created by Dragonfly Partners and Interrupting Criminalization, they look at harm as an impact when a person is deprived of or senses a threat to an essential need as a result of the action or inaction of another person, group, institution, or system. So both definitions are talking about needs not getting met, right? And then the incident creating a gap there that we need to address.

And then lastly, I had the opportunity to go through the Vision Change Win security school training in which they also talked about harm in our formations and how to address it, and they broke it down even more. And I really love the way they break it down. And the trainer who spoke on this is Yalini Dream. And so they invite us to ask when someone says they’ve been harmed, get curious and ask, okay, are you triggered in this moment? Are you experiencing discomfort versus being triggered? Are you misaligned? Are we misaligned? Or is this abuse? So they really want us to get clear on those distinctions.

All of these things can feel very similar, but as we know, the implications of what we call things really, really matters. So if we’re using the Vision Change Win frame of breaking down harm even more to name abuse as a type of harm, what is abuse? I’m pulling from a domestic violence hotline definition, and they talk about harm being a pattern of behaviors. Or, sorry, abuse being a pattern of behaviors that are used to maintain power and control over others. And so I really want to lift up that pattern-of-behavior piece of the abuse.

So certainly can harm escalate and become abuse over time through patterns of unmet needs? Absolutely. But what I think is important for us to really sit with is the first time something happens in a formation, we want to address harm that occurs and be watchful to see if it becomes a pattern, but I would really caution us against naming something abuse right off the bat, right?

Okay. And why does this matter? Back to what we were talking about, Kelly, at the very start of this conversation, language matters. The stories we tell to each other about each other, about who we are and what we do, this is the way we make the world, right? As you demonstrate in your work all the time, the way we interpret one another matters. And the words that we use to describe our interpretation of events absolutely matters. So we really have a great opportunity to get sharper around the language we’re using and how we’re using it, because what we call things is going to really impact the direction we go in to intervene on what’s going on.

And then if I label something harm or if I label something abuse and I talk to my homies about it, we’ve seen it. And I’m just going to name it, we’ve seen people be like, “Oh, well, so-and-so is abusive. Well, I’m staying away from them,” or, “So-and-so is a harmdoer now.” Well, okay. And what I’ve seen and heard about too is instead of getting curious with one another and approaching the situation and approaching the person who’s being labeled abusive or harmful, we kind of avoid them and we cancel them or we just silently ice them out. And that creates a lot of harm. It leaves the person who experienced harm without a full opportunity to address that. And it ends up creating a binary here between harmdoers and people who are harmed. And I really grieve and feel so sad for that dynamic in our spaces because it really is impacting our ability to do the work that we need to do. I’ll pause there.

**KH:**I appreciate what you’re saying about the ways people can get cast in these fixed roles, and I think that really connects with notions of innocence and guilt, and how we’re conditioned to understand harm through a lens of who is harmed and blameless, and who deserves to be punished. I have so many thoughts about that.

I want to dig into that, but first I want to stay with this question of unmet needs, or of the fulfillment of a need being threatened by someone’s action or inaction. Can you talk about what kinds of needs people may feel, or fear, are being compromised when they experience hurt?

TJ: Mm-hmm. Thank you. And I want to make a distinction between hurt and harm too. This is something that I’ve learned from Spring Up in my studies with them. So harm, as we mentioned, it’s an unmet need. It’s a behavior that has had a negative impact and someone’s left with an open wound. Someone’s left… And this is the way I can think about it and make sense of it myself.

So something happens and I’m left with a little wound, a little gap, a little, maybe it’s bleeding or maybe it’s a bruise. A hurt then becomes when that bruise or when that wound gets reactivated or reanimated. So just on the physical level, if I have an open wound and I go to the meeting and I don’t have a bandage on it, I haven’t taken care of myself and I’m just sitting there with an open wound and someone bumps into me, that is a hurt and they impact my wound, so it’s that activation of a previous harm.

And the question around needs from decolonized nonviolent communication, which I learned from Meenadchi, we all have basic human needs that we’re entering our spaces with. And one of the biggest needs that I think that more folks are talking about openly and claiming and honoring is the need for belonging. And this need for belonging, it’s not silly. It is so fundamental. It’s fundamental to human survival to find and create places where we can belong together and take action together. So that’s one of the big needs that comes to mind. But the need to feel seen, the need to feel heard, the need to feel effective, the need for meaning, the need for purpose. So some of those are in there and those are some of the unspoken and unmet needs that I think I see a lot being revealed through some of the conflicts that I’ve encountered and been involved with.

**KH:**I really identify with what you were saying around hurt because I think it’s so important to recognize that the fact that something hurts, by itself, doesn’t mean that we’ve been treated unjustly. Sometimes we’re angry at someone because, as you say, they’ve brushed up against something. That person, here in the present, may not have done anything wrong or unfair. The issue could be that there’s something there that hurts and maybe that needs examination, maybe needs care. And whatever incites that hurt, here in the present, may not require a confrontation with the person whose words or actions brought up that feeling. So I appreciate the opportunity to make that distinction.

I also wanted to zero in on the word “trigger” because I think that it’s a term that’s been misused and weaponized, so I just want to make sure people are clear about what we mean when we say it. So what do you mean when you say someone is triggered?

TJ: Mm-hmm. Thank you, Kelly. Yeah, a trigger is not always a negative thing. It’s not always an experience that goes back to trauma. When we were talking about triggers in, I believe it was the Vision Change Win training, we invoked the image of the Madeleine. Oh gosh, I can’t remember the writer who writes about this. He’ll come to mind. But a trigger basically is something happens, an event takes place or you see something or you hear something and it takes you back. It takes you on a journey through time to another moment that is still alive for you in some kind of way.

And so for me, an example I can give about being triggered in a beautiful way is every single time I smell orange blossoms on the wind, not usually in Chicago, usually if I’m in Arizona, it takes me back to summer days in college and it is a beautiful memory and it makes me think of my dad, but I’m there. I’m no longer in the present. I am back in college and I’m feeling all the feelings that I felt on a particular summer night when I smelled the orange blossoms and felt so alive. So a trigger can be something like that. You taste something, you hear something that sends you back in time.

In that same way, a trigger can also be a sound, a word, an event, an action that takes you back to a moment where you were harmed, where that harm was not resolved. That need remains unmet. It can be very similar to that example of you brushed up against my open wound and here I am. I’m time traveling now. I’m going back to maybe the moment when I got that wound.

And we do each other a big disservice and we do ourselves a big disservice if I make my focus the person who brushed up against my open wound and start labeling them as a harmdoer, right? Instead of saying, “Oh, wow, this is information, I have some work to do. I have an open wound, what do I need to resource myself and take care of that so that it doesn’t get infected, et cetera?”

And I’ve heard Mariame Kaba talk about this, when we ascribe intention where there isn’t actual intention, that’s that storytelling piece that we do, we do a huge disservice to ourselves. So the guidance when we find ourselves triggered and it’s bringing up painful memories is to notice, first of all, honor it and ask, what is going on with my body? What do I need and what resources do I have available to meet those needs?

I’m not going to hold accountable or in obligation the person who triggered me. Sometimes you just can’t, and it’s also not their responsibility. So I’m going to take responsibility for my unmet need here. I’m going to seek out support. I’m going to do what I need to do so I can actually take care of this and honor this need that is clearly still there. I don’t want to invalidate my need. I don’t want to tell myself stories that are going to end up harming me further, but instead I think this is something that unfortunately we do. Or another way of putting it is, our conditions are often such that we may not feel like we have access to the time and the space and the resources to get those needs met.

And so I’ve been reflecting on this a lot, Kelly. I just feel like some of us, we are truly moving through our spaces with open wounds all the time, driven by our sense of, we’ve got to get this done. There’s urgency, there’s real urgency here. And also I just have to lovingly ask us, what is the cost of continuing to do it like this? And I think a lot of people are really hungry for us to try a different method.

**KH:**I really appreciate this. And it has me thinking about how burnout is so much more than exhaustion. Burnout is what happens when exhaustion meets moral injury. So we’re exhausted, and most likely, there’s also been some violation of our boundaries. And I know that’s something I used to do to myself in groups a lot, especially when I was younger. I would overextend myself and then I would experience these moments where I felt unappreciated. Because people weren’t responding to my efforts in ways that felt right to me. But there was really no appreciation that was going to feel commensurate with the injury I had caused myself. I wasn’t going to feel adequately appreciated because I was hurting myself, and people weren’t asking me to do that, didn’t understand that I was doing that, and wouldn’t want me to do that if they knew, so of course their responses didn’t match what I was feeling or where I was at.

Sometimes, we need to show up differently, or engage differently. Sometimes, we may need to adjust our group norms, so that we are naming and honoring people’s contributions, and not putting too much on any one person. And, we might need to practice some amount of acceptance around the fact that, while we are in alignment in some really crucial ways, we may never see eye to eye about some things that are really important to us.

Other times, we may be struggling because someone is just showing up badly, and they might be way out of line. And that can also take different shapes. So when people describe a situation as harmful, what questions can help them clarify whether they’re talking about disagreement, mistreatment, abuse, manipulation, boundary violation, or something else?

TJ: Thank you. Yeah, and I just want to say, Kelly, I too am absolutely guilty of this pattern. And I catch myself in it, I cause harm, I have to apologize, and I try to learn and do better after I mess up. So I am right there with everyone else who is struggling. We really do share this condition of, wow, struggling to do what we can under really intense circumstances. So anyway, I just have so much empathy for all of us going through this.

So to your question, again, let’s go into some term definition and I love this question around what’s a disagreement versus what is mistreatment, what is disagreement versus what is abuse, what is disagreement versus boundary violation? And so hearkening back to Spring Up, very simply, they define disagreement as a lack of consensus or agreement, and there can be a difference of opinions. And it’s so, so simple, but I think … I was just talking to somebody about this the other day. We have a great opportunity in our movements to learn how to be opponents without being enemies. I think we would thrive in our groups and in our formations if we actually could hold space for lively disagreement, lively debate, exploring differences of opinions instead of doing this thing that I also see and that I’ve also participated in, which is where we’re like, “Ooh, I don’t have the right opinion. If I don’t have the right opinion, I’m going to be out.” Or, “You don’t have the right opinion. You’re out, you’re wrong, you’re not enough of a radical to be here,” et cetera, et cetera.

What if we embraced our differences of opinion and got curious about where that opinion comes from? And I want to shout out Katrina Dion at Free Street Theater. I just had an opportunity to take a training with her on devising, on collectively creating a work of theater. It is, wow, some of the hardest stuff you’ll ever do if you try it and it also is so … It’s a powerful and really rewarding process and it can really teach us a lot about organizing.

So anyways, I love how Katrina and Free Street Theater invite us into getting curious when we see differing opinions, right? They ask questions to find out, “Okay, where is this opinion coming from?” And back to needs, what need is underneath this perspective? And can we find a way to identify the needs here and the root values and come to an agreement with folks so that everyone’s basic needs are getting met and we have the values, we have enough spaciousness to hold and create something that can honor all the values here.

So disagreement can be a beautiful, beautiful thing. Disagreement, if we lean into it, can help bring us closer together, right? We can learn more about each other and our relationships can get stronger in that, right? And that’s one of the things I know in Understory, Kelly, we try to encourage people. When we break down a reading or look at a piece of poetry, we do not all have to have the same opinion. Actually, when you’re looking at art or encountering the world, it’s a gift that I’m going to look at it this way, you’re going to look at it that way. Somebody else is going to look at it a completely different way. If we can bring these different perspectives together, wow, we’re going to understand this thing in a more holistic way than we could have alone. And that’s the beauty of honoring differences of opinions.

So that’s disagreement, back to abuse, abuse is more around patterns of harm with the intention or with the impact of keeping certain entities in power and in control. So you can really hopefully see a big difference between “we’re having a disagreement of opinion and perspective” versus “I’m regularly doing stuff to disempower you and to maintain power and control in our situation.”

Regarding mistreatment, disagreement versus mistreatment, I’m just going to ask, what are the agreements between us? What are the expectations between us? And have we expressed those agreements and expectations? In a formation, I love it when we can write it down, when we can sit down, articulate what we expect from one another in terms of treatment and write that down. And I personally have benefited from being able to be lovingly held accountable to group agreements. I was able, and this was years ago, but I was able to, in this scenario that I’m thinking of, I was able to sit and notice that I was not behaving in alignment with our shared agreements. But what if those agreements weren’t written down?

So if we’re feeling mistreated, if we’re feeling that there’s some injustice in how we’re being treated, I’m going to ask us to refer back to, well, do these people know how they’re supposed to treat me? Do we know how we’re supposed to treat each other? Or are we making assumptions about how we’re going to treat each other? What are these assumptions based on? And who gets to decide what is the collective norm? So I would still ask questions, but I’m going to invite us into holding the complexity here of a disagreement is not mistreatment. If I disagree with you about what toppings are best on a pizza, I’m not harming you, I’m not mistreating you. Now, if you tell me, “Oh, I’m lactose intolerant, bro. I can’t put cheese on the pizza,” and I go ahead and I order the pizza and it’s loaded, it’s a four cheese situation, that’s mistreatment.

Around manipulation… I think about manipulation a lot, and the way that I want to invite us to think about manipulation in this conversation is, again, getting curious. When somebody uses the strategy of manipulation in a formation or in a relationship, I’m going to ask what’s going on with them and what is the need that they are trying to meet here? I wonder if there’s a way to support this person to get their needs met in a different way, perhaps in a more direct way.

Because I have a hunch that, and I’ve done this when we don’t feel super empowered or we don’t have a very clear pathway of, say, giving feedback in a group. I think that’s when we start to see manipulation in the form of passive-aggressive language, and just doing other shenanigans that are ultimately not necessary if we’re really able to get our needs met in a direct kind of way. That’s how I want to think about manipulation, but that is so different from a disagreement.

Now, if I don’t feel like I’m able-

KH: Can I ask, and I’m sorry if I kind of missed this, what’s your working definition of manipulation?

**TJ:**The way I’m thinking about manipulation, and manipulation I don’t think is always negative either, but in this context, you’re taking actions to achieve something. You’re taking actions to achieve something. Those actions may not be all the time on the up and up. They might be perceived as shady, they might be… But when I put on a certain outfit to look “professional,” that’s manipulating my image in order to get a certain effect. So I’m taking actions to be perceived in a certain way. I’m taking actions to achieve something that I want.

KH: I am going to go ahead and offer a related, but slightly different frame around this word. I tend to think of manipulation as something that’s unstated, like I’m not being straightforward with you about what I’m doing. As opposed to telling you, Tanuja, I think we should organize our next event by the lake, and here’s why, I might start by arguing against other locations, to sort of drive you toward the conclusion that I’m hoping for. If I am manipulating a person or a situation, there’s something that isn’t directly stated, or something that’s covert or deceptive about the steps I’m taking to influence or control a particular outcome.

Maybe I’m doing that because I don’t just trust people to hear me out — because let’s face it, there are a lot of situations under capitalism, under patriarchy, when we’re interacting with systems and people with authority, when just being completely straightforward about our needs and our thinking isn’t going to serve us well. So we develop skill sets around these more covert maneuvers, these emotional levers, these ways of driving people where we want them to go. So, I think sometimes, people can do this in a negative way without even realizing it. Because it’s just how they’ve been conditioned to navigate potential conflicts or difficulties. Sometimes, these are practices we’ve been enacting since we were children, when we had very little power, and were doing whatever we could to steer the adults around us towards actions and conclusions that weren’t harmful to us.

Sometimes, we feel people steering us, in these ways, and it doesn’t feel good.

Can you talk about how that experience, or a difference of opinion, or mistreatment might differ from a boundary violation?

**TJ:**Yeah. First, I want to define what a boundary is. A clarification that I received recently is rooted in a definition from Prentis Hemphill in which we think about boundaries as agreements or limitations that help us to maintain our own bodily and relational integrity, and that meet our needs. If I set a boundary, it is going to be up to me to reinforce it and to take action.

An example of a potential boundary is like, okay, I can have this conversation for two hours. After two hours, I’m going to leave. And so, the enforcement of the boundary is very much in my hands. It’s about actions that I can take and that I’m going to take, and less about when I set a boundary, I am not controlling you or controlling the other. Does that make sense?

**KH:**Absolutely.

TJ: In a boundary violation, according to that perspective and that definition of a boundary, I can violate my own boundary if the conversation goes past two hours, an hour into the third hour. I’m violating my boundary that I sat with myself if I stay on for three-plus hours or two-plus hours. I think that’s really important to sit with because sometimes … I know I have, I’ve thought about boundaries as this is my boundary and now it’s up to you to behave in a certain way in relationship to my boundary. Now, I think it’s connected. If I have a limitation, if I have a boundary, then I should express it and then we can work together to figure out how we can do what we need to do in such a way that both of our boundaries are being met and taken care of.

I see that being super, super different than a disagreement. We can have a disagreement on what our needs are, and that might actually be more of a conflict because it’s deeper than an opinion. It’s more at the need level, even potentially more at the value level. If I express a boundary and say back to the two-hour conversation, like, “I can have this conversation for two hours,” and if we make an agreement to stop at two hours and then the other party pushes us to continue, I don’t personally see that as a boundary violation unless I stay on and violate my own boundary.

It may be an agreement violation, or did you forget our agreement? We agreed we would end the conversation after two hours. I think that’s what I want to offer in terms of boundary violation versus a disagreement versus manipulation and versus mistreatment. If every time we talk and I’m like, “I can talk to you for two hours and no more than two,” and there becomes this pattern of even though we agreed to end the conversation after two hours, you still continue pushing for more time, then I’m going to probably call that mistreatment because we have continually made an agreement that continues to be pushed.

I’m going to ask questions about, “Okay, two hours is clearly not enough time for us to do what it is that we are here to do. So let’s get creative and come up with different ways of doing this.” I hope that makes sense.

**KH:**It does. And I appreciate that framing, because I think people often talk about boundaries as rules for other people, rather than as limits we need to know and uphold ourselves. At the same time, whether we call them boundaries or limitations or something else, there are absolutely lines that other people should not cross, and sometimes they do. And that’s something we have to address as well.

[musical interlude]

So when you are in the middle of a conflict and your mind is spinning, where do you even begin? What helps people get oriented before they jump to conclusions or rush toward next steps?

**TJ:**Okay. Yeah, this part is so, so important. I just want to say there are truly so many ways for folks to get oriented and re-centered, and there’s no right way, there’s no single way. I’m just going to share some methods that I use and that I’ve picked up over the years from friends and teachers. Truly, and this is my framework, I’m a former acupuncturist, I’m a yoga educator, so I am going to ask, okay, what is going on with my body?

When I’m angry, that is not always the first place that I want to be looking, just being transparent. I really enjoy living in my head. I really have to work at engaging my body, and listening to my body, and taking care of my body sometimes. It’s not always a happy place for me as a survivor of trauma and violence. This is part of why I study stuff like yoga and embodied ways of making theater because it’s fascinating to me and it’s so hard, and it’s something I have to work at.

I find when I can just slow down and ask that question, “Okay, what’s going on with my body?” Then I’m going to be able to name what’s going on. So activating that prefrontal cortex, “Oh, my heart is pounding, my ears are really hot, my stomach is rumbling,” when we can make those observations without putting a story onto it, I want to really, really emphasize the power of that, intercepting the situation before we can start spinning out and telling the story, “Oh, so-and-so is fucked up. This is bad. I got to get out of here.”

Okay, what do I need, and can I take some time to give my body what it needs? Back to boundary violations, I cannot [overstate] the importance of listening to the body. Very recently, I made a huge mistake and I almost took some actions that would’ve been very, very harmful. When I look back at the inciting incident, the situation, the conditions that led up to making a very potentially bad mistake, I see my body, I see myself pushing myself past a moment when I was actually able to function.

I was under great stress. I was actually doing this thing where I was typing and writing emails while I’m crying. That would’ve been a really good moment to do what I’m telling you all to do, to pause and to say, “Hold the phone. What is going on and what do I need?” I think if I had listened to myself at that time, I would’ve probably quit writing the email I was writing and passed that work off to someone else, and probably taken the rest of the day off, something like that if I had that opportunity.

But I violated my own boundary in that moment and pushed forward, and ended up potentially doing something pretty harmful. When I say take the time to check in with your body, I’m not… Well, people can interpret it how they want to, but I really cannot [overstate] the importance of doing this moment of caring intervention for yourself. Take the space, seize it, keep in mind it can be a very important harm prevention step.

Then if you happen to have a little list of things handy for you, like a little safety plan (I got this nugget from Vision Change Win from their security school training), then this is a good time to check out your little list of things that help you get oriented and re-centered, grounded. I personally know it’s difficult to remember that you have this list, and so you can think about taping it on your wall, someplace where you’re going to see it and have ready access to it.

Or if you have a homie that you trust, they can be kind of the holder of your safety plan and they can remind you, “Oh, hey, well, here are some options that tend to help you.” Then they can remind you of some of the things that might help. Some things to consider putting on your list or to consider trying is stuff like easy breathing, taking a walk, get the hell out of the situation. I really personally love doing some form of bilateral stimulation, so fancy way of saying engaging your left side of your body and your right side of your body in some kind of way.

You can think about jumping jacks. You can think about just shaking your limbs. There’s a theater game where you count down from eight, shaking all of your limbs eight times, then seven times, then six. I love it. There’s the butterfly hug where you give yourself a little hug, crossing your arms over your chest, and then maybe tapping your hands on your chest or even squeezing your arms. Something like that.

A nice thing to try could be getting some cold water on your face, or going out into the cold, just stimulating your body in that kind of way. If you need to cry, cry. You may not be in a place to laugh, but talking with a friend or getting yourself out of the situation and giving yourself the release you need is so important, and laughter can help. There’s a form of Qigong that is called Laughter Qigong where you literally make yourself laugh. It’s super goofy, but it works.

I learned from Vision Change Win too that peppermint gum or peppermint hard candy can really help to shift your body out of the fight, flight, freeze moment into more of a rest, digest, parasympathetic activation. In general, engaging the senses. Again, there’s no wrong way to do this. It really depends on the moment and depends on what you have access to, but I think whatever you do, just take that time.

Then once you’re in a place where, okay, maybe we’re not at the super high-intensity activation moment, we might be breathing calmer, we might be able to activate our curiosity, then this is when I would take some time to check in with your value system or maybe your personal code of ethics. How do you want to show up in this moment? That can be a good moment to set an intention, maybe write down one or two values that can guide you as you navigate the situation.

Examples of values: kindness, honesty, relationship, like these big concepts that guide so much of our behavior and that really live at the root of why we even do movement work. So those are just some ideas, but there really is no wrong way to do it as long as you’re doing it.

**KH:**I love these suggestions. I’m also thinking about something our friend Dean Spade talks about in Love In A Fucked Up World, about asking yourself what else is true. I find this so useful. And I’m thinking of a moment last year when I had a conflict that very easily could have spiraled with someone. And part of it was that thing that you’re talking about, about people overextending. And that resonates so much, Tanuja. I think that so many of us as organizers, so many of our worst moments, when we realize, “Oof, I really fumbled that situation,” happen when we’ve really overextended ourselves, and we’re running on fumes. I’ve seen it, again and again, and I understand why it happens. Everything we’re doing feels so important, that we can’t imagine taking our hands off of it, but in those moments, we’re not stopping to think about how reactive we can become in that condition. And when we get into that highly reactive state, which can happen quite suddenly when we’re emotionally, physically, or intellectually exhausted, we can start to lose access to our critical thinking skills, or even our values based thinking.

So our ability to navigate the conflict or the question at hand is diminished, and then we make the wrong move and oof, now something has blown up in our face. Then, we have a much bigger mess to deal with, and how did we get there? By thinking that something we’ve now harmed — the cause, the campaign, the group, the work — was too important for us to attend to our own needs, or take some space. So I want us to be really conscious of that pattern.

I also want us to be conscious of it in other people, when that’s something we can hold. I am thinking about that situation I mentioned, that happened last year, when I brought someone I respect some feedback, and it did not land well. They said something really escalatory to me in response, and in a different time in my life, I would have matched that energy. I would have lobbed one right back at them. But I was in a place in my life, in my work, and in my mind, where I could ask myself, “what else was going on here?” And I could recognize that this person was exhausted, and trying really hard, and maybe feeling unappreciated in a way that I sometimes have, when I’ve overextended myself. So, I was able to approach the situation from a place of trying to reframe it, and figure out what we both needed in order to move forward. So, I guess what I am getting at here is that we need to be able to hold each other in our humanity, and sometimes, we have to create offramps, when we feel ourselves being pulled into a conflict that doesn’t need to escalate.

Of course, in that case, I knew who I was dealing with, and I knew what else was true about them, and we don’t always know that about each other. Sometimes, we are giving each other the benefit of the doubt. And other times, we may be relying on the kind of group agreements that we’ve talked about, and leaning on those understandings to guide us, and refocus the situation.

We’re getting low on time, and if folks are getting worried, because we haven’t talked about the thing you were hoping we would talk about, please be reassured, we still might! We knew this topic was more than we could possibly tackle in a single hour, so we will be coming back for another full episode on this subject.

But as we wind this one down, I want to ask, what are some of the diagnostic questions that people should first ask themselves when they are trying to understand what kind of conflict they are actually in?

**TJ:**Okay. Beautiful question, Kelly. And I’m so glad we’re going to have a second episode because we really could talk for hours about this, but okay, you’re in a conflict. You want to understand what kind of conflict you’re actually in. I want to put a pin in the idea of decision-making under stress. I’d love to talk about that. But first, I’m going to refer back to Spring Up and a set of questions that they invite us to use when we’re starting to analyze a conflict. And we’ve talked about these definitions, right? So is what’s going on a disagreement, is this a true conflict, or is this a harm? So what am I experiencing? Back to the body question, am I just deeply uncomfortable because of what’s going on? Am I being held accountable? Am I in a learning moment? And this is really, really scary and weird.

Am I being challenged in a way that I’m not used to being challenged? Ask those questions. But if you believe that there is some kind of harm happening, then try to identify, okay, what system of oppression is this actually perpetuating? And what are the power dynamics that are at play here? So those are some questions you can ask. And then I really recommend, I cannot recommend enough the In It Together toolkit. It has a whole diagnostic section that is going to invite you to identify what are the events or series of events or interpersonal conflict or critiques that you have. And it’s going to ask you, is this a conflict with a group? Yes or no? Or is this a conflict between specific individuals? And then it’s going to invite you to get really specific about, okay, if it’s between individuals, let’s try to understand what’s going on between these individuals. Are these people who are experiencing oppression themselves, an historical oppression?

Is this a conflict involving behaviors that we’ve already named as harmful? Have we had this conversation and this behavior is popping up again? Is this about the way things are being done in the group or in a relationship? Is this about expectations that are not being met? Is somebody not fulfilling their responsibilities? So getting into describing, getting very specific about what’s going on as much as possible.

And I want to say about decision-making, when you’re in conflict, you’re making decisions under duress and you’re potentially making decisions in a state where you’re heightened, potentially physically, your mind might be going all over the place. So you do that moment of pause, check in, but I want to add, ask, right? Before I make any decisions about what to do, who will be impacted by this decision? It’s really important to bring that in because again, we are empathetic people, we are loving people, we love each other so much. That I know. And when we’re afraid, and like you said, Kelly, running on fumes and trying to do the most and making decisions in the worst conditions possible, we’re going to forget that we love each other. So bring those people in. Who is involved in this conflict? Who is impacted by the decision that I’m about to make? Bring those people in, remember who you love and that you love them.

But other questions to ask, is this conflict about strategy that I disagree with? Is this about a tactic that I disagree with, back to that misalignment and disagreement, or is this related to money? And we could talk forever about conflict and money, Kelly, but really try to identify the factor