Deëscalation tip #53

Why?

Why would you call me that?

Why are you insisting that my friend doesn't "belong" here?

Why are you upset?

To deëscalate, you seek to identify the interests below the positions. The classic simple example of deëscalation by doing this is the story of the busy Mom and two scrapping daughters, yelling at each other in the kitchen with one orange in a bowl. 

Busy Mom grabs the orange, whacks it in two, gives a half to each child, and is off to her next task. Girls still give each other the stinkeye as they take their half. Their next conflict isn't far off.

The position of each daughter was that she wanted the orange. 

If Mom had the time, she could have inquired about those positions. 

"Why do you want the orange, Taneesha?"

"To get the juice, Mommy." 

"Why do you want the orange, Beryl?"

"To grate the peel into a cake recipe, Mommy." 

Now busy Mom has investigated and found out the relative interests of the girls. She can resolve this by giving the entire peel to Beryl and all the juice to Taneesha. Each child gets everything she wanted. Classic win-win.

If Dad would help out more, perhaps busy Mom would have the time to teach Taneesha and Beryl to engage in this process themselves, to become skilled at principled negotiation. Instead, busy Mom has to act as arbitrator (whack the orange in half) or mediator (investigate to determine interests and seek win-win outcome). She brings in the elements of principled negotiation but doesn't have the time to do the ultimate labor-saving act, that of education so that the next potential conflict between Taneesha and Beryl might be processed successfully by them, with their new skills.

If the school system would fold principled negotiation into education with the same priority it gives history or math, perhaps our society wouldn't be chock-full of folks who manage conflict poorly, escalate easily, set new records for gun violence, divorce at high rates, and send more people to prison than any other country, and spend more on the military preparing to kill than any country on Earth ever has. Perhaps.

Just sayin'... deëscalation starts with education, in the home, in the schools. Otherwise, we play Whack-an-Orange forever and it more frequently escalates to Whack-Each-Other.