Dialog across difference #32: When the other person is irredeemable

Of course, deciding that the person is the problem, in direct contradiction to a tenet of conflict transformation, is something that most logically can only happen once you've tried best practices toward conflict transformation and they clearly rebuff and invalidate all of them. Without having done that, no matter how tempting it is to label another person as the problem, we can never be sure. 

This is not to say it can't happen; some people cannot seem to rise to decency no matter how often they are approached in an adaptive manner. In my experience, I've only had one of those in the past 25 years and he was a doozy. 

Any parent would understand my ultimate decision that, in fact, he was the problem when he endangered my son without a single care or concern, and that was after much other offensive behavior. And, like so many conflictual situations, it was made worse by forced proximity; he was a housemate, in my case renting a room from me and trashing everything in drunken idiotic episodes.

I tried to channel Kwame Christian, who is a fine presenter with a range of skills, views, and insights. His term, compassionate curiosity, is one we use on the Portland Peace Team when we deal with escalated people whose behavior is otherwise inexplicable. Asking why, getting an answer, paraphrasing to check that you heard correctly, and then asking a new question to prompt answers to your compassionate curiosity is not only good in the moment to take down the tension, but good in the effort to negotiate on the merits. 

In my conflict with that fellow, it failed repeatedly and I accepted that, possibly due to my lack of skills or perspective, he effectively was the problem. One deëscalation tactic I didn't try is one advocated by the lead deëscalation trainer for the Royal College of Nursing in London, who advises to simply sit, allowing the other person to tower over you (Dean, 2024). She says it tends to create an atmosphere of calm as normative, and frequently works after a minute or two, once the person seems to have decided that, on a physical and demonstrative level, they are dominant but that their dominance isn't producing fear or surrender, making it not particularly useful. 

References

Christian, Kwame (2018). Finding confidence in conflict. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6Zg65eK9XU&t=325s

Dean, Erin (2024). De-escalation: 7 tips for handling conflict situations. Nursing Standard 39(1), 57-59.