We all like to believe we’re graceful at navigating conflict – engaging curiously, speaking honestly, staying grounded. We like to believe this, but then we find ourselves in the midst of a heated moment and we’re feeling flushed and indignant, and suddenly all of our gracious and creative ideas about how to engage fly out the window (yes, our team includes ourselves in this wholeheartedly).

Much of our work at Trust Labs revolves around the idea that if we are to effectively build our capacity to stay in relationship, even when it’s hard – to get more comfortable with heat, to not lose ourselves in the throes of our activations – we have to take stock of our instinctual responses to conflict (withdraw, shut down, ice out, lash out) and build our capacity to notice and consider options beyond our most instinctual ones. We know that building this capacity requires real practice and reps, often through catching our activations in real time and in both low-stakes environments and higher-stakes ones.

If you’ve ever engaged with us, you might know that we take a number of approaches in service of this work: in our cohort trainings and workshops, we use “case in point” methodology which invites participants to study themselves in action, paying attention to group dynamics when they emerge in real time, and prompting participants to explore their activations and instinctual responses as they arise rather than preemptively or retrospectively. We also create lower-heat containers to try on new skills (see our recent conversation on The Peoples’ Supper) and strengthen the muscle for pluralistic living that can extend into participants’ lives beyond that one environment. We try to live into this practice ourselves, using our own work as data for what it takes to truly navigate relationships with grit – and we try to have a little bit of fun while we do it!

Which is why we’re excited to invite you to a collaboration we’re hosting, one that bridges two things our team loves: pop culture and conflict skills!

You’re invited!

Next week, on August 6, we invite you to join a public workshop called Rehearsals in Defiance, in collaboration with friend of the org, facilitator, and chaplain, Nathalie Folkerts. This 90-minute workshop, designed by Nathalie and co-facilitated with Maya of Trust Labs, is a chance to step into a fictional conflict and imagine the creative ways we might navigate an issue that isn’t our own – a rehearsal for those moments when we’re caught off guard by something someone says or does, and our minds go blank.

Using a storyline from pop culture (film, TV, books), we’ll analyze a conflict together, then dream up small, human-scale interventions we might try in real life if faced with a similar set of circumstances. Together, we’ll practice the courage to act in alignment with what we care about – even when systems, stories, or relationships make that difficult. Think improv, meets fanfiction, meets our recent report Explorations in Relational Grit. Consider it a rehearsal room for the skills we’re trying to build.

So, join us. We’ll dig into a conflict from the recent hit show Off Campus (cue: love, sports, and tension of all kinds), analyze it together, then try on new ways of navigating a conflict that will likely echo something you’ve faced in your own life. Sign up below and share with someone who needs to be in the room!

Date: Thursday, August 6

Time: 5pm - 6:30pm PST / 8pm - 9:30 pm EST

Registration Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/QRfIxKpNTqWiCV9ns_8L2A#/registration

You can learn more about Nathalie here and Maya here.

Our first conversation is about a tool we call The People’s Supper: thoughtfully designed and facilitated dinner conversations meant to elicit stories, connection, and wonder about who we are to one another - especially among difficult moments. Join us (K, Anna, and Maya) as we chat about this tool, what it can / cannot do, and how we understand it as a part of our broader endeavor at Trust Labs’ to support relational grit. You can watch the video by clicking “play” above, or read the transcript below.

Transcript:

*(conversation edited slightly for clarity and flow):

Anna Del Castillo: I want you to imagine that you’re walking into a ballroom, and there are about 20 tables spread throughout the room. At the center of each table is a bouquet of flowers and these small question cards. And you walk in, you don’t know many of the people in the room, you don’t know what these question cards are for, but you enter with curiosity, and you’re met at your table by a host. Someone who greets you, says welcome, and invites you to start looking at the card. We’re inviting you in today to a conversation about the People’s Suppers. My name is Anna Del Castillo. I use she/ella pronouns, and I work for Trust Labs. And today, I have the gift of chatting with two of my dear friends, Maya and K, about recent moments of deep human connection that have given me a lot of hope and model what I think so many of our communities deeply need right now.

We’re talking about the People’s Suppers, which are conversations around a shared meal. The People’s Suppers began at a tender moment, right after the 2016 election, when our communities were fractured and in need of repair. Between 2017 and 2019, over 20,000 people sat down at tables together in more than 100 cities and towns across the country. We’re continuing the People’s Suppers, and what we found is that when you put people together around a table and ask them to actually share their stories and not their titles or talking points, something really shifts, and real connection and the ability to practice pluralism instead of just talking about pluralism becomes possible. So today, we’re gonna jump into a conversation about some recent People’s Suppers experiences that our team has hosted, and we are in such good company to have K, who’s been there from the beginning, and Maya, who’s the beautiful curator of so many of the question cards that I mentioned. So let’s begin with some intros. I’m going to pass it to you, Maya.

Maya Pace: Hi, it’s so good to be here. I love chatting with the two of you, it feels like such a treat. My name is Maya Pace, I’m the Curriculum Director at Trust Labs, and I am reporting live from the Bay Area in California.

K Scarry: Amazing.

K Scarry: Hi, I’m K Scary, calling from right outside Washington, D.C. Similarly, really just grateful to be part of this. This has been a version of my work and life for so many years, and… I feel like this is really good company to get to dig into it with and dissect it a little bit.

Anna Del Castillo: And as I mentioned, my name is Anna. I am based here in Washington, D.C, and this is going to be a casual conversation about what we’ve noticed with our recent People’s Suppers. So, K, I want to ask you, as someone who has been there from the inception, can you tell us a bit about how the People’s Supper came to exist?

K Scarry: Yeah, I’m happy to. So, I actually joined just after its inception, so I wasn’t in the room where it happened when folks were coming up with this idea, but… I think a lot of the story I tell myself about it is that right after the 2016 election the acuity of polarization felt really significant for a lot of folks in a way that, for many people, felt new. It felt like it was a really large part of the cultural conversation happening. Like, wait a second…what this election illuminated for me is I don’t know my neighbor as much as I thought I did, or that person surprised me, and we didn’t know how to hold complexity in one another and also didn’t know how to hold the grief of that moment and it felt like rupture across a lot of our communities.

For me, the People’s Supper was a response that said, “Oh, actually there’s a couple of things that feel really important to me at this moment. One is the reminder that though we often think of relationships to be natural, there’s actually a lot of skills and tools and intentionality around building relationships that we can use to turn toward each other to get into practice in order to do some repair work together.”

The other side of that is that in the moments of surprise of polarization, it could feel really vulnerable to reach out, to try and have a different kind of conversation with other people. So the People’s Supper formed at that point as a collaboration amongst three different organizations who I’ve heard said were unlikely bedfellows who were thinking about how each of their communities could use this kind of tool to kind of get beneath the headlines and understand the stories that often propel us to show up in the world in the ways we do, but aren’t always the ones we’re apt to share. And the invitation to come into this experience means that I as the facilitator can take some of the vulnerability on so that you can show up and – under the cover of my invitation – you can have the kind of conversation that you might really be craving.

Anna Del Castillo: Thanks, K. Connected to that, Maya, what is a People’s Supper and what is it not?

Maya Pace: I think it’s a really important question because it feels like often in today’s day and age, when we talk about bridging, when we talk about getting to know one another, we often think about large scale events. And the People’s Supper is a tool in service of deep connection. We use it often as a kind of shortcut, if you will, to help people drop beneath the patterns that we get caught in in the ways we talk to each other. We talk about the weather, we talk about our families, we talk about where we’re from. Perhaps these are kind of the patterns that feel most familiar to us as we’re moving through our day to day. And there’s real beauty to them. And they can also prevent us from really getting to know one another on a deeper level. Or we get caught in opinion and belief, and we never actually understand the stories that shape us, the stories that help us kind of figure out how we formed those beliefs.

The People’s Supper is a tool in service of kind of dropping down to understand the stories that form us, the stories that shape us. Many of our questions are asking folks to “think about a time when,” and helping them have a little bit of space to kind of dig into that and really witness other people’s stories who they may never have thought to ask about or who they may never have found themselves around a shared table with.

So in that way, I think the People’s Supper is a really beautiful and important kind of modeling of the types of conversations we can have and what those conversations make possible. It is also a time bound event. It is one event where people come together and share an experience and then leave the room at the end of the evening. At times we’ve done series of suppers, so there is a way that it can be used over time and sequentially. But most of this work of pluralism and of really learning how to live well together amidst friction and disagreement and pain, and honoring past rupture and harm, that is long, slow work. The People’s Supper is one intervention in a much longer arc that is needed to really bring people together and build our own internal capacity, to… to live well together amidst the real challenge and ripe discomfort of figuring out who we are to each other and how we want to be.

K Scarry: I wonder if I might jump in and share some of how I even think about like the possibility and the pitfalls of this kind of model that we’ve just learned through doing this in so many different communities around so many different topic areas. We’ve done some that have really addressed the thing that feels most polarizing in a particular community at a certain time. We’ve done some that have been more broad. What I’ll say is that, I often think about it as a place of practice. Like, when we think about the kind of relational tools we might want to cultivate for the ways we want to be in our communities with each other, the idea of learning something from now until forever feels so daunting to me. But if I can invite you to try it on for an hour, can you–for an hour–practice suspending your assumptions? Can you–for an hour–practice noticing what comes up in your body when someone says something you disagree with, and figuring out how you actually want to engage before just quickly reacting?

There’s a way in which that can be a place of real practice. I also think there’s a lot to be said for the kind of cover the space can provide, especially when we’re connecting folks across ideological or identity differences, which is not always the goal, but sometimes is something we’ve been really intentional about. It might be true that I have somebody really personal to me who shares a perspective that is aligned with someone I’m sitting across the table from, and I have no idea how to have the conversation with that person who’s really dear to me. And the stakes of trying to go there with them are really high. And there’s a way in which you can kind of empathize, “I’m actually able to engage this person who I don’t have as much stakes with and hear a perspective that cracks something open for me that then I can take into the rest of my personal life.” Something about that feels really critical. I also think that there’s a simplicity to the model that allows people to see that this kind of connection is possible. The challenge of it–and I think it’s important to say, because we’re part of a larger field of people who are thinking about repair and who are thinking about bridging–one of those buzzy words that I squirm at a little bit, if I’m honest.

Maya Pace: This team likes to hold some of those words with a little bit of, “I don’t know how this sits in my body.” Pluralism is one, bridging is another.

K Scarry: Totally. But one thing I think that was tough was in the early days we started as a 100-day campaign. In the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency, there’d be 100 dinners happening all over the country of people connecting across lines of identity and ideological difference, and it was going to present as a counter-narrative to the polarization in our country. That felt really significant. What we found is that some people used it to prove they weren’t part of the problem. Sometimes people would sit down at a table and say, “Oh, see, I heard a different perspective. I was empathetic. I’m not the problem.” And that felt like… a thing we had to really design against, or design with explicitness around. I think a thing that sometimes happens in the field is the narrative that “sitting down for dinner, that’s where pluralism happens.” Instead of, like, this is a place we practice the kinds of relationships that we can extend beyond this place to live more integrated, pluralistic lives, in a sense.

Anna Del Castillo: I feel like what you and Maya are saying is so important that this is a tool, it’s a place to practice. Maya, you always say that the work takes reps. The idea isn’t that it’s one and done, like “I did this thing, I felt really good, I talked to people who I disagreed with, and I left the room.” It’s the invitation, and it’s why we send people home with the question cards that are always beautifully designed. Shout out to you, Maya. But the idea is that you take those questions and you bring them back to your community, or to the next table that you need to host, or the conversation that you’ve been wanting to have.

But the thing that I’m thinking about, K, is what you said earlier of giving people, cover and just a little bit of permission, because the whole entire People’s Supper is quite simple. You know, it’s curated questions, a table host, it’s an intentional space, but what I found to be… really interesting about this work is that people really appreciate the permission to be invited to be tech-free for 90 minutes, to not have their phone out, and to be invited to go deeper. I’m just always curious about how we give people more permission to do that in other spaces.

So, connected to that, Maya, I’m so curious, you’ve designed both question cards for our most recent People’s Suppers. One was at the Social Media Victims Remembrance Day here in Washington, D.C, on the Hill for many bereaved parents and allies who are tackling social media harm. And the other was in Seattle at the Council on Foundation’s Building Together conference, which gathered many different foundations and people doing pluralism and belonging work. These were two completely different audiences. Can you talk us through how you created the questions for both of those events, and just in general, what goes into that process as you’re assessing different needs?

Maya Pace: You’re being very generous to me, Anna, saying I designed the question cards, and I think in reality, it takes a village to kind of, like, hone and fine-tune the questions. We take the creation of the questions and the writing of them very, very seriously as a team of like, how specifically can we frame this to push against our instincts, to talk about belief, to invite vulnerability? So this part of the work is one of the things that is most interesting to me, like, really, what is the craft of a question? Anna, to your articulation of these two different groups, we were thinking about each supper as having really different intentions.

Within the group of people who are all thinking about pluralism, we were at a conference setting. Part of our intention was to invite people to move, in a different way than a conference often invites us to do. Right? Conferences can be really easy to kind of stay in the mode of business cards, in the mode of, a little bit of really healthy and normal kind of jockeying for, like, who’s been in this work? Who are you in this work? And a real kind of desire to perform competence. It’s a really natural thing. It’s a very human thing. And we were really wanting folks to try something else on. And as K has mentioned, to have permission to do that differently, to have some cover to do that differently. So the questions in that context were designed to elicit stories from folks of where they felt at their edge. Where do you not know how to move? What are the moments, the relationships in your life, the moments of pluralism, the moments where you could move pluralistically, where you’re invited to imagine into a perspective that might feel really difficult for you? What are those moments? What are the edges that you find yourself coming up against? Where have you found yourself either apologizing or receiving an apology that feels really meaningful to you?

These types of questions that ask people to kind of go to the edge of their competence and explore together. Again, a big part of that was because the environment was talking about pluralism itself, and a huge part of that that I think often gets moved too quickly past is this idea that it is really vulnerable, humbling work, and that we are often asked to shift what we think, and it can be really destabilizing. So we were trying to create a kind of micro-moment of that, if you will, and for people to learn more about themselves and each other.

In the context of Social Media Victims Remembrance Day, that’s a really different space. It’s a group of people who are sharing a profound commitment to tech accountability, and many of whom have experienced immense tragedy with the loss of their children. The intention with that was to give people a space to explore their stories in a way that is more private than what they are often asked to do in front of media or other kinds of public facing venues. To have more time to explore their stories with each other, and to do it in affinity spaces. So we had designed the space in partnership with the organizers so that folks were matched at tables with others who shared a similar experience to them, whether allies or bereaved parents or impacted families. We shaped the questions to be specific to that area which allowed folks to drop in in a different way together and probe the edges of their stories and feel witnessed in their stories, perhaps differently than they might have felt able to if they were with folks who didn’t share that particular experience with them.

Anna Del Castillo: As I hear you talk about both of those events, both were so different yet both deeply impactful, and it made me think about the role of the table hosts. I’m curious for both of you, why does it matter to have the table hosts present? Can we speak to that?

K Scarry: Yeah, we think about the table host as a facilitator and participant. Like, this is also a person who’s sharing their story, who’s modeling vulnerability, and it’s a light facilitation. We want to give people tools to be able to move through moments of difficulty, or if someone says something that really is beyond the bounds of what’s appropriate in the space, how do you move through that with the kind of firmness and generosity that those moments often require? So we offer a table host training before all of these gatherings that we offer. I think the role serves multiple purposes: You can tell people all day, “this really is a place you can come tell your stories,” but then they show up and they’re like, “but really, can we?” I think the purpose is twofold. It’s one – that kind of signal to people that this is deliberate, it’s thoughtful, we’ve actually built this such that you could be well held while we’re asking vulnerability of you, like, we don’t take that ask lightly.

I also think that it does make people feel more at ease to know like, okay, someone’s holding this, someone’s holding us. And the kind of modeling, if someone doesn’t jump in right away, knowing you have somebody who’s ready to kind of kick it off. I find that usually when people don’t immediately jump in, it’s not typically because they don’t have a story that’s coming to mind, it’s because they’re testing the space still. Can this actually hold the story that’s coming up for me? And I find that a person who’s able to just really generously hold the space, who has some training and tools and can offer steady presence of like, yep, we really can do this is, you know, makes all the difference as one of the really key ingredients of the space. And then similarly at the end of most of the trainings I lead, I remind hosts, like, at the end of the day you’re having a conversation, and so use the things you already know to be true and the experiences you already have about what make conversations go well and what don’t, and give some thought to that in advance. I’ve been in high-stakes People’s Suppers around really tense issues, and having somebody who’s going to be grounded at the table, kind of reiterating – even if not explicitly reiterating, but in their behavior – that we really can try this thing together allows other people that same kind of permission.

Maya Pace: I really resonate with everything you said, K, and the one piece I’d add is that all the table hosts are members of the community that we’re doing a People’s Supper with, and in that way, I think one extension of what you’re speaking to, K, is that we really believe anyone can do this. Like, this is both not rocket science and requires a certain amount of intentionality and kind of… direction. And so we’re really trying to also build up the capacity of the community that we’re serving through the People’s Suppers by equipping table hosts with just a little bit of guidance and a little bit of permission, again, to kind of hold a conversation in a specific way that hopefully can translate out of the room, as well, and into the community writ large.

K Scarry: Yeah, and return to people’s own wisdom. We get asked sometimes if we’ll bring in a facilitation team, but very much by design, that’s not what we do here because we do actually think this is something that communities can hold, and often it doesn’t really take that much to remind people what they already know about how to do this.

Anna Del Castillo: I’m also just thinking about the gift of being asked to step into leadership. At our most recent Social Media Victims Remembrance Day event, I wasn’t a table host, and I just got to sit at a table while someone from the community was facilitating the table. And it was a young person who was absolutely just like holding such beautiful space, who was pivoting when they needed to and I could see in them a light and an energy and a feeling of excitement. We could have provided all of the facilitators, but that’s not the goal of this work. The goal is that we can bring this experience and then these conversations continue on without us.

And I feel like that’s a good transition to the close of this conversation. I think many people get to know Trust Labs because of the People’s Suppers. Our last two PS events have had hundreds of participants, but really, the work that we do at Trust Labs is long, engaged and deep work. It’s not just the People’s Supper events, even though, if we’re being so honest, I absolutely love it when we get to host a People’s Supper! But I’m curious if we can conclude this conversation by talking about what does the People’s Supper open up? What is the edge that these suppers allow people to step more fully into? What do we hope people continue after they experience one of these events?

Maya Pace: You mentioned how the hosts can kind of feel like, “Oh, I can do this.” And I think that’s true of the participants, too. There’s a kind of like, “Oh, we can do this. We can do this. Even when there’s a clunky moment, even when there’s a painful moment, even when there are tears, even when there is laughter, we can do this.”

And it won’t always be easy, but I think that the People’s Supper can open up the experience of oneself and of one’s community to the idea that we can hold through really difficult moments. It doesn’t mean we always have to be in a room together having dinner. And so much of our work as Trust Labs, including and beyond the People’s Supper, is about building folks’ capacity to tolerate tension and heat and stay resourced with the relational skills that they need to kind of move through that, to be able to say, “Whoa, this is really intense, I’m having a huge activation. I’m feeling really angry or really devastated by what you just said to me. And I now know how to track that I’m feeling activated. And so I can have more options of how to move.” A critical part of that work, in addition to the long term internal capacity building and collective capacity building, is having an experience of knowing you can do it and then being able to reference back to that in hard moments. And it feels like the People’s Supper can open that up for folks.

K Scarry: I’ll say, a couple of stories come to mind for me that illustrate the possibility of this as a tool: I’m thinking about a congregation we did a series of suppers with a few years ago when they were really reckoning with a tension point in their congregation about a decision they were trying to make together about a current cultural issue. This church had lost a third of their membership from just not knowing how to move through this tension.

We offered a series of suppers, but some of what we did in the planning was to ask them: What’s gotten in the way before? Like, what might we need to give you all a tool around? We discovered, number one, they could never get underneath the issue itself. They were not understanding the different animating stories that propelled people to their landing places on that issue. The community now has the People’s Supper in their own toolkit when they get gridlocked, they can just do this. They can be like, “let’s actually just have a meal together and ask a different kind of question to get under what’s really the stakes here?”

The other thing that’s true is in that planning process, you know, something they mentioned is that the thing they noticed as a breakdown in all the conversations they’d had prior were generational divides around language usage. They were like, “We’ve never identified that that was really the thing, and we don’t know how to move through it.” And so when we curated the People’s Supper for them, we gave them a tool, like, “When you notice someone say something that makes you bristle, here’s how you can respond, and when someone gives you that feedback, here’s how you can respond.” It gave them a tool that helped them move through something that had been a sticking point that was gonna show up in that supper because it was showing up in the community that they could then use in other instances. And a lot of the feedback we got afterwards was that the process also gave them some self-insight and a tool that they could use and then workshop together because they knew now it was possible to break through a thing that had been gridlocked around before.

K Scarry: Similarly, we used the People’s Supper to help a mayor’s office in Pennsylvania to connect his community across racial lines after a series of really difficult racial instances in the community that increased racial tensions. And then, out of the People’s Supper group formed a task force for the mayor’s office that was an accountability task force. That felt really important, and, 6 months in, as happens when you’re trying to work on something you’re really passionate about, that team was really struggling to kind of keep working together, and they were like, “You know what we need is a People’s Supper. We need to remember the humanity in each other, and that we trust each other, and that we want good from one another.” That as a grounding tool, as something that you can kind of call upon, that steadies you such that you can then meet relational conflict or heat also, I think, is a really interesting way that this can kind of be a tool that plays in a long-term relationship.

Anna Del Castillo: All the stories that y’all have shared make me feel like I’m transported back to the seats of People’s Suppers that I’ve been in and just, I’m always really interested when tears arise. I think that tears are wisdom and I don’t think that we have enough spaces where people can cry together. But I feel like what I want people to take with them after experiencing a People’s Supper is the gift of being witnessed, to continue to allow yourself to be witness in the fullness of who you are, which is a tall order. You know, earlier I said this is simple, and it’s actually not simple. To allow yourself to be viewed in the fullness of who you are. It makes me think of a friend who always says that attention is one of the deepest forms of love that we can give to each other.

I think that’s why people cry or feel really moved, not always, but often, in these experiences. It is because you get to feel that love of being seen and being witnessed. That’s what I want people to take from this experience, and the knowledge that you can do this too. We’ve said over and over again: it is possible to be together without distractions. It feels really radical these days to spend 90 minutes with people without looking at a phone. It’s a screen-free, technology-free event, and that is such a gift that I want people to continue doing, like, being together without distractions, and without the technology, and just practicing what it means to be human with a neighbor.

Maya Pace: You know, I’m thinking about how there’s such a conversation about loneliness right now, and I think often we talk about loneliness as if the solve for loneliness is something shared, like sharing a particular thing together, an experience or a part of your life story or whatever the case might be, and I think there’s truth to that. I think that can be really important. And Anna, hearing you speak about slow attention and witness, I’m reminded that one of the beautiful things that comes out of a People’s Supper is that we might feel slightly less lonely, not only because we’ve shared an experience together, but actually because we’ve seen that we are all so particular and everything about each person’s story is so specific to them and that there is a kind of sharedness in that. That it doesn’t require us to have exactly the same life story, but that there can be something really beautiful and connecting about recognizing the particularities in another person, and finding something through that. We are having really different lives, and how beautiful that I get to learn about yours, and you get to learn about mine.

Anna Del Castillo: That’s a beautiful note to end on, Maya. And I just want to thank you both and the people who have hosted tables, people who have made these experiences possible. It’s a really beautiful thing that we’re doing. As we were having this conversation, I realized it’s been almost a decade of the People’s Supper. What a celebration. This conversation helps us to honor this project that doesn’t belong to us or those initial three organizations. It truly belongs to the people. We will share information on how to get connected to us if you’re interested in hosting a People’s Supper. We look forward to seeing how the next 10 years will go.

—

Learn more about our work, including the People’s Supper, at www.wearetrustlabs.org

We all know how easy it is to talk about a thing, but because this writing was shaped by real, messy, gritty practice, and in relationship with people all across the country, this conversation will invite us into practice too.

The anchoring questions of our public conversation is: what did we learn, and how might we all live into these learnings more robustly, together?

Register Here!

Together we’ll dig into:

• What led to our social feedback loops getting so off kilter;

• What sucks about community, why we like to silver-lining it all the time, and how we maybe (maybe) might just a bit more honest about when it sucks;

• What relational grit is and how to strengthen it;

• And, critically, how we (yes you!!! And me!!!!) might really, actively, change how we think about and face conflict, tension, and heat;

• Then we’ll practice/reflect/play a bit :)

We promise to talk at you for a bit so you can have a moment to breathe, but this work is relational after all; so we’ll also be asking for your help: we’ll ask you to provide some insight into how these core learnings operate in your own life, what we might be missing, and how you are working to live into relational grit in your own life and world.

Join us. We can’t wait to see you there:

April 15: 1 - 2pm PT / 4 - 5pm ET

Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/WxjRQbw3Rc-vNW-Noz1ilQ#/registration

There are negative feedback loops: Your body gets too hot, so it sweats to cool off. And there are positive feedback loops: Your body produces one thing, which triggers it to produce more of the same. Breastfeeding is a classic example, so my last year has given me a front-row seat to that process: My daughter feeds, which triggers my body to make more. The check is her hunger: She gets full, so my body stops producing milk until she’s ready for the cycle to begin again. Something changes, which changes something else, which propels more of the same. Unchecked, it can cause things to snowball. (Taken literally, a snowball rolls downhill. As it gets bigger, its surface area grows, which means it can take on more snow. It continues to grow.)

Our social lives are also governed by feedback loops, both positive and negative. As kids, we’re rewarded for good behaviors and face consequences for bad. A child learns to make others laugh, and becomes the class clown. A kid hurts another’s feelings and faces social consequences, and learns not to do it again. The same is true of adults: Our bodies pick up on subtle (and not so subtle) cues — facial expressions, “vibes” — and we learn to modulate our behaviors based on that feedback.

But what happens when our ability to read cues goes awry, or there’s a flaw in our reward system? Another child laughs at someone else’s pain, creating an incentive to pile-on, and voila: bullying. We’re not scientists, but it seems something has gone terribly wrong with at least two of our social feedback loops.

One is happening on a macro scale, but having profound effects on our relationships. The concurrent crises we’re facing – the rise of authoritarianism and the decline of democratic norms, state violence and mass shootings, increasing natural disasters and the threat of climate catastrophe – are all having a corrosive effect on public trust. Social media platforms profit off of the outrage those crises engender, which only worsens the problem. We become less able to discern perceived threats from real ones, with the result that we grow more fearful of one another. Our mental health further deteriorates. We find ourselves quick to point fingers and assume the worst. Over time, our institutions and the communities that hold them – both of which are vital to how we meet and respond to crisis – become more and more brittle and prone to fracture. The crises deepen. In other words: Crisis begets mistrust, which begets more crisis. (For our purposes here, we’ll call this the Crisis Loop.)

The other is strictly relational, but having profound effects on our macro politics. Community is quite literally life-giving but it’s also annoying: When connection goes awry, as it often does, we retreat. Our social anxieties grow, and our skills diminish. We find ourselves more easily agitated by others’ actions and behaviors, and we retreat further. Over time, it becomes harder and harder to generate, let alone sustain, relationships. (We’ll call that the Relational Loop.)

COVID accelerated both effects, but they didn’t begin there.

Let’s start with the Crisis Loop. We humans have a built-in relational response to crisis: In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit writes about how moments of crisis often spark acts of altruism and solidarity that defy our status quo. That crisis can bring people together rather than drive them apart is an effect that’s been well-documented. For communities that already have a well established relational fabric, disaster further tightens the weave, leading to lower death tolls than places that lack that fabric. When people are socially connected to one another (even distantly) through what’s known as “social capital,” good things happen. Indeed, the power of social connection in the face of crisis was on powerful display recently in Minneapolis. Most of us can think of moments when a crisis drew us closer to others who were similarly impacted, or to people who helped when we needed it.

The problem is that social media has broken that effect: Now, when we experience outrage on another’s behalf, we often don’t have clear mechanisms to offer much in the way of tangible support. So, we go online (again), interrupting our natural tend-and-befriend response that would have us engage in acts of care in-person and offline.

Now let’s turn to the Relational Loop. One of the social consequences of the infinite scroll is that we spend more time looking at our phones and less time looking at each other. Our social skills diminish, we become more attached to the frictionless interactions that the scroll offers us, which means we want to spend less time with people and more time on our phones. (Think about your own behavior in a supermarket line, and how it’s evolved in the last 20 years.) And now, AI has introduced an even wilder reward system. AI expresses what feels like profound empathy: It’s available to listen 24/7, it doesn’t interrupt or turn the conversation back on itself, it’s almost universally affirming. We are headed toward a reality where we spend more time talking to Claude, and less time to each other. Over time, we may come to see bots as better friends (and therapists) than people.

The bad news: We can’t make those feedback loops go away.

The good news: We can each become the check.

Successfully interrupting those feedback loops requires that we learn to navigate heat, without shrinking or retreating on the one hand, or resorting to silencing or discarding on the other.

That’s the thesis behind our new report, “Explorations in Relational Grit: Field notes from the work of building communities that can hold.” In it, we do a deep-dive into stories and learnings about what it takes to help community leaders cultivate and sustain relationally sound strategies that can withstand heat. We draw on more than a decade spent creating and sustaining communities of care and growing and equipping relationally skilled leaders, from our earliest lessons leading The Dinner Party and The People’s Supper, to our work today with The Parents’ Network, to our work with campus-based leaders and local leaders working on immigration, across a range of red, blue, and purple states.

In the report, we offer our hopes for those working in and outside philanthropy: to push back on the mythologies that inadvertently undermine this work, to invest continually in the work of real relational formation, tending, and repair, and to focus less on abstract narratives and more on helping people at a local level stay in it with one another.

Today, too many of our relational containers are doing what decades of helicopter-parenting did to kids: In emphasizing safety, connection, productivity, and pleasure, we have left people vulnerable to everything in life that isn’t.

Getting in and staying in relationship is a muscle that needs building: Real relationships won’t just happen on their own, and more often than not, they’ll fizzle if left untended. Someone will say something or do something you find shitty, and voila: that connective Promised Land will recede further into the distance.

Our wish is deceptively simple: that community leaders refuse to treat community as merely an afterthought, after they take care of the “real work,” and that we free ourselves of the idea that friction is a flaw instead of a feature.

In today’s world, we find ourselves confronting a set of challenges that put immense pressure on our relationships. As an organization and as a larger field, we need to ask: What does it take to cultivate relational grit, so that we know when and how to stay at the table, even when it sucks?

Read more: http://wearetrustlabs.org/explorations-in-relational-grit

Subscribe now

—

Author: Lennon Flowers (bio)

Over the last year, we’ve been working with teams of faculty, staff, and students from seven different campuses, all striving to help folks in their communities move through conflict and mistrust in relationally sound ways. They hailed from schools in different states and different time zones, ranging from a land-grant university in Utah, to a small liberal arts school outside of Orlando. On the surface, their work is as different as the environments in which they operate: One team worked on the meaning of accountability beyond cancellation. One sought to increase support for trans students and faculty within a particular department, on a campus with strong ties to the Church of Latter Day Saints; they quickly realized their first order of action had to focus on building trust across the department as a whole. In another school, a team of Assistant Deans of DEI worked to build a resilient network that could withstand the dismantling of centralized infrastructure, and find ways to support students and faculty alike in continuing to tend to differences in power, privilege, and perception across racial and ethnic groups on campus.

But in each case, their fundamental question was the same: When it feels like everything and everyone is splintering, how can we hold our community together?

We were recently talking to a researcher, who’d been hired to evaluate the impact of one of the grants that underwrote that work. “What you’re suggesting is really counterintuitive,” he said.

He’d asked about the role of authority figures — college presidents, provosts, boards — in sustaining the type of changemaking and relational work that our cohort members were engaging with. He’d expected me to tell him that success hinged on buy-in from the top: that in places where there was supportive leadership, especially from the college president, you could expect to see big changes afoot – widespread adoption of curricular and co-curricular programming, and the like. Where it was lacking, efforts would invariably falter.

But that hasn’t been our experience. We’d just told him that none of their efforts had presidential backing. And indeed, many of them would have been stymied, or even failed, if they’d waited for that approval.

Which brings us to the distinction between authority and leadership. What is the difference between exercising strong leadership and exercising authority? When is authority a liability? And for those of us operating without the support of good leadership from the top, what does right action look like right now?

Resting in Authority

Humans are neurobiologically wired to dislike uncertainty. When we are faced with it, we reach for a variety of instinctual coping strategies: We try to find things we can control. We avoid the issue. We use reductive explanations to help sense-make.

And we turn to authority to give us direction: We turn to those behind a podium, to tell us what to do or what to think. We want our politicians to tell us that they have the answer; we don’t want them to tell us that it’s going to be hard. Even when we’re searching for an answer or what to say next, our eyes flick upward. This moment is no exception.

The last year has seen a surge in college presidents introducing dialogue programs at scale, and other efforts to supplant DEI efforts with pluralistic practices. These interventions are, by definition, designed to lower the heat, and to reduce disequilibrium by providing us with spaces that bridge differences and facilitate healthy dialogue. They are, necessarily, “safe.” These interventions are lauded as critical for helping campuses navigate polarization, hold ideological diversity, and navigate a pluralistic community.

Authority figures can be very good at providing order, protection, at lowering the heat, containing people, offering structure and strategy – and those roles can be especially valuable in moments of crisis, when the heat on campus bubbles to a potential breaking point. These types of interventions are an important part of repair.

But they cannot be the whole picture. If anything real is to change – if we are to deal with the simmering anger present across all parts of American life – we’ll also need interventions that can deal with rage, with accountability, with repair, and that will surface creative, unsanctioned ways to engage with not only the content of our disagreement, but the force and emotion that comes with it.

We’ve seen what happens when authority tries to lower the heat before the force behind it has been tended. Over the past two years, college campuses have erupted as ground zero for the struggle over questions of national and international morality and justice. As the US contended with Hamas’ attack on October 7, the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, and US involvement in the rising death toll of Palestinian people, many authority figures — presidents, heads of departments — did many things. Many of them tried to exert authority and called it leadership. Very few of these actions led to anything other than deepened and entrenched division. (We define leadership as asking people to look at a difficult reality, and helping them move through that process. Hardly any of those efforts met that standard. But that’s a piece for another time.)

Leadership often involves risk-taking. It involves actions that will be destabilizing, that raise the heat, that lead to our facing something difficult. These interventions often happen in the shadows, to the right, left, or just beneath the authority figures, allowing the authority to maintain plausible deniability, while still seeding something essential.

Need-to-Know Basis

There are many historical examples of how unsanctioned and unauthorized momentum can seed pressure for essential, pro-relational, pro-democratic change – particularly on college campuses. Student groups and independent organizing were foundational in resisting consolidations of power in WWII and in dismantling the dictatorship in Serbia (and again, more recently in Serbian history). They were core to the civil rights movement, and the anti-apartheid movement. College presidents did not sign off on those student initiatives. They couldn’t have, without risking their own removal, or damaging the power and legitimacy of those grassroots efforts. And, critically, the organizers didn’t wait for authorization — consciously or unconsciously they understood that giving authority some amount of plausible deniability could actually be a helpful tactic.

This remains true. Recently we worked with a senior administrator whose office was the site of a student sit-in over the administration’s response to Gaza.

Together with the campus’ Director of Spiritual Life, he set out to rebuild the badly frayed trust between students and administrators. The two of them quickly realized, however, that the situation was still too hot; there was little desire – let alone capacity – for trust-building and repair between students and the administration at that stage. They noticed that there were other ways to engage some of the conditions that led to such rupture: The entire campus community was participating in a culture of disposability, and students had no way of navigating conflict without exiling or cancelling each other. Tending to this unspoken norm, they felt, could indirectly deepen their capacity to engage in conflict well elsewhere on campus.

They recruited student leaders who each possessed strong social capital and cultural influence among particular student groups and voices on campus. Together, we began training them up in skills related to conflict navigation.

Once in the room, students raised some challenging questions about when and when not to partner with authority figures, and how – when to put pressure on them, when to engage in negotiations, when to fall in line, etc. One shared a story of sitting down for a listening session with administrators, only to be told all the things that were off the table; it felt, they said, that they were being boxed into a corner from the start.

It mattered that, as facilitators, we had no skin in the game – that we were not representing a particular set of interests on campus or in its leadership. Had the invitation come from on high – or even if it had been publicly sanctioned by the college president – we would have had to measure our words with care, with less room to honestly address the feelings and concerns that were being surfaced. (Pro-tip: We’ve never met a feeling that shrunk because it was ignored.) Had those in power known talking openly about these tactics was to be a part of the conversation, they may have been forced to discourage it to protect their own legal standing.

Authority figures in many different landscapes are confronting the same threats right now: they are targeted and scapegoated, as a means of undercutting entire institutions or fields of work. The same pattern is happening in higher education (here and here), business, nonprofits, philanthropy, and (obviously) government. Faced with real risks, people in authority can default to the choice we’ve seen them make again and again: Exert their power by attempting to command and control what’s said, by whom, when, and how, all in order to placate or otherwise fly under the radar.

Or they can choose strategic opportunities to do something else — exercise plausible deniability, for instance, freeing those below them to operate in ways that they themselves cannot. By simply getting out of the way, they can quietly support nascent movements that can put counter-pressure on them.

By the same token, those without authority, or those — like our friends in the administration of the campus mentioned above — who have varying degrees of authority, also must consider when and how to bring more senior authorities to the table, versus when it’s actually more effective to just leave them out of it (for the time being).

Relational change needs pressure from various groups that are pushing the people in the system to shift their behavior, along with their hearts and minds. If good work is going to happen at all, authority sometimes cannot know about it.

We have to look up, of course we do. But it seems we’ve forgotten that authority figures have rarely been the ones signing off on widespread culture change. That happens after groups of people take it upon themselves to model something different, often independent of authority, sometimes without authority at all. It begins when we look around, not just up.

—

Author: Maya Pace & Lennon Flowers (bios)

A year later, she and I went out to dinner. At one moment, downtrodden, she said, “Well, I know you hated my play.” I was taken aback. “What do you mean?” “Well, you just didn’t seem that enthusiastic, and I didn’t hear anything from you after the show.”

“Did you get my text?,” I asked. It turned out, she hadn’t seen it. I pulled it up, and she read it at the table. Sure enough, she felt relieved and affirmed.

For a year, she had operated on the assumption that I didn’t say anything, and that I hated her play. I operated on the assumption that she had seen my text and not bothered to respond.

How often do we make assumptions based on faulty or incomplete data, and then start to feel a certain way about someone based on a false perception?

Everyone does it. We fill in gaps in actual information with assumptions. We’re meaning-making creatures, so we make a certain meaning of those assumptions, and then draw a false conclusion based on that inaccurate information.

My friend Ora calls this the “conflict avoidance escalator”.

The boxes are what we experience, starting with the original event. The thought bubbles are the stories we tell ourselves based on our perceptions of what happened. The arrows are the actions we take, or don’t take, based on the conclusions we’ve drawn. The actions that we take escalate further misunderstanding, tension, and eventually, a loss of trust and authentic relationship.

How many conflicts mirror what happened with my mother-in-law? Something happens. We don’t want to shame someone or cause a fuss, so we just move on. But we start to unconsciously develop a story: This person doesn’t respect me or my time. The next time we interact, we’re mealy-mouthed; we hem and haw rather than naming our needs, because we already assume we can’t count on them.

But if we’d actually had a conversation at that first moment, we would have realized that there was an explanation for it. (Indeed, perhaps something as simple as a missed text.) In other situations, the explanation might elicit compassion or empathy or forgiveness; at the very least, we would learn that it wasn’t personal. Perhaps the conversation would reveal something important about our own piece of the mess: our own failure to communicate properly, or something else that we could correct for next time.

The “How Dare You” Test

“When the going gets rough, turn to wonder.” So goes one of our favorite “Touchstones” from Parker Palmer and the team at the Center for Courage & Renewal. “Turn from reaction and judgment to wonder and compassionate inquiry,” they go on. “Ask yourself, ‘I wonder why they feel/think this way?’ or ‘I wonder what my reaction teaches me about myself?’”

We humans are notorious for confirmation bias: We enter a conversation or a relationship with a particular bias or assumption, and subconsciously look for data that confirms our underlying belief-sets. As our pal Scott Shigeoka reminds us, checking that impulse – and choosing to exercise curiosity instead – can unlock transformative effects in our relationships.

I was recently talking to a longtime friend and colleague, with whom I’ve navigated some tricky territory over the years, with more than a little scar tissue to show for it. She asked me for something that I felt, given our history and the context, was inappropriate. I felt myself getting hot.

“How dare she?” I thought to myself. There was no acknowledgement of our history with this particular subject, of the ways those wounds still lingered, or the power imbalance in our positions. If she’d paused to consider how that might land, I’m certain she would have thought better of the ask, or at least named why it might be complicated. There it was: The line of code in me that longs to be seen – that is quick to read disrespect into a situation – was activated.

But she wasn’t thinking about that. She had all kinds of needs she was tending to – in this case, all equally legitimate to my own. She was doing right by someone else, even if I felt triggered by it. We don’t have to be right to think we’re right.

Since then, I’ve been catching myself: When I think to myself, “How dare they?” it’s a cue for me to investigate my own reaction, and to name what’s coming up for me. More importantly, it signals there’s something about the other person’s motivations that I’m missing: What need is being served here? If I can uncover that, I can figure out another path to finding common ground, or at least acknowledging the humanity behind their position.

It doesn’t always work: Some actions are, of course, callous or cruel or vindictive or careless. But more often, people find a way to self-justify what they’re doing. I don’t have to agree with it, but if I have to negotiate through their resistance, or find a way to get unblocked, I do have to understand what’s important to them and why.

To be clear: Explanation is not the same as excuse. Understanding our own or each other’s lines of code doesn’t absolve us of responsibility when we get activated, or spare us the need to apologize, or to work toward repair.

And neither does it make us immune to relational irritants. I can try to understand a person’s underlying motivations — the reasons they have calcified into a particular position, the sources of pain that made them liable to inflict the same, the way we’re apt to falsely assign blame — and still find myself super annoyed, or disappointed by what they did or didn’t do.

The point is not to tie this in a bow, but to say, simply, that understanding those things slows down my impulse to run away or discard. It asks me to consider another interpretation than my most instinctual one. If I’m primed to read things through the lens of, “they’ll never understand me,” or “I’m always left out,” or “people always let me down,” or “I can’t let anyone see me as weak,” then chances are that’s how I’ll code whatever situation I find myself in. The challenge is to gather additional data to see if there could be any other interpretations.

I was leading a workshop recently for a group of parent leaders in The Parents’ Network. One of the moms shared that she calls her version the “WTAF test”: “Whenever I catch myself thinking, ‘what the actual f***’ in response to someone’s actions, I know to get curious.”

If the situation warrants holding onto a little judgement, asking yourself “I wonder why he’s such an asshole” can help you at least start to exercise the muscle.

Recognizing our lines of code

Email and text messages rob us of facial cues or voice intonations, so it’s easy to draw false conclusions from them. While hearing a voice or seeing a face can help clear up the confusion, it can also, of course, compound it. I had to learn to consciously relax my eyebrows on Zoom calls, because – as a colleague once pointed out to me – it turns out my concentration face closely resembles Resting Bitch Face.

It proved a useful lesson to me: Our body language communicates messages even when – especially when – our words don’t. What we’re saying often matters less than how we’re saying it.

“People consistently pick up on warmth faster than on competence,” writes Amy Cuddy, a professor at Harvard Business School, in a joint paper with the co-authors of Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities that Make Us Influential. If you want to get better at conflict, becoming more aware of the nonverbal cues you’re sending at any given moment is a good place to start.

But we’re also coded to receive certain information in a certain way: Our identities are shaped by the messages we’ve received and internalized. Our past experiences inform what we’re likely to perceive in the present. We each carry around a particular set of emotional needs – longings for validation, or affirmation, or credit, or visibility, and trip-wires that make us particularly reactive. (Question my integrity, and I will bludgeon you with it.)

That means we have to pay attention to the histories we each bring into any room, and all the histories we cannot see within it. It’s why paying attention to issues of power and positionality in a conversation matter for anyone interested in working with other humans: What might feel totally benign for one person might be activating for another. We obviously can’t always know each other’s histories, but we can pay attention to cultural patterns that mirror patterns of discrimination, ensuring that the voices heard aren’t only the ones who are accustomed to being heard.

(Even if you believe that “pluralism” has rightly supplanted DEI as a focal point on college campuses and everywhere else, that point still stands. It’s bonkers that all of our uproar and backsliding over DEI has made that controversial right now, but we’ll come back to that in a future post. I digress.)

In this era, our language, too, is highly coded: the same words mean vastly different things to different people depending on their news sources. Recently, a friend in Jacksonville was told that using the word “belonging” was like “waving a red flag in front of a bull.” I remember an early partner in The People’s Supper telling me to be careful of using the word “folks” in conservative company, because President Obama had regularly used it. AYFKM. And: Fine. Tailoring your language to your audience without understanding that audience can feel pandering. But done well, it can help ensure you’re heard.

Tuning into our “lines of code” is a core tenet of non-violent communication: Understanding which of our “universal human needs” are motivating a particular action or reaction in someone else can help us replace judgement with empathy. (In all honesty, we might find ourselves judging them anyway. But acknowledging the fears or needs behind the words can soften a conversation, whereas dismissing or ignoring the underlying need can inflame it.)

Understanding our own lines of code and which emotional needs are exaggerated in us can also help us take responsibility for our own behaviors when our reactions are outsized to the situation at hand.

I recently found myself waiting for a response to an email. As one hour became five hours and one day became four days, I started to lose my mind.

It was, admittedly, an email with semi-urgent action items and significant implications. I’d emailed the same recipient once before, with no response. At the time, I’d chalked it up to busy schedules and competing priorities. After all, who among us hasn’t missed an email, or neglected a response? There have been plenty of times where I let an email sit until I had capacity to adequately address it, only to let it slip beneath the constant stream of inbound asks. No hard feelings, right?

But this time, whatever other explanations were at play all seemed secondary: This was the height of disrespect. I projected onto the silence every other moment of feeling slighted. (As a kid from the South living up North — a plebeian who has come to intimately know the well-heeled ways of the donor class — this is a familiar feeling.)

As I waited impatiently for a response, I flashed back to a professional shit-storm a decade before, when fraying relationships imploded in spectacular fashion: the feeling then of repping the organization with the least money doing the most work, the watching for slights, both real and perceived. I told a colleague about the delay. On cue, she said it seemed rude. I felt vindicated.

Within a few days, I finally got a response. Once again, the explanation had to do with busy schedules and competing priorities.

Meanwhile, however, I’d let my own misinterpretation fester into a larger story, fueling my mistrust of someone with whom I needed to build good rapport: Our ability to collaborate effectively depended on it.

When in doubt, ask

Okay, but you can’t expect someone to always be self-aware of the verbal and nonverbal messages they’re sending. Yes, our stories can be revealing, helping us to complicate the narratives we carry of one another, and to illuminate our invisible identities. (It’s why we’re such big fans of personal story-sharing over shared meals as a means of bridge-building.) But most of the time, you have to earn someone’s trust before they’re willing to share those kinds of stories.

Even then, most of our lines of code are obscure even to the people who know us well, let alone the casual observer or professional acquaintance. (Hell, if you’ve never had a good therapist – and most people haven’t – you probably don’t understand your own “lines of code”.) Most of the time, we don’t know the histories another person carries into the room.

So in the absence of that information, what can we do to get more data, or at least curb our impulses to falsely interpret?

The obvious answer, of course, is to ask. But that’s easier said than done.

It’s true that we very rarely take the time to slow down a conversation and check our understanding. There are lots of reasons for that: Chalk it up to a culture that places a premium on efficiency, or technologies that profit off of outrage, or simply the way our social muscles have atrophied.

Perhaps the most likely culprit is simply that it feels uncomfortable. We fear we’ll be met with defensiveness. We fear we’re missing something – that what’s happening should be obvious. We think we’re avoiding conflict, only to inadvertently deepen it.

Or maybe our own lines of code have already been triggered, so we’re in fight or flight mode: Our capacity to self-regulate is shutting down. We’re already pissed, so any explanation they give will land on deaf ears. We fear that by giving one person grace or the benefit of the doubt, we’ll be betraying another.

Yes, if there’s any chance we’re misinterpreting someone based on limited data, we’d do well to ask for more. But what do you do when that feels like an unavailable option?

Ladder of inference

The ladder of inference is a tool first developed back in the 1970s by an organizational psychologist named Chris Argyris, and popularized by Peter Senge in his seminal book on leadership and organizational learning, The Fifth Discipline.

(A micro-case in point: I haven’t read the book or anything else by Peter Senge, but I did see on the internet that it sold a lot of copies, so I’m trained to insert the word “seminal” into that sentence without thinking about it, and to convey to you, good reader, that I am an informed subject matter expert. But I digress. Again.)

The ladder of inference illustrates the process by which we often leap to conclusions based on incomplete data: our tendency to selectively pick data that conforms with our existing beliefs, and to impart our own meaning on it. It explains why two people looking at the same piece of information can draw such different conclusions from it – which in turn explains why we have such a hard time arriving even at a consensus reality these days.

If we’re to overcome our natural hesitation to ask for more information, we have to first recognize there’s something we might be missing, and to entertain the possibility that we’re acting based on a conclusion derived from a false assumption.

As I sat waiting impatiently for a response to an email, I needed to heed my own lines of code. What part of my reaction was due to the delayed response, and what part of my reaction belonged to a past pain-point?

The feeling – of being ignored, or treated as less than – isn’t one I can easily escape. Perhaps the best I can hope for is that knowing those things about myself can, with time, afford me the ability to hold that feeling as just one interpretation among multiple explanations.

The more intimately acquainted we are with our own patterns and reactions – the way we stiffen at a particular word, the speed with which we dismiss a particular idea – the easier it is to interrupt that response in the moments when it doesn’t serve us.

Knowing there’s a ladder and that we might be on it can help us pause long enough to get more data.

Subscribe now

—

Author: Lennon Flowers (bio)

In practice, what this means is that every two weeks I put a bag of my stuff into my tidy, aesthetically cute metal box, close the lid, and forget about it. Ridwell has tapped into our pre-existing trash habits - put it in a box, forget about it — and has gently created an additional avenue for this “trash.” Frankly, I love Ridwell, I’m an eager member and it makes me feel so much less morally conflicted about my Amazon packages because look! There’s a place the plastic can go! They partner with companies that turn these plastics into decking, into drainage materials, into picture frames. I believe them (mostly). Plus, the efficiency of sticking something in a bag paired with the moral superiority of more recycling — I can keep my “bad” habits and make them good — seems worth $14 per month.

I easily convinced my partner and our other housemate — a dear friend with whom we’d moved across the country — that joining Ridwell was worthwhile. (They both care about the environment and love feeling like they’re doing the right thing).

Six weeks after I signed us up, my housemate moved out, citing the need for a more walkable neighborhood (our neighborhood is quite walkable) and a desire to live alone (more believable). But there was more to it, too, that we struggled to name. We’d stopped talking openly to each other; we moved around each other like tentative clowns, donning smiles and check-in questions, but anxiously glancing at some discarded banana peel between us, worried we were going to slip and fall. In our pursuit of smooth and conflict-free friendship, we decided to not keep talking about our trash. We put it into a box and tucked it away.

…

In 2022, Lauren Berlant, an iconic gender and queer studies theorist, wrote the book On the Inconvenience of Other People. Like Ridwell, the central thesis is contained in the title: living requires engaging with other people, and other people are annoying. Berlant was already dead when it was published, but the itch of their work haunts me. They died from a rare form of cancer called leiomyosarcoma. Apparently, one risk factor for leiomyosarcoma is exposure to vinyl chloride, a key chemical in PVC. PVC is commonly used in drainage materials, which Ridwell aims to replace with recycled plastic alternatives. If Ridwell had existed in 1990, would Lauren Berlant still be alive? No, almost certainly not, but maybe, if we hadn’t invented vinyl chloride to begin with, they might be.

But let me not get too hung up on counterfactuals that try to save the life of a theoretician I respect though do not know. And let me return to our relationship with trash. Trash is the cumulative mirror of our own limitations. We don’t know how to keep using the things we discard or don’t want to spend the time to learn, to consider, to innovate. We don’t want to be reminded that ultimately we, too, will be discarded in one way or another. Trash is convenient: It’s immediately efficient and creates the conditions for a slow, deniable, death (chemicals and plastics that will remain in our soil and water and brains and skin cells forever). When I throw something out, I want to be done with it. I want to know that it will not haunt me. I want to know that this was the last of it. It’s a cruel gesture, this act of disposing. But not as cruel as the existence of the trash in the first place.

And that’s the thing that I now see everywhere and can’t stop seeing. We have created a culture of disposability. It is the trash’s problem for being trash and not decomposing quicker. The trash’s problem for imposing a sort of moral complexity upon us when we throw it away. We know it’s not really going anywhere, but every day we pretend otherwise, placing it in tidy bags that render it someone else’s problem. Anything that causes friction, that could smell or clutter or create discomfort, we label as trash to be thrown out. Even if it points us to some habit or shadow that we desperately ought to look at. We have no tolerance to sit amidst our stink. We’ve lost the capacity to discern what actually needs to be thrown away and what needs to be sorted.

…

My friendship with my former housemate is, frankly, much better since he moved out. He’s happier where he is, and we can enjoy our time together without having to navigate the tactics of living together. I see him when I see him and there’s no tension. We laugh, we get burritos, we see movies. We’ve put our housemate trash to the side. It’s quietly decomposing in the box in the corner, no bother to either of us. This box doesn’t ask much of me. As in, it doesn’t ask me to look at myself, at him, at the world, at our dynamic with any particular intensity. I can skate by, mindlessly shoving tortilla chips down my gullet and then go home and say “wasn’t that fun?” And wasn’t it? And what else?

Our culture of disposability is masquerading under the guise of morality. It’s seeping into everything that we do. Distance from stench and proximity to purity has long been a part of the psyche of American morality, but the scale at which we are discarding each other is remarkable. We throw out these people or those ones under the guise of solidarity. We allow a culture where people throw out left-wing senators and right-wing activists and children and immigrants with little accountability, and then we throw out the people who dispose of them in ways we find abhorrent. And we throw out the people who cheer on the disposers. And we throw out the people who talk about all of this in a tone we don’t like. The cycle repeats.

We can’t bear to look each other in the eye and say “that felt bad” or “I don’t agree” or “I’m sorry” or “help me understand why you think this,” and if we do, we can’t know whether the person across from us will do the same. We distance, withdraw, and close the lid on our trash can. We’ve taken something that is morally complicated — like disposing of each other — and called it morally righteous. After all, their trash smells worse, right? Ridwell perhaps correctly invites us to get rid of things well, but doesn’t question our instinct to throw out. Sometimes discarding, forgetting, moving on is the right move. I don’t know that overly processing my housemate dynamic with my friend would have helped that much, and I genuinely think that we needed to throw out our dream of living together and try something different. But if our only relational tool is discarding, then we’ll just keep trying to make discarding look less morally complicated, throwing out the possibility that there may be parts of the instinct to dispose that are actually not beneficial, not right, not helpful. That there might be something on the other side of inconvenience. That perhaps my housemate and I lost something when we sidestepped the trash between us.

Trash asks me for nothing in return, barely even my time. It’s one-directional. We throw it out. But I want to be needed. I’m begging for something to say stop, to pause my hand as it quivers over the open bin. Neediness is full of the stench of wanting to be seen.

…

Disposability politics has come for so much that we hold dear, not only people. Our noise filtering mechanisms have gone haywire. All of our attention gets directed through very narrow tunnels of vision. Berlant, is, in one frame, a byproduct of this disposability politics. That is, the frame that a certain amount of deaths (literal or metaphoric) are tolerable, a certain amount of lives might “need” to be thrown out in the pursuit of progress — progress, in this case, being PVC piping. It’s hard to look at. Is PVC piping worth Lauren Berlant? How do we measure their value? I want to throw out this equation. It’s all wrong. But this is what we do all the time. Is this relationship “worth it?” Is the inconvenience it causes me “worth it?” Worth what? What are we measuring? No, really, what? And, are we getting closer to a life well lived as a result?

In many cultures, when someone dies, or many people die, the community gathers. Then, slowly, people begin to tell stories. The stories do something: They narrate the arc and twists of a person’s life, and in so doing, describe who a person is obliquely, by association and by walking the perimeter of how they lived. The rich and beautiful, the harder parts. Talking about what we will miss offers a way to also note what we will not.

There is and will always be a place for throwing stuff away. For now, can we try something else? To gather quietly and say “I’m scared,” or “I’m relieved” or “ what will happen now” or “how could they” or… and to not have one single thing be the entirety of the story.

I feel the tenuousness of disposability all the time — in my own psyche, in my relationships, in this country I live in. People are, after all, incredibly inconvenient. They knock us off our agenda, they need things, they have opinions, they want. In our culture that craves ease and optimization, people and their needs are, indeed, a problem. Surely everything will be better if we just smooth it over, withdraw, throw out, never demand to be something more to each other than a vessel to hold our takeout?

But the people and words and takeout containers come back to haunt us. I want to believe that someone would consider what we could be to each other before I am discarded. I want to believe that I would do the same. Nothing, nothing, is ever really gone.

What if — just for a moment — we thought from the perspective of the trash? What if we tuned into all that — the data in our bodies, the lives, the stuff, the stories — that get tossed away in pursuit of ease and validation? I know what some people will say. Part of me says it, too: This is dumb, and simplistic, and won’t change anything. And the stakes are life and death.

Maybe this is a dumb suggestion. It’s certainly simple. But, in its simplicity, maybe it can disrupt the frame. There is no answer. No one has it, even if they think they do. Instead it’s just this continuous mess of trying to live together with people we hate, and ones we just dislike, and ones we really like (except for that one annoying thing they do) and trying to soften. We forget about the rest — how impossible it can feel to navigate the gulf between us. So maybe, what if?

Look at me, just for a moment.

Subscribe now

—

Author: Maya Pace (bio)

I paused. I flashed back to another conversation with a different would-be funder in the pluralism sphere, years before. Trust Labs’ work grew out of what was then the partnerships team at The Dinner Party. I worked for years to convince people that interrupting the isolation that attends grief can help us to interrupt the isolation that’s animating our politics. I failed. “I don’t get what grief has to do with it,” said that funder at the time. We didn’t get that grant. After struggling to make the case to our staff, our Board, and our supporters, we decided to split the organization into two. And thus Trust Labs was (eventually) born.

Our work today has to do with helping communities move through hard moments without breaking apart. On the face of it, that might have little to do with grief. But when you know to look for it, you begin to see grief and its effects everywhere.

Which means: In today’s world, exercising relationally sound leadership requires being grief literate.

Grief in the era of polycrisis

We typically think of grief as the natural product of losing someone significant to us. It is that, but it’s a lot of other things, too. Grief is the emotional reaction to the experience of loss. We can grieve all kinds of losses: of a job or a home or our health, of a relationship, of stability or security, of routines, of a future that's no longer within our reach. Grief is experienced not just individually, but collectively, in response to histories of discrimination, targeted violence, and inequities in everything ranging from healthcare to housing. Some forms of grief are referred to as “disenfranchised,” meaning they’re often deemed “less than” or unimportant or not real. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller describes the "Five Gates of Grief," which captures everything from the grief we feel over the love we longed for and never got, to the grief we feel for the outcast parts of ourselves, to climate grief, to the grief passed down over generations. (I used to think all of that sounded hokey. Then I read it. I was wrong.)

These days, we find ourselves constantly on edge: Grief seems to permeate everything, all the time.

We’re living in what’s been called “the era of polycrisis,” in which multiple disasters fuel each other relentlessly, leaving all kinds of compounding effects in their wake.

A crisis is anything that exceeds our window of tolerance. In the era of polycrisis, our stress responses are constantly firing. That leaves us less resourced to meet the relentless challenges that continue to come down the pike. When things erupt in one arena, it’s often because we can’t tolerate what’s being asked of us in another. For any leader right now, de-escalation – and the ability to hold grief erupting in one arena while moving forward in another – becomes a thing of paramount importance.

The Four Rs

A framework I find helpful for responding to crisis comes from our partners at the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project. Building on similar models, they cite 4 Rs of crisis response: Readiness, Response, Recovery, and Renewal. Designed to support educators navigating increasingly high-risk environments, the 4Rs demonstrate the entanglement between grief, leadership, and crisis response, and how to put grief literacy to practice.

Let’s start with Readiness: When there are things happening outside your control, you want to be able to access predictability where you can, by having policies and protocols in place. You want to know who to call when you need help, because you already trust them. You want to be able to hold spaces for ritual or meaning-making or other support that are familiar and part of your existing cultural DNA. You want to have thick relationships that can withstand acute stress responses and highly charged situations, and work through repair on the other side. All of that depends on the things you do before you’re in crisis.

Ever been force-fed a “moment of silence” or a seemingly supportive gesture that feels empty? Most people have pretty good BS-detectors, which is why it’s critical to norm pauses, reflection spaces, and a culture of care into your ways of working, before you need to call on them.

Strong social networks can even lessen the impact of a tragedy, by curbing preventable deaths to begin with. Researcher Eric Klinenberg famously showed that, in the face of a devastating heat wave in Chicago in 1995, mortality rates were significantly higher for those who lacked deep social ties. If isolation can kill, then trust-building can quite literally save lives (grief prevention, anyone?).

That helps to explain why pre-existing social connectedness and social cohesion lead to greater resilience in the face of crisis.

Which means: Grief prevention, grief care, relational leadership, and trust-building are inherently bound up with one another. Whether you're talking about a workplace, a congregation, a school community, or a family unit, our ability to navigate grief and trauma – and the crisis that often precedes it – is shaped by the norms and relationships in place before the crisis hits.

If you want to move through crisis with less scar tissue, you have to scaffold relationships and a reparative culture long before. For many, of course, the problem is that there's no longer such a thing as "before": To live in a polycrisis means having to build trust at precisely the same time that trust is fraying. We must do the work of scaffolding relationships even as we simultaneously work to stop the hemorrhaging.

Which brings us to that second R: Response. Crisis response is about mitigating harm wherever possible, and quickly deploying resources and assistance where they need to go. It's the "R" we tend to be most familiar with, so I won't belabor it here. In the face of a death, we’re quick to write the card, send the flowers, and make sure someone has the time off they need. And then we go back to business as usual. But healing doesn’t end with the funeral; indeed, it barely begins there.

We tend to approach conflict the same way. When we can't avoid or deflect it, we seek to de-escalate quickly: We try quickly to reassure or appease or cajole, striving for safety over honesty, or else we offer immediate mediation. As soon as a situation has cooled, we consider our work finished. But really we’re just beginning.

It’s only when you’re out of immediate crisis response that you can begin to think about Recovery. This is where we move from chaos to cohesion, and restore a sense of safety and predictability. It's the point in which we can pause and take stock: "Did that really happen?"

In order to move forward through grief, you must first acknowledge it. That also requires that we name all of the attendant harms that happened.

I still distinctly remember the feeling of sitting down at those first Dinner Party tables, and saying out loud things I’d never said shared with anyone. I realized then what most people realize when they open up about things they’d kept under lock and key: Speaking a truth out loud helped to release its grip on me.

And yet, our culture too often tells us to do the opposite: to avoid mention, lest we remind a grieving person of their pain. A couple of years ago, I spoke with a clinician who expressed concern about peers openly talking about loss and trauma – better, he thought, that we reserve that kind of talk for a therapist's office. But when our mental health care providers are over-saturated with demand and often financially out-of-reach, that kind of thinking is a prescription for silence. What's more, it paints as dangerous the very thing that can help us find healing. Without creating space to name and move with grief, it’s apt to fester in quiet.

“People don’t resist change. They resist loss.” So goes an oft-quoted adage by Harvard professor Ron Heifetz, in his seminal book, Leadership on the Line.

Managing a crisis is of course different from managing any other form of change, and we'll dig more into the latter in a future post. But we'd argue the same principle applies to both: Helping someone move through grief or any other form of loss – which is to say, change – requires first naming and acknowledging the reality of what's happening. Similarly, leading any group or groups of people through change requires taking seriously what’s at stake for them: the people they might be letting down, the fears of what the change will mean. When we’re met with resistance, it’s natural to try to convince someone of all the reasons things will be better on the other side. We justify, we explain away, we insist on moving on. But that line of reasoning often falls on deaf ears, or backfires altogether.

For years, I felt haunted by a particularly bad episode in my tenure with The Dinner Party. I wanted so badly to be able to move on, lest it cast a shadow over some of the most important experiences of my life. Yet I found myself returning to that moment, as if on a loop – confronted by innocuous reminders, fearful of situations that bore only the faintest resemblance to what had happened, trying continuously to make sense of aspects of which I remain, even now, a little in the dark. I struggled to release certain relationships from the wisps of resentment and anger that lingered, and longed to free my own body of shame, and of the loss of trust.

I'd felt like the fall guy (even now, I want to take out the qualifier – I was the fall guy). That meant that I struggled to fully examine my own sources of culpability: to admit any measure of responsibility risked taking on a responsibility that wasn't mine to own. But fixating on the ways I felt wronged meant that I couldn’t fully absorb the lessons of that moment. I’d screwed up, too; I needed to work through my feelings of hurt in order to let that be a part of the story, without it becoming the whole story.

And then last Fall, K and Mary, both colleagues then and now, came over. We got to talking about that chapter, in part because it remained so front of mind for me. “I need y’all to confirm for me that it really was that bad,” I said. Without missing a beat, they both replied, “It really was that bad.”

We talked about everything that had happened. Crucially, when I repeated something someone had said to me at the time, K gently corrected me. Memory is famously faulty, especially (and counter-intuitively) when it comes to the moments we’ve relived again and again. In my mind, I’d replaced one word said with another. It changed the meaning – not hugely, but enough to matter. Naming isn’t just healing; it can give us a window into the ways our perspective has distorted the truth.

And sure enough, after that conversation, it no longer felt activating to think about that period. That one bad episode became just that: one bad episode, right-sized alongside all the other episodes, good and bad and everything in between.

Naming and acknowledgement is crucial, in the endless – and endlessly changing – road that is healing after the loss of someone significant. The same is true of any form of loss. And owning our piece of the mess is easier done when there is space to name whatever grief we carry.

Then finally there’s the question of long-term Renewal. Renewal is where we begin the work of meaning-making and reclaiming newfound purpose, of post-traumatic growth and reimagining the systems we interact with, of forging new and deeper connections and friendships.

Most people who've experienced major loss have examples of friendships that faded or disintegrated in the face of grief. But as my Dinner Party co-founder puts it, grief can also be your entry-ticket to a “cosmic motorcycle club,” producing some of our most meaningful friendships and relationships. We would do well to think of grief not as something to be overcome, but as generative tissue: a binding agent that can be every bit as connective as it can be disconnective. (To hype a recent post of TDP’s, “grief is not a boundary – it’s a bridge.”)

Want to deepen social cohesion? Look to shared pain-points.

Over the last several years, we’ve been working to build The Parents’ Network, a community led by and for parents whose children have experienced internet harm. In April, I gathered with more than 50 families who’d lost a child to causes ranging from cyberbullying to TikTok challenges to fentanyl poisoning and an illegal drug market that has exploded thanks to Snapchat.

They hailed from dozens of states, ranging from Louisiana and Alabama, to Oregon and California, to New York and Pennsylvania. Over pizza one afternoon, I watched a group of a dozen or so dads crowd around a table in a small grey courtyard in the back of the Marriott in Midtown. Their jobs ranged from rancher to educator to chicken farmer to business executive to insurance salesman, and who knows what else. Their voting habits surely differed, but here, it didn’t matter. They were “the Archewell Dads” – their self-proclaimed moniker, named after the foundation that made this work possible. What bound them together was a transcendent identity, borne of shared grief.

It was a group of people who would never otherwise find themselves in the same room, let alone around the same table. That they could be friends – and indeed call themselves brothers – sounds fantastical in a moment when pluralism is profoundly imperiled.

If you’re a nerd about these things (hi, reader), you’ve probably heard someone say something to the effect that pluralism works better when it’s about action and not just words. Want to deepen relationships across difference? Engage in collaborative problem-solving.

Meh, okay. Sometimes. It’s true: To engage this group in a dialogue circle about why they believed what they believed would have generated benign curiosity at best, dismissiveness or rage at worst. And it’s a non-starter anyway: no one would’ve shown up to that conversation to begin with.

The problem is that shared action alone rarely yields deep enough bonds to withstand heat. Someone blows up in a meeting; you know in passing that they’re caregiving for an aging parent, but “get it together,” you think to yourself. They're treated with kid-gloves at the next meeting, and after a few more, they leave. You help paint a mural at the local elementary school, and meet a fellow parent there. You become Facebook friends, and recoil when they next post. You give a passing nod at the next family night, and otherwise avoid them.

When friction occurs, when things go off the rails – and things will, eventually, go off the rails – what do you have to fall back on?

If you want to deepen social cohesion, you'd do well to find a shared pain-point – one that’s personal and powerful enough to motivate shared action, and which elicits not sympathy but empathy, allowing the members of that group to claim a transcendent identity.

But that sounds messy, right? After all, "Crises often amplify stress and unresolved emotions," write our friends at SCRR. That means that emotional activation — intense reactions triggered by stress, grief, or trauma — is unavoidable.

The thing about working with grieving people, or building belonging around shared pain-points, is that – at some point – something will inevitably go a little off the rails. That’s actually the beauty of it.

When we expect discomfort, we’re less likely to freak out about it. We’re ready for it, which means we can normalize it: People are more apt to give each other grace when they, too, have felt those same big feelings. Those experiencing dysregulation are buffered from a shame spiral – it’s easier to recover when you know you’re not alone.

It also means that grief literacy has to be baked into a community’s core ways of working with one another.

Grief literacy as a set of organizing tools

As noted, grief activates our stress responses: It can affect us physically, changing our sleep patterns and our appetite. It affects us emotionally, eliciting sadness or anger or sudden or exaggerated reactions. It affects us mentally, producing brain fog and impeding our executive function skills, and socially, driving us to self-isolate, often unable to find pleasure in the people or activities we used to enjoy.

Tending to its hallmarks means knowing how to pre-empt them where you can, by carving out time and attention to help people understand and manage their triggers. It means putting a cultural premium on self-care, so that people can refuel their tanks when they find themselves depleted. It means developing shared language and tools to create and maintain healthy group dynamics, helping groups and the individuals within them to understand their own and others' activations, and the ways they're primed to interpret particular actions because of our past experience. It means learning how to navigate conflict in healthy ways, and how to respond to harm or hurt in real-time, without shaming someone.

For the last several years, our work with The Parents’ Network has given us a front-row seat to the fight for tech reform and digital safety: a fight driven largely by bereaved moms who've lost a child to internet harm. Dig deeper into any reform movement, and you’ll quickly discover: Grief has produced some of the world's most unrelenting advocates and change agents (see: Mamie Till, Lucy McBath, the Parkland students, every climate change activist motivated by eco-grief).

To view grieving people only as objects of sympathy is to ignore their power. And yet, too often, we encounter organizations whose advocacy efforts are stymied by interpersonal drama, which has, at its root, untended grief or trauma.

We believe that the people who've lived problems are often the best equipped to solve them. But if we are to engage people in work that is both professional and personal, we have to be ready to hold space for grief and all that it brings up.

Creating cultures of care that hold together when it counts depends on grief literate leadership. In the era of polycrisis, any community-builder would be well-served by it.

What’s grief got to do with it? It turns out: Everything.

Subscribe now

—

Author: Lennon Flowers (bio)

But that's not our focus here. Our focus will be on all the things that make being in relationship hard, and clunky and sometimes intolerable. It will be on what to do with the people you cannot erase, and why you shouldn't try to, and the steps you can take to muddle through with a little less scar tissue. It will be on what happens after the feel-good story: when things inevitably suck again, and how to move through it, so that — with any luck — you can get to another feel-good moment. We will not brush off disappointments, or frustrations, or treat the most headache-laden work as an afterthought.

Too often, we treat friction as a system-glitch: something that we can opt out of if only we surround ourselves with the right people; something that, with the right tools, we can pre-empt, or control for. The problem isn't friction; it's what we do with it.

Read on for our opening volley. (This one’s from founder & ED Lennon Flowers, but you can expect posts from all of our team over time.) We hope you'll subscribe.

Welcome reader. Don't leave your mess at the door.

****

Don’t Fear the Friction

It’s Sunday morning. I’ve just gotten my 11-month-old to sleep and for the next 12 minutes, my three-old-year will mercifully occupy himself. I pick up an untouched stack of New Yorkers, curious whether I still possess the attention span to absorb more than a paragraph or two. I flip to an article on AI companionship, and what we gain and what we lose when we treat it as a tool for curing loneliness. It explores what’s becoming familiar terrain: the rise of Chatbot therapists and AI-generated crisis response, the instant validation that comes of relaying your sorrows to ChatGPT.

In the last day, my husband and I have barely said a word to one another, as we both do battle with a low-grade depression that flares when under-slept and over-spent. I’m preparing for a convo with someone important in my life, for which I am searching for a better ask than, “stop being the way you are.”

I think of all the pitfalls that attend even our most intimate relationships: the stumbling blocks of awkward silences or rapid subject changes or furrowed brows, the conflicts that simmer in silence, the tendency to fill in gaps in information with false assumptions. AI offers us the feeling of being understood, and better yet, affirmed. It doesn’t tell us that our perspective is but one, or ask us to consider our situation through another lens, or name its own hurts when we name ours.

In the contest between relationships with humans and relationships with bots, there is no doubt that companionship with one is easier than the other. That’s the problem.

Long before ChatGPT arrived on scene, Sherry Turkle at MIT pointed out the link between what was then an emerging loneliness crisis and the ways we’ve outsourced the role of being human to sociable robots. Since then, the evidence has only grown: Our attachment to frictionless, one-directional relationships with chatbot therapists and AI coaches erodes our mental and social health.

Our pal David Jay put out a terrific piece recently, which included a round-up of studies that point to that effect. The good news, he says? Humans are better at being human than bots are at mimicking them. Don’t fret, he reassures: AI is a long (long) way off from being able to mimic our ability to respond to social cues.

To demonstrate, he points out that it’s one thing to beat a human at chess; it’s quite another to teach a child to love chess. The latter requires a deep knowing of the kid at hand, and the ability to think predictively about particular relationships amidst a sea of complicating factors. “This ability to create the conditions for positive emergent outcomes in our relationships is one of our greatest cognitive superpowers.” Strong concur.

***

For the last 15 years, my work has hinged on a single premise: Relationships are key to our wellbeing. That’s true at the level of individuals (hi, mental health), and at the level of societies (hi, pluralistic democracy). You can expect to read a lot about why in the posts to come.

But here’s the rub: Relationships are also hard, and clunky, and bound to disappoint. If we’re not honest about that fact, then anytime they go awry, we’re apt to think it’s our fault – that there’s something wrong with us. Or else we point fingers – there’s something wrong with them. We retreat. We spend more time in front of screens than with other people. We begin to conflate positivity with health, coding positive affirmation as good, conflict as bad. Our social anxiety increases. In fight or flight mode, we become primed to read everything as harm. We struggle to differentiate harm from discomfort, and become highly suspicious of any perceived slight. We turn to the friction-free safety of a chatbot. We retreat further.

We tend to think of the problem of social disconnection (if we think of it at all) as a problem of "those groups" "out there." It isn’t.

Think of a relationship in your own life that dissolved in the face of conflict.

Think of a project that’s been stymied because of a relational rupture. (Someone missed a deadline. No one communicated the impact, but everyone was frustrated. People began to avoid or cancel meetings, and the tension grew. Or: One person got credit or blame. Where there was once camaraderie, there was now resentment. Energy waned. Or, or, or.)

Think of a moment you've struggled to move a connection from something that felt transactional into something that felt transformative.

Think of (almost) every room you've ever walked into: the scan for something or someone familiar, the almost instantaneous, unconscious assessment of which parts of you will be welcome here and which won't, the knowledge that your belonging is contingent on the performance of something.

There is no such thing as a relationship without friction. If we fear friction, we will fear each other.

The problem is not friction itself; it’s what we do with it. Do we pretend it isn’t there? Do we attempt to eject and erase it? Do we panic and escape from it? Do we inflame it, looking for the perfect score? Do we point fingers or spiral into shame, refusing responsibility? Do we sanitize it, settling for the blandest admonishments, or choose to be performatively agreeable?

Or do we check our understanding, choosing to examine and correct our misperceptions (both our own, and others')? Do we pause long enough to appreciate the things we couldn't see: the human who was having a shitty day, the person whose invisible identities and stories of struggle mirror, and diverge from, our own? Do we offer explanation rather than excuse, and are we willing to receive the same? Do we choose to own what's ours?

Now think of a moment someone surprised you with their response, revealing a capacity you didn't know they had.

Think of a relationship with a partner or a friend who stood by you at your most fragile or frustrated.

Think of someone with whom you shared something you mostly keep under lock and key, and were met with the words, "me, too."

Think of a relationship or a project in which a moment of disagreement or conflict threatened to derail it, and instead strengthened it.

The following day, the half-finished New Yorker article still sitting on the side table, my husband named for the first time what had been bothering him. It wasn't the thing I expected him to say, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that that was what was lurking beneath the heavy silences of our preceding day. But it made perfect sense. I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed mine back.

That conversation that could have gone so terribly wrong? It ended up being hugely helpful: allowing us both to name the moments we'd missed each other and why, and to correct some of the assumptions we'd been carrying since. We remembered we loved each other, and more importantly, we remembered why.

Friction can be every bit as generative as it can be destructive. We’ve consistently found that the subjects and experiences that leave us feeling most alone can lead to some of our most powerful conversations and relationships.

***

Our work at Trust Labs is about helping people to get in and stay in relationship – especially when it’s hard. Our premise is simple: If we’re to take community seriously, we have to take seriously the things that make it suck.

This space is dedicated to that wrestling: to excavating the paradoxes that make relational work so challenging. Like how about the fact that honest reflections and expressions of vulnerability are the means by which we build trust and come to see ourselves and each other more fully – yet it requires trust to reflect honestly and express vulnerability. Or to use an example that’s currently in vogue: Sure, shared action is a path to building trust – but what happens when mistrust interrupts our pursuit of a common goal? As every student who’s ever worked on a group project knows, misunderstanding and resentment can quickly derail both project and trust along the way.

We promise to avoid cheap takes. Ditto esoteric debates, or the kind of lofty rhetoric that sounds nice, but is wildly out of touch with messy human realities. We’ll do our best to talk openly about our own Achilles’ heels, and the costs that came of hard-won lessons, and the things we continue to struggle with, personally and organizationally.

Some of what we'll talk about here will be practical, pertaining to the most common pitfalls of relational practice: how to ask better questions — the difference between those meant to satiate your own curiosity and those that open a conversation; the concept of “non-defensive defense,” and how to acknowledge critique or negative feedback — especially the kind you disagree with it — without falling on your own sword; what to do when someone says something inadvertently harmful, without shaming the person or derailing a group. We may even touch on the mundane, because haven't you noticed how things tend to die in details?

A lot of what we'll talk about will focus on getting to the root of entrenched resistance: How do you figure out what’s really going on here? When should you choose to stay in the arena and when is it time to let go? How do you increase your own and others’ capacity for heat, and when is the goal to turn down the heat and how?

We’ll share stories and case studies and mine our own experiences for data. We’ll draw on familiar (and less familiar) leadership tools and frameworks, and when we don’t know something, we’ll tap someone who does.

Not everything has a happy ending, of course. Sometimes, being in community means looking head-on at a person we don't like, and who doesn't like us, and accepting that we cannot debate them into feeling differently, or ask them to see a part of us that they refuse to see. It asks us to hold all of that discomfort and to choose to neither shrink nor explode, knowing you cannot erase what you do not like. Sometimes it requires sitting in, and staying in, the suck. So naturally, we’ll talk a lot about that, too.

But to go back to David’s point: Over millennia, we’ve honed the emotional and cognitive skills to live and work effectively together. We believe we humans have superpowers that bots do not.

Most of the time, we can choose to muddle through the frictions and forces that have us stuck, coming out on the other side bumped and scratched, but tested, and more connected.

Here’s to muddling through, together.

***

If you want to understand more about what we do, why we do it, and how we arrived here, click here. If you’re interested in potentially working with us – perhaps you’ve got a source of conflict or rupture that’s got you stuck, or a shared pain-point you wish to tend, or a gathering where you’re hoping to spark the kind of conversation and connections that people will remember long after they leave the room – click here.

—

Author: Lennon Flowers (bio)