Peace Guidebook Part 3: Resolving the Heart of Conflict
Have you done some breathing before reading this? If you don’t know yet why breathing is valuable for you then go read Part 2 of the guidebook.
Part 3: Resolving the Heart of Conflict
So far we have explored the science of the brain to better understand ourselves and how we can harness our conscious to better handle stress. Now we will look at the heart and how we relate to the world through our relationships.
The knowledge of this part comes from the book, The Anatomy of Peace. It's published by the Arbinger Institute, but the author remains anonymous.
I read this book for the first time in 2012 purely because I was curious. When I first read it, I think I internalized a lot of it, but I didn't consciously remember it very well. And then in 2020 when things started getting heated with people in terms of the world getting locked down and there were lots of protests going on, I was just like, “what's going on here?”
Seeing all the conflict in the world, I felt a desire to create more peace and I felt I needed to reread this book. When I did reread it, I thought “oh boy, everything suddenly makes a lot of sense!” Now I really believe that this is a fundamentally important book for people to read.
I would say that this is a book that every single person needs to read and they can read it. It’s a really easy book to read because it's actually not just a factual book saying here is what you need to know.
The knowledge is shared through a story narrative about a group of parents who bring their kids to a camp for counselling. The kids are taken out into the desert with camp counsellors to learn how to overcome their struggles, but the book actually follows the parents who are told, “okay parents, you need to stay here for a few hours and we're going to explain everything we're going to teach your kids because if the kids come back and you don't understand the change they've gone through, then you're not going to be in the right place to support them and they're just going to revert back to their old ways.”
So the whole story is about these parents going through the hours of camp counselling. Through this story, the counsellors share all the information and knowledge that is helping people find and create more peace in their lives.
Like I said it's really easy to read, and it's also a bit of a page turner. Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger which made me want to read the next chapter.
It's a really good book, and I'm going to share some of the key takeaways I got from it. To start off, it begins with what's known as the way of being.
Way of Being
This is your way of living and going through life. And there's two ways of being. There's living with the heart at peace or the heart at war.
When we have a heart at peace, we see other people as people. But when we have a heart at war, we see other people as objects or obstacles.
Whether we're in heart at peace or heart at war, it affects our behavior. It affects what we do, it affects what we say, and how we treat other people.
The question is, how do you end up with a heart at peace or a heart at war? They talk about what's called “honouring the sense”.
Honouring the Sense
When we go through life, you're going to come into situations and in those situations, you're going to get a sense or a desire. That sense or desire is going to present you with a choice. You either honour that sense. You follow it. You listen to it. Or you betray the sense.
When you honour the sense, you're at peace. When you betray it, you go to war. When we betray the sense and go to war what's happening is we are seeing other people as objects or obstacles, and we begin justifying our choices and actions.
There are a lot of different stories used in the overarching story of The Anatomy of Peace, but the one I really like is the story of the beggar. The story of the beggar is shared by one of the counsellors about how he used to live in Israel Palestine, and he would frequently walk by this beggar on the street. One day the beggar had all of his coins get thrown on to the street.
And the counsellor had the sense, the desire, in that moment to help the beggar pick up the coins. But for some reason he decides to not help the beggar. He just walks by and in that moment he starts to justify. He betrayed his sense that he should help the person, and he now has to start justifying why he didn’t do that.
He starts thinking things like, “This beggar deserves to live on the street. He's put himself in this situation. It’s just karma.” Or he says “I'm really busy. I have to be somewhere. I don't have the time. This person is taking away time from my busy day.”
You start creating these narratives in your head to justify your choice, and that's what creates a heart at war, and the most dangerous thing is that once you start doing that you start going into more situations and you keep on betraying your sense and you go into a cycle of war. This is when things get really intense internally and externally.
What happens when you go into a heart at war? You'll end up in what's known as one of the Four Boxes. This for me is the most important part of The Anatomy of Peace.
The Four Boxes
The four boxes are the “I Deserve” box, the “Better Than” box, the “Worst Than” box, and the “Need to be Seen As” box.
Every single box has a bunch of details which I’ll go over. Each box has 4 parts. There is the View of Myself, the View of Others, Feelings and the View of World.
In the “I Deserve” Box, you might see yourself as meritorious, mistreated or unappreciated. Your view of others is they're mistaken. They're mistreating me. They're ungrateful. You might feel entitled, deprived, resentful. Your view of the world is it’s unfair. It's unjust. The world owes me.
Then there's the “Better Than” box. The view of myself in the Better Than box is: I'm superior, I'm important, I'm virtuous, I'm righteous. The view of others is: they’re inferior, they're incapable, they're irrelevant, they're fake, they're false, they're wrong. Feelings I might feel are: impatient, disdainful, and indifferent. The view of the world is competitive, troubled, and the world needs me.
In the “Worst Than” box, you might view yourself as not as good, broken, deficient, fated. You might think others are more advantaged, they're privileged, or they're blessed. You may feel helpless, jealous, bitter, or depressed. You might think the world is hard and things are difficult. You might think the world is against me or the world is ignoring me.
Lastly there is the “Need to be Seen As” box. In this box, you might need to be well thought of, or you think you are fake. The view of others is people are judgmental, they're threatening, they are my audience. You may have feelings of being anxious and afraid. You might be needy, stressed, or overwhelmed. You might view the world as dangerous. The world is watching me, and the world is judging me.
Those are the four boxes. When our hearts are at war, we might find ourselves in one or multiple of these boxes. Now here's the tough question: do you feel called out by any of the boxes? Because when I've shared this book with some people, they can't even finish reading the book because they say, “I feel called out when I read this stuff.”
That's why I say before this part to do some breathing because this is where it gets tough for some people, but accepting these uncomfortable parts of ourselves is how we can get to peace. It’s something we all need to do.
Of these four boxes, I think it’s pretty obvious when people are in the “I Deserve”, “Better Than” and “Worse Than” boxes. But I think the “Need to be Seen As” box is the sneaky box that actually catches most people and they get stuck in it. It’s a big box with different types of needs that people need to be seen as. You can be need to be seen as a lot of things, but I think the top two types are the need to be seen as smart, and need to be seen as compassionate. Those can be very dangerous.
Especially I see this a lot with the “Need to be Seen As Smart”. People who need to be seen as smart are less likely to admit when they're wrong, because if they admit they're wrong, suddenly they're worried that people won't think they're smart. One of the smartest things we can actually do though is to admit when we're wrong or admit when we simply don’t know something.
The “Need to be Seen As Compassionate” can be a tricky one. The need to be seen as compassionate, or nice, comes from the need to be liked and accepted, but we need to be wary of when we are doing acts of true compassion as opposed to being compassionate just to be seen as compassionate in order to be liked and accepted.
The most blunt example is someone who gives money to a beggar and tells nobody about it, but then there are the people who give money to a beggar and film themselves so everyone knows that they gave money to a beggar. One person gave money out of pure compassion. The other gave money to be seen as compassionate.
It's important to think about how the boxes affect our relationships. In life you have a relationship with family, romantic relationships, friends, coworkers, community members, and strangers, and we need to beware how other people's boxes can put us into boxes.
Someone's “Better Than” box could put you into a “Need to be Seen As” box. Or it could put you in a “Better Than” box, but it could also put you in a “Worse Than” box if you're a different kind of person.
Speaking from my own experience, I rarely ever get into the “Better Than” box, but sometimes when I run into someone who is in a “Better Than” box, someone who talks like they're better, they're smarter, they're just a better filmmaker, or whatever, than I am, but to me in my mind, it's so obvious that they're not better than me. That suddenly puts me in a “Better Than” box and I start to think, “okay, you think you're better than me? You can’t be more wrong. I'm the one better than you.”
The tricky thing for me is when I'm in a “Better Than” box, and I also am in a “Need to be Seen As” nice and compassionate box, so I don't speak up and tell the person like, “You're not as smart as you think you are.” These are very conflicting boxes.
Another situation I get in is when I'm dealing with someone who is in a “Worse Than” box and that will put me in a “Need to be Seen As Compassionate” box. Because sometimes I feel like I need to give this person tough love. I want to say, “You need to be exercising. You need to be eating better.” But I worry if I'm too tough on them, they won't want to hang out with me anymore. That's my “Need to be Seen As Compassionate” box coming into play. I need to be seen as compassionate so I say the things that I know sound compassionate as opposed to saying the things that might actually help people.
These are a few examples. I now recognize that being in these boxes creates the internal conflicts that I struggle with. So how do I deal with these situations?
The subtitle for the book The Anatomy of Peace is “Resolving the Heart of Conflict.” So how do you resolve the heart of conflict?
You need to first recognize when you're in a box. Keep in mind what boxes you're in, how other people put you into boxes and how you put other people into boxes.
And you need to honour your senses. When you get into situations, you need to start listening to the intuition that's telling you what is the right thing to do. And, if you start doing that, you can start doing the opposite of the heart at war cycle. You can go into a heart at peace cycle where you keep on making the choice to honour your sense. That’s when you’ll really feel peace in your life.
This is all easy to say, but hard to do. If we all did this though I think the world would be a lot better place.
