Unpacking our stuck stories
The story we tell ourselves and others about a conflict isn’t the story of the conflict. It’s our story of the conflict. What is it trying to tell us?
In 1944 two Smith College psychologists showed research participants a short animated film. In the first of three experiments involving the film, the researchers asked the student participants to write down what happened in the animation.
Only one student responded by describing what happened in geometric terms (“A large solid triangle is shown entering a rectangle…” and so on).
The rest interpreted the movements as actions of animate beings, and more than half turned the sequence of movements into a story. Here’s how one of those stories began:
A man has planned to meet a girl and the girl comes along with another man. The first man tells the second to go; the second tells the first, and he shakes his head. Then the two men have a fight, and the girl starts to go into the room to get out of the way and hesitates and finally goes in…
The Heider and Simmel experiment was an early exploration into the ways we draw causal inferences about behavior, and helped inform the development of Heider’s well-known attribution theory.
We are story-making beings. We construct stories to understand and communicate what we’re experiencing. We do it so naturally that we may not recognize that a story we’re telling ourselves (and others) is a story we’ve constructed.
We do this in conflict, too, of course. In my book, The Conflict Pivot, I called them Stuck Stories.
Like our personal movie trailer, our story of the conflict is a montage of the moments most interesting to us, with certain scenes magnified and others omitted. It’s not the story of the conflict; it’s our story of the conflict.
The moments we play over in our minds or tell others may to be the ones that ticked us off the most. Hurt us the most. Left us most troubled. We subconsciously select moments that we need to figure out.
Our Stuck Stories nag us because they have an important message, if we know how to listen for it. When we learn how to “tune our ears” to the signal our story is trying to send, we take the first step to ending the rumination and beginning to do something that can transform the conflict.
There’s been a resurgence of interest in the The Conflict Pivot recently and I thought it would be a good time to revisit some of the book’s important ideas. This month and next I’ll share how to delve into Stuck Stories and use what we learn to disagree better.
Thanks Tammy, this is useful.