Clearing conversations, AKA Repair Conversations (at least for smaller issues) or Mediated Conversations (for the bigger issues) are crucial to maintain relationships of all types and levels as they support arising issues, difficulties, and challenges people may have with each other by creating a space for feelings/emotions, projections, thoughts, feedback, stories, request, boundaries, etc to be expressed cleanly by the giver with the greatest chance of being heard by the receiver.
Over time, without these types of conversations (or the ability for either or both people to integrate them into something real rather than imagined, relationship will slowly (or quickly) deteriorate. One only has to look at their closest relationships to understand how easily it is to make things up about someone else, their needs, their desires, their personality, their fears, their qualities and faults, etc to see the natural propensity for humans to fill in the blanks of their knowing and understanding about someone else and begin to believe their own thoughts more strongly than leaving an open empty question about this person.
Indeed, it’s evolutionarily a matter of survival that we imagine or estimate things as more dangerous/difficult/challenging than they are, given even the smallest amount of evidence to make up our mind.
Think of it this way: without this survival mechanism, over time and as a species we would be more trusting than is safe and as a result we would be be harmed more than we should.
And yet, as we have evolved a neo-cortex, we are also given the capacity for abstraction and reasoning, giving us the capacity to see past our fears, misgivings, and fantasies, and we as humans are now able to engage with them as such by disidentifying with them, such as by evolving our perspective from being something related to an experience (“I am afraid”) to having something (“I have fear”) related to an experience, thus allowing us the choice of holding this thing or replacing it with something else which may be (if we follow solid steps) more accurate.
How cool is that?
Consider a conflict you may be in right now in your life: How are you feeling about it? About the other person? What do you believe is happening for the other person? Do you have evidence for this? What if the evidence you have is misleading or inaccurate? What if your interpretation of the evidence is, too, inaccurate?
It’s indeed easy to believe that our perception, evaluation, or assessment of the situation or the evidence is accurate, but how do we truly know how accurate?
Enters clearing conversations, the best most effective way to get clear about what is happening for you and someone else, and (hopefully) create a deeper connection with them through a more deeply shared reality.
Keep in mind, it’s also an exercise is deepening intimacy with the other person, vulnerably revealing things about you that you may not be proud of as they do juist the same.
And for this reason, for larger issues, this process may require a trusted neutral third party to support the two of you to go through this process so you will be able to safely sink into a more vulnerable place. In this case, you may want to hire a mediator to hold this role. What they will do is take you through a series of steps to allow all parties to express their sense of what happened, what they are learning, what they would do differently (given the same or a similar situation), apologize, and agree on repair steps (if needed) and/or boundaries around future engagements.
But what if there’s nobody else around to use as mediator or what if the issue is (hopefully) small enough to be resolved with just a few words?
This is why I wrote this post: to offer various ways you can clear and/or repair with someone through a series of clear steps.
Ready? Here are a few:
First, here's a 7-Step Apology Process my partner and I created many years ago
From Paul Hoffman:
Ask…
What is the deepest truth that you are capable of articulating, now, about what is going on now with you, with us, with your assessment of the world?
Will you be committed to telling me without censorship what you are sensing.
If you do that, on a regular basis, and really be present, Listening to what the other is saying...
Yes. That is where the Magic of being human, relating to another, really lies.
From Mark Michael Lewis:
Share: I agree to be culpable for my actions and make amends for not doing what I say I will and what I say I will not, using the D.E.A.R process:
Declare the upset
Explore the consequences to both parties
Amends as necessary to let the event go fully
Renegotiating and recommit as appropriate
This process called Deep Heart Share (DHS) is from Sumati Sparks
Here’s Empathy Exchange by Maren Metke (along with Empathy, Feelings, and Needs charts)
Here’s Resolving Conflict by Marie Anna Winter.
This process from “The Work” by Byron Katie is also a great way to get clearer on reality.
I’m told that Radical Relating might support these clearing processes too.
Here’s a Clearing Conversation from the company 15five.com
The company Seeds in Berkeley also does Mediated Conversations.
Here’s another Clearing Conversation process by Jamin & Jen
The Somatica Relationship Repair guide
Of course, you might want to search Google or Youtube to find the model of clearing conversation that you and the other will feel comfortable with, or you might want to ask the other person if they would be willing to have a clearing conversation with you and let them express the type of clearing they want so that the decision on the type’format of the conversation can be left to the person who is the most specific with their needs. But if this isn’t easy enough, you’ll want to consider a mediated conversation with a third party.
(Read the original Facebook Post on the topic)