“As long as feelings are second class citizens in public dialogue, people will be second class

citizens.” -Michael Eigen

“I feeling” statements may not be our first impulse to tumultuous moments, mishaps, collisions,
the many and complex missed meetings of different, but also not so different minds. When we
feel attacked we get defensive, ‘How dare you”, “who do you think you are” etc. Hopefully, in
time and not without great effort and internal maneuvering, we move past these initial
reactions. If we are unable to disentangle blame/revenge from injury then we become
incapable of nurturing new dialogue and possibility for genuine relating, for transforming injury
into a repair that exits the circle of endless blame and finger pointing.

We know it in our own families, the great and tragic histories of who did what to whom. And
those we love most sometimes never fail to remind us of these age old grievances. They are like
sacred stories that some families could not live without. And societies. But something else is
there also, and it’s not always the easiest thing to detect. One day we’ve let go and we don’t
always know how but it shows, in small, significant ways. Sometimes it’s easier to detect those
changes in a family, not at all easy in a society.

Blame seems to be an internal origin story. We desperately need someone to confess, as if the
only way to make something right is to make a person admit that what they did was not just
wrong, but totally and completely wrong. We take a piece of reality and use it to symbolize the
whole.

This is why, as Robert Karen writes, when it comes to forgiveness it’s seldom as simple as doer
and done to.

“When we think about forgiveness we tend to imagine one person deeply and decidedly
wronged by another. But most of our relationships with one another lack such simplicity. So
much good and bad is going back and forth, and each person is so deeply implicated in
everything that happens, that it is not always so clear who needs to apologize and who needs
to forgive. The struggle to forgive and the struggle to apologize are barely distinguishable.”

Part of what makes injury so hard to sort through are internal systems of blame, systems that
are par for the course in our society. The challenge is to find a more spacious meeting ground
for the resolution of our grievances;

“All of which is to say we emerge into a more fluid, alive, dynamic world, a world where
embracing ourselves obviates the need to police others. Blame, by contrast, collapses the
world. It makes it rigid and binary, with moral winners and moral losers, and the imperative to
control. The need to blame (ourselves and others) runs so deeply at times that it can feel like a
basic necessity. Part of the need arises as a defense against shame. As shame encroaches,
fending it off requires that someone else be proved the villain. And it is not enough that we
protest what they’re doing, that we have our say. We have to nail them to their crimes, make
them confess, make them feel bad and promise to be better. Only then can we finally have the
satisfaction of being free of the denunciation we direct at ourselves, which is now safely
directed at them…

Knowing oneself is integral to growing up. But, to the extent that we live in a blaming system,
we do not want to know the truth about who we are and, therefore, resist growing up. We
don’t want to know our own murderousness, selfishness, greed, envy, because all of these very
human feeling states have been made a source of so much guilt and shame that they lead at
once to total condemnation and self-rejection. We can’t know them, and we can’t know how
we came to them. As a result, we miss out on the experience of self-empathy and self-care,
which might be the basis for doing something new, for beginning to emerge from these things
we don’t like in ourselves but which hold us prisoner.

Some of what we do is bad and should be changed – the way we bully, deny, manipulate, shirk,
indict. But if we make every misdeed or character orientation into a capital crime, into evidence
that our very being is worthless, we will not be able to let ourselves know the full complexity of
who we are. If there can be no mercy, no leniency, no forgiveness, no simple tolerance for the
magnificent complexity of being human – if we face every flaw or disliked quality as evidence
that our blackened souls require rejection and banishment – we will not be captured by our
own awareness and motivated to change. The blaming system puts a brake on a fundamental
area of growth.” -Robert Karen “The Forgiving Self”

And here is where maybe Jessica Benjamin’s idea of the Third way might offer us glimpses of
future islands where we may begin to understand and feel each other’s feelings and hurts. In
contrast to models of action/reaction which characterize our experience of complimentary
twoness, the one-way direction (my way or the highway); a shared third is experienced as a
cooperative endeavor. “The thirdness of attuned play resembles musical improvisation, in
which both partners follow a structure or pattern that both of them simultaneously create and
surrender to, a structure enhanced by our capacity to receive and transmit at the same time in
nonverbal interaction. The co-created Third has the transitional quality of being both invented
and discovered. To the question of “Who created this pattern, you or I,” the paradoxical answer
is “Both and neither.”

Benjamin notes that in learning to accommodate to accommodation itself, we fall in love with
love. And while such a third space is hardly one that could be collaboratively made together
every single time we are hurt by someone (after all, there are some hurts that it is simply not
safe or okay to collaborate with someone with on states of repair) and also because such a
space takes time and is perhaps always built imperfectly if it is built at all, it is at the very least a
better starting place than the all too familiar one of shame, blame and finger pointing.

“An ability to maintain internal awareness, to sustain the tension of difference between my
needs and yours while still being attuned to you, forms the basis of the differentiating Third –
the interactive principle that incarnates recognition and respect for the other’s common
humanity without submission or control.”
To be able to open spaces of thirdness that enable us to negotiate differences and to connect,
to feel both our feelings and the feelings of another, to make music together when the singular
song we had previously chosen seems sometimes not to give way so easily to improvisation, is
something I think that has no absolute “total” destination or arrival point.

If the task of blame is to nail you for the wrong doing, to make you fess up to the pain you
caused me, then the task of the Third hearkens back to Robert Karen’s notion that who did
what to whom isn’t always the easiest thing to pin point. Certainly we do hurtful things and
apologizing is important, yet there are ways in which the road to getting there can cause more
cars to slide off on the ride there then having taken other, less traveled roads. A Third road.

“When there is no possibility of intersubjective repair – when someone refuses

acknowledgment or fears loss of having the upper hand, the self turns to intrapsychic repair of
the internal object instead. When mutual dependency cannot be negotiated, the other must be
reduced to to intraspsychic object of fantasy, onto whom the subject splits off unwanted
weakness. The need is to distinguish such objects of projection from the real other. This is
central to the survival of destruction and overcoming of doer-done to relations. The denial of
humanity to the other is tantamount to the erasure of intersubjectivity, understood here as the
ineluctable fact of mutual dependency on equally human others. The inability to embrace
recognition within an interactive system of thirdness leaves the subject alone in a monadic
world without intersubjective orientation…

We move from from the position of “failed witness” or bystander to acknowledging witness and
we become able to experience our own vulnerable humanity in a different way when we
recognize the other’s, through this we we come closer to realizing the sense our
interconnectedness and responsibility for one another.” -ibid

Benjamin also notes; “the person who fails is paradoxically the one whom you desperately need
to witness how they failed, to receive the communication. If that other person can bear their
own realization that they have played the role of harming, they can step back into the role of
the one who acknowledges and thus offer something new. This paradox tells us we are at least
trying to facilitate the dramatic emergence of new experience. We allow ourselves to become
part of a complimentary opposition that serves to expose the “truth” of a hidden self – perhaps
in us. This collaborative effort to to unpack the dramatic meaning is part of the process of
restoring the paradoxical space of Thirdness that holds the old and the new. In this intense
collaboration a new space opens for self-states and their accompanying “truths” that have felt
irreconcilable to share the stage.”

In other words the space of the third isn’t something that belongs to either you or me, my
version or yours, my truth, your truth, but instead belongs to neither of us alone and yet to
both of us at once. This is a tall order for a future island of possible repair. Yet without ideals
life is hardly worth the effort we put into it.
The place of the Third is perhaps the only place where one could bring out the complexity and
genuine possibility of resolution to what Robert Karen describes in matters of forgiveness;

“Forgiveness too often gets framed as an issue of a victim and a wrongdoer. There are certainly
many cases of that. But in most people’s lives I think forgiveness is an issue whenever two
people are in conflict. Who needs to forgive and who needs to apologize is often a tossup. In
most situations, everyone shares the blame, to some extent.”

Everyone shares the blame, to some extent. This is certainly not an area many of us are
comfortable navigating, myself included. There is a certain amount of annihilation dread to be
found in the idea that I played a part in the play on stage. That we all played a part.

Anger too, has a creative and reparative role to play in conflict resolution.
“It’s hard for people to get anger right. People have very poor models of how to be angry in a
warm, creative, connected way. We’ve been brought up, so many of us, to think it’s a bad thing.
So anger gets suppressed and only comes out when it’s explosive. And we have this tendency to
just let ourselves go: screaming, denouncing, humiliating, impugning character, sarcasm, quips,
mob shaming. But anger doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to plunge into our worst
inner places.”

Could anger come from a place where we learn to love love, connect to connection?

Anne Hallward’s descriptions of “voluntary vulnerability” might also be potentiating spaces

analogous to the Third:

We can’t change what we can’t talk about, and the subjects that most need addressing are very
hard to discuss, because they make us feel vulnerable or upset. Disagreements become
polarized, and we shout at each other and don’t listen or see the good intentions on the other
side. Having a forum for respectful conversation about difficult topics can, I hope, help us
address many causes of suffering.

The most effective way to prevent polarization is to make yourself vulnerable. I like to imagine
it as a verbal form of nonviolence: when you choose to reveal yourself to someone, and you
don’t fight back, it disarms the listener. I call this “voluntary vulnerability.”

If we don’t fight back, might something else emerge? What might that “something else” look
like? Perhaps not a place where I am right and you are wrong or I am wrong and you are right.
Maybe it’s a place of both and none. A place that is neither yours nor mine. A shared place of
vulnerability that gives our common humanity ground to shine on.