Dignity as a Plural Term

Dignity as a Plural Term

This edition of Marginalia focuses on Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict, by Donna Hicks, PhD. Using her broad experience as an international conflict resolution facilitator and her learning in evolutionary biology and neuroscience, she offers us hope – and concrete steps – for healing damaged relationships in our personal lives, workplaces, and across the globe.

Like our lives depend on it

Hicks starts by letting us off the hook (a little bit) for the bad behavior we all exhibit sometimes when we think our dignity has been violated. You know: retaliating with insults, shouting, sometimes even resorting to violence.

Just a blink of evolutionary time ago, dueling and blood fueds were thought to be the normal and honorable response to a perceived insult. Much of the conflict in our world and our inability to resolve it can still be traced to violations of dignity from the personal to national levels.

She points out that when our early ancestors lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers, their physical safety depended on maintaining status and good standing within the group. As she puts it,

“We have an inborn desire to be treated well because we are psychologically programmed to believe that our lives are dependent on it. … Research suggests that we are just as programmed to sense a threat to our dignity – to our sense of worth – as we are to a physical threat.”

Those emotional responses are quick and automatic, driven by the amygdala – sometimes referred to as our lizard brain, because it developed long before our more advanced cognitive abilities.

“The primal desire for dignity precedes us in every human interaction. When violated, it can destroy a relationship. It can incite arguments, divorces, wars, and revolutions.”

Lives actually depend on becoming better

Thus, in many real ways, lives do depend on how we respond to indignities, both real and perceived.

Hicks doesn’t let us get comfortable with our primitive selves, though. She points out that our brains have also developed the neocortex, where thinking and decision-making take place.

“We have the power to make different choices about how we react to instincts. … We can choose to override our destructive instincts and learn more dignified ways of responding to threats – ways that would not only maintain our dignity but preserve the dignity of those who threaten us.”

And crucial to her lessons on how we can go about resolving conflicts and preserving dignity, she goes on:

“Our opponents may have been reacting to a violation of their dignity in the first place, a violation that we unconsciously perpetrated.”

I vs. Me

The first step toward getting control of our emotional response that Hicks lays out is understanding and acknowledging the two sides within us. She labels as “I” the reasoning mind, capable of empathy for others and insight into our own role in the conflict. “Me” is our emotion-driven amygdala, reacting with uncontrolled, defensive behaviors.

“Until we become aware of the two parts of who we are, until we name them and reconcile them, we tend to banish the Me, driving it out of our consciousness, abandoning a part of our humanity that we would be wiser to be aware of and control than leave it to its own devices.”

Indeed, citing research, she points out:

“Some psychologists argue that the integration of the competing parts of ourselves is the hallmark of a healthy person. The lack of integration creates both inner chaos and rigidity.”

Hicks doesn’t sugar-coat the difficulty of this inner work, nor the feeling of “ambivalence” that often results when our Me instincts are telling us our dignity has been violated and to fight back, but our I reasoning tells us we should talk it out or walk away.

The beginnings of her way forward come with acknowledging our Me side:

“Knowing that we ourselves could stab with knife or tongue prevents us from taking a superior attitude when we see others inflicting harm.”

But she explains,

“Having destructive thoughts doesn’t make us bad people. It simple means that there are two compelling and competing aspects of who we are, and it is often difficult to reconcile them. But with a little knowledge, we can put ourselves in a position, with a strengthened I, to make the right choice.”

And maybe someday MWe?

The core of Hicks’ argument lies in her “Ten Essential Elements of Dignity” and, perhaps more revealing, her “Ten Temptations to Violate Dignity.” I say more revealing, because I found her insights on how to overcome the temptations to be the most actionable parts of the book. I’ll touch on lessons in three of them and urge you to get the book; it’s one of the most valuable I’ve read in years.

In the temptation to “take the bait” and respond in kind, she shows how this almost always results in mutual harm. To avoid a cycle of destruction, she argues:

“The better part of dignity is restraint. We are all able to hold ourselves back, to not take the bait. We just need to be aware that we have a choice. The other part of who we are – the I, as opposed to Me – recognizes that we do harm to ourselves when we do harm to others.”

It’s that insight, that the harm to ourselves starts at the moment we act on our instincts for retaliation, because our own dignity is violated by such behavior, which struck me profoundly.

Under the tempation to pretend we are the innocent victims, when most of the time there are two sides and a long history of back and forth, Hicks provides another useful tactic that I hope to make a habit:

“We can change our internal default setting from victim mode to self-questioning mode: ‘Might I have contributed to the breakdown of the relationship?’ “

She suggests that this victim temptation and the dynamics when both sides feel justified in claiming that role can be especially difficult and often require involving a third party, “a trained mediator, a facilitator, a therpaist, or even a good friend.”

I wrote in the margin there, “Phone a friend?”

But the crucial habit that seems necessary to defuse this form of conflict seems to me to be asking, “Might I have contributed?”

And under the “Resisting Feedback” temptation, Hicks starts with:

“We all have blind spots; we all unconsciously behave in undignified ways. … Feedback gives us an opportunity to grow.”

She talks about ways that “good conflict” and even “optimal conflict” present us with opportunities to learn and grow by showing us in no uncertain terms that something needs to change. And she points out that this kind of change (I’d go further and say any significant change) requires letting go of some part of how we see the world.

I wrote in the margin here:

“When our theories about our own dignity and that of others needs upgrading.”

But the part of Hicks’ treatment of this temptation that hit home hardest for me was her analysis of adult developmental theories around the three stages of dependence, independence, and interdependence.

If you’ve followed our newsletter, my blogging and social media postings, or read my book, you’re familiar with my thinking about the concept of “MWe” from Daniel Siegel’s book, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human.

When Hicks got to the discussion of interdependence, I felt like we were almost there:

“Finally, and most important, at this stage we recognize that the most elevated experience of dignity is achieved in connection with others, where I’s converge to become We.

“… The interdependent person goes one step further by recognizing that becoming vulnerable with others opens the door to an even more expansive experience of dignity, with everyone experiencing it together … feeling that the whole is greater than the parts.”

Sadly, she points to research showing that nearly two-thirds of adults remain in the dependent stage. Most of the rest are in the independent stage. And only one percent have reached interdependence.

May we all get there soon.