Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

by Sarah Schulman

But there are all kinds of actions: some are designed to acknowledge and reveal the sources of conflict and pain in order to resolve them, and some are designed to obscure those sources so that resolution/change can never occur. Which one we choose, of course, is related to how we see ourselves and others, and what we don’t see about ourselves and others. There is no evidence that time heals all wounds, or even most wounds; instead, it freezes unnecessary enmity and makes it harder to overcome. Time allows perpetrators to forget the pain they have imposed. As Bertolt Brecht said, “As crimes pile up, they become invisible.” And so I don’t believe in an ideology of non-response. Therefore, this is no argument for silence. Silence can itself be an escalation. Little children give their parents “the silent treatment” because they don’t know how to negotiate: how to listen, to respond in a way that is transformed by having listened, to change in order to meet the other. Ideally the parent does know how to negotiate, and so they help the child learn how to express and how to listen. But we all know now that many parents are the source of the problem. They either impose the pain from their own lack of resolution, or they employ the tactics of shut-down, refusal, and punishment instead of trying the radical openness that produces positive change.