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

by Sarah Schulman

People who are being punished for doing nothing, for having normative conflict, or for resisting unjustified situations, need the help of other people. While there are many excuses for not intervening in unjust punishment, that intervention is, nonetheless, essential. Without the intervention that most people are afraid to commit to, this escalation cannot be interrupted. In other words, because we won’t change our stories to integrate other people’s known reasons and illuminate their unknown ones, we cannot resolve Conflict in a way that is productive, equitable, and fair. This is why we (individuals, couples, cliques, families, communities, nations, peoples) often pretend, believe, or claim that Conflict is, instead, Abuse and therefore deserves punishment. That the mere fact of the other person’s difference is misrepresented as an assault that then justifies our cruelty and relinquishes our responsibility to change. Consequently, resistance to that false charge of Abuse is then positioned as further justification of even more cruelty masquerading as “punishment,” through the illogic at base of refusing accountability and repair.

Without in any way minimizing the role of violence in our lives, I am looking, simultaneously, at how a heightened rhetoric of threat that confuses doing nothing, normative conflict, and resistance with actual abuse, has produced a wide practice of overstating harm. And that this overstatement of harm is often expressed in “shunning,” a literal refusal to speak in person with another human being, or group of people, an exclusion of their information, the active obstruction to a person being heard and the pretense that they do not exist. I am examining the inaccurate claiming of “abuse” as a substitute for problem-solving.

Namely, false accusations of harm are used to avoid acknowledgment of complicity in creating conflict and instead escalate normative conflict to the level of crisis.

This central role of anxiety in escalating Conflict is one of the reasons why, in our contemporary time, email and texts are so often the source for tragic separations of potentially enriching relationships. First of all, email and text are both unidirectional and don’t allow for return information to enhance or transform comprehension. We must speak to each other, especially when events or feelings are fraught. I wish that all the people of the industrial world would sign a pledge that any negative exchange that is created on email or text must be followed by a live, in-person conversation. And clearly we have a responsibility to encourage our friends and colleagues to not make negative judgments based on email or texts. So many relationships are ruined by the artificial nature of these obstructive walls, especially when one party makes a negative power-play by refusing to speak to the other in person. They then create the false problem of whether or not the two conflicted parties will speak at all, which makes addressing and progressing to the real source of anxiety impossible. Refusing to communicate has always been one of the main causes of false accusation as it guarantees negative fantasy about the other, especially in arenas that are particularly loaded like sexuality, love, community, family, materiality, group identification, gender, power, access, and violence. Email and texts don’t allow us to go through the human phases of feeling that occur when we actually co...

Refusing to speak to someone without terms for repair is a strange, childish act of destruction in which nothing can be won. Like all withholding, it comes from a state of rage, and states of rage are products of the past. As some say, “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” By refusing to talk without terms, a person is refusing to learn about themselves and thereby refusing to have a better life. It hurts everyone around them by dividing communities and inhibiting learning. When we have terms (e.g., “You stole my money to buy drugs so I will talk to you about this when you have three years sober”), they may not ever be met. But at least there is always a possibility of repair. Withholding this possibility makes normative conflict or resistance the primary source of injustice between us. It is designed to hurt, and it does hurt, with nothing gained but pain.

Without conversation, it is the person with the most limitations who is in control. The desirable goal for all of us is not to restrict those who can, but to bring more communication skills to those who can’t. Refusal through email, texting, and other technologies keeps the person who doesn’t know how to problem-solve from learning how. It keeps them imprisoned in their own imagined negative fears about the other, and their fantasies of their own potential humiliation or demise if they were to talk to the other person and thereby understand what the other person is thinking and feeling. Often these blocks are instigated over Nothing, Normative Conflict, or Simple Difference. It gets elevated in importance in the blocker’s mind because they are too anxious to negotiate, or are paralyzed by negative fantasy about actually speaking to the dehumanized other. But because they also deny these internal conditions, negotiation becomes impossible. They cannot advance, and anyone who is controlled by their refusal cannot advance. If we can recognize that relationships are necessary to human peace and societ...

In another example from other people’s lives, sometimes angry, supremacist, or traumatized people send emails commanding, “Do not contact me.” I want to state here, for the record, that no one is obligated to obey a unidirectional order that has not been discussed. Negotiation is a human responsibility. Little children order their parents around: “Mommy, sit there!” When adults give orders while hiding behind technology, they are behaving illegitimately. These unilateral orders do not have to be obeyed. They need to be discussed. Two people in a situation means two experiences, two points of view, two sources of information, two voices. And talking through conflict saves time, because having email/text-produced enmity with someone with whom one’s life could be enriched, wastes years if not lifetimes. So sending a person an email that says, “I don’t want to talk to you” and then refusing to discuss the problem at hand, or even to interact at all, resolves nothing. In fact, it creates anxieties, fears, antagonisms, and pain that can be long-lasting.

The performative conceit at the root of this kind of assaultive action is the melodrama that email orders are a “last resort” in response to some horrible transgression. But the opposite is more likely true. Often a real conversation would illuminate nuances and correct misunderstandings. The real question is: Why would a person rather have an enemy than a conversation? Why would they rather see themselves as harassed and transgressed instead of have a conversation that could reveal them as an equal participant in creating conflict? There should be a relief in discovering that one is not being persecuted, but actually, in the way we have misconstrued these responsibilities, sadly the relief is in confirming that one has been “victimized.” It comes with the relieving abdication of responsibility. There is something in the person who hides behind email that wants these offenses to be true. They want to feel victimized. Then they don’t have to look at themselves critically or think about the other person with complexity. There is no guilt or responsibility if one is an email victim.