Conflict, Blame, and Betrayal

If you are a collaborator, and you find yourself in conflict with your creative partner or partners, here is a game you can play with yourself to enable your perspective to broaden. And If the relationship hasn't deteriorated too much yet, you can do this together.

There are elements of your situation which play a part in the drama you find yourself in. Elements such as time (deadlines), money (budgetary constrictions), ideas (yours vs the other person's), disagreement, connections, needs, distractions, and more. See if you can make an objective inventory of the elements inherent in your particular situation. Once you've got that list, see if you can imagine, one by one, each element being different in the situation. Let your imagination roam from having that element being different in some significant way to NOT being a factor in the situation at all.

This can be a creative process but it can be a long one. A shortcut is to jump right to this element: blame. Regardless of if it even made it onto your list, play around with this one. Imagine blame being present but different than it currrently exists. Explore what changes in your view of the situation when you do that. And finally, imagine the situation and its stresses, but without blame being involved at all.

What sorts of things would you say to your partner? What sorts of things would be said to you? What happens to your definition of the problem? What happens to your idea of solutions?

If, in your particular situation, you still feel you've been betrayed in some way, imagine the facts of the betrayal being the same, but that you are not offended by those facts. In this game, make that the one element that you change. In many situations this is hard to do. Surviving a betrayal is quite a challenge. But we're just exploring ways to look at things here; we're not rewriting what actually happened. We're just looking at how unstuck we can become in our responses to what happened. The point isn't to hypnotise you out of holding someone accountable. The goal is to get you past the personal affront such that you can see the difference between the event that occurred, the effect it had on you, and how you organized around it yourself, creating the conclusions you reached about the situation, the players involved, about yourself, and maybe even the world as a whole.

Remember, a way you can be constructively responsive to the situation, no matter what your role, is to separate the event from the effect, and the effect from how you - or the other person(s) - organized around it.

A rule of this game is that you've got to let go of each element. If you can't let go of blame, or of the anger of betrayal - at least for the time you're playing the game - then you are lost in your story. Regardless of the cause of the conflict, you being lost in your story will keep you from being able to move out of the conflict and back into creative collaboration. And, worst of all, if you can no longer see that the price of what you're throwing away is greater than your investment in your story, then you're so lost that it's going to likely effect how much time it's going to take you to collaborate in a clean and healthy way again. Don't let that happen. Keep your eyes on the prize.