Message from the Director
Dear Friends of the Padnos/Sarosik Center for Civil Discourse,
I recently had a conversation go very wrong. I am troubled, both as a human being
committed to keeping conversations constructive and as a civil discourse advocate, that
I admittedly “lost my cool” in the conversation. The other person lost their cool as well,
and so, as you might imagine, our conversation exploded. While I know how important
emotional regulation is in contentious conversations, I found myself emotionally
unraveling as the conversation escalated—the increased volume of my voice, my upset
tone, and the way I began interrupting were clear indications that I was feeling
emotionally flooded. And when people are emotionally flooded, it is more challenging for
them to regulate what they say and how they say it.
Because this conversation was with someone I care about and love, I cannot reflect
upon lessons learned and simply move on from the conversation. Rather, I need to be
willing to have another conversation with this person and to re-commit to keeping my
words constructive as we try again to have an emotionally fraught conversation. Civil
discourse does give space for intense emotion (despite the myth that it requires
politeness and dulled emotional expression), but it also provides guardrails around how
these emotions get expressed. I need to re-commit to those guardrails or what I refer to
as “Group Agreements."
Group agreements, or conversation guidelines, are a set of commitments that
conversation participants agree to abide by during a conversation. Group agreements
serve to establish the parameters of a conversation which, in turn, free people to speak
authentically and with emotion in ways that are constructive. I use group agreements in
all of my teaching and training, but I also know of many couples and families who have
adopted group agreements as a way to help lower the heat of challenging
conversations. Upon reflection, if group agreements had been in place for the
conversation that went terribly wrong with my loved one, perhaps we both could have
expressed our feelings more constructively.
