He couldn’t imagine having the strength to walk through the door into the next room. He began to unravel, sobbing now, seeming ever less able to engage. The outpouring was not useful to this man who was trying to express himself while maintaining a sense of self-control, something he’d been working toward for months. As others in his group tried to offer support they took his side, got indignant in his defense and denigrated ‘those people.’ Voices got louder and anger rose with calls to ‘let them have it’ in the dialogue to come. ‘I can’t go in there with those people!! I can’t bear to hear what they say about me!!’ He had been wounded by years of being on the receiving end of stereotypes about his identity held by some of the folks in the other room. As people spoke of their hopes and concerns for the upcoming dialogue, one man began to shake and weep. A ‘mixed’ dialogue to begin repairing a bitterly divided and broken community was scheduled after lunch. In a warm church basement on a hot summer morning eight people had gathered in a circle of folding chairs: a homogeneous group of like-minded souls preparing themselves to meet their opponents who were doing similar work in another room. This article will discuss the nature and place of strong emotion in dialogues across deep identity differences, the power of relationships in community and the ways in which dialogue planning, process and facilitation can support participants’ self-regulation and co-regulation of emotion, enhancing mutual understanding, connection and the capacity to participate in a deliberative process. … Such deliberative practices often require high quality of dialogic communication, where the participants feel safe to question their own assumptions and to be open to change. According to Escobar ( 2009),ĭialogue before deliberation can help to construct a safe space for relationship building in the group. Formal dialogue processes can enhance the effectiveness of deliberation where trauma and strong emotion are likely. The eruption of strong negative emotion and the triggering of past trauma experiences can derail deliberative processes. What happens in dialogue and deliberation when one person’s truth is another person’s trauma? How do we understand the power of strong emotion and harness it in service of mutual understanding and collaboration? How do we help people ‘listen so that others will speak speak so that others will hear?’ What openings for self-regulation and co-regulation of emotion can dialogue -and facilitators of dialogue- provide? What does it take for people to feel ‘safe-enough’ to participate?
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