Narrative Muses of Sarah Federman
Sarah Federman, PhD is co-author of the upcoming book Understanding Our Understanding of Conflict. This introductory anthology introduces students to the intellectual history of the field. Students learn how global events impact the narrative space of foreign policy and development approaches. By making these impacts visible, students are freed from the narrative webs that constraint and direct public discourse. They can be leaders. Sarah’s blog The Language of Conflict considers various examples of how narrative and language impacts our treatment of conflict. She will be speaking at the Chrysalis Institute in Richmond, VA in October.
What has had the greatest influence on your narrative practice?
I learned the most by putting narrative to work on myself. I spent 5-days at a Tony Robbins program in Australia where we deconstructed the larger stories and beliefs dominating our lives. Change master, Tony Robbins worked with me individually, showing me and a room of 3000 people how my stories about myself and the world were robbing me of love and joy. I also completed the Landmark Education Curriculum for Living. These courses, which I took over a number of years, taught me how to challenge my stories about other people, love, money, sex, fame, community and self-expression.
Committed to not just transforming my own experience but transforming the experience of others, I completed the Robbins-Madanes Coach Training. I have used my training in strategic intervention to work with — for example — a Muslim peace activist in Indonesia and to reunite two brothers estranged since their survival of Auschwitz.
What book best explains the intersection of narratives and conflict?
In terms of books, My Voice Will Go With You: the Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson (Sidney Rosen) and Sweet Fruit from the Bitter Tree (Mark Andreas) provide utterly delightful and delicious examples of how shifting narratives and changing contexts can transform someone’s experience. Blockages that have been there for years can “disappear” in a short amount of time with the turn of a phrase, the shifting of the setting, or rewriting of the story.
What is the next step, next horizon for narratives and conflict resolution?
We know a great deal about working with narrative on the individual level. The tricky part now is what to do when someone changes their story and then must re-enter the context where the old story dominates. For example, if a Palestinian and Israeli go to a seminar and change their stories about each other and then return home to contexts of suspicion they not only risk losing their progress, they risk being ostracized from their own families and communities. Working with group narratives, especially when violence continues outside of the workshop context, is the most challenging and most important. Very few people can resist being sucked into the stories in which they find themselves. This is why we say “be careful who you spend your time with.” We tend to become and live out the stories around us.
My blog the Language of Conflict considers this challenge as well as the myriad of ways language frames how we engage with the conundrums in which we find ourselves.
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