A Community Crippled by Misunderstanding

A story of teacher strikes (and the last week of a free book giveaway!)

As I mentioned last week, an ongoing teacher strike in the town where I live and has upended life in my community. Today I’m going to dig into some of the psychology at play in this intractable conflict, but before I do I want to remind people to enter the Relational Riffs book giveaway. I’ll be taking entries through the end of this week to win two terrific books: ACT for Burnout by Debbie Sorensen and Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (check out last week’s and the week before’s newsletters for more on these books). Enter the book giveaway below (or order the books, yourself if you don’t want to gamble on winning!).

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The Story of the Newton Teachers’ Strike

Going on thirteen days, the city of Newton has now captured the title of the longest teachers’ strike in Massachusetts history. Like any city, the public schools in this town are the backbone of the community. Students need education and other services accessed through schools and the rest of the community relies the school facilities for various things, like, say, working (during the pandemic I wrote a piece about how pissed off working parents were with the systems we rely on getting shut down. I *might* be feeling a bit of deja vu.).

There are many complicated factors at play in this strike, but I’d argue that misunderstanding between the teachers’ union and the school committee/mayor sits at the heart of it all. Two days before the strike officially began, School Committee Chair Chris Brezski admitted “we can’t even agree on the facts.” And despite many long days of negotiation under their belts, the two sides remain locked in battle over a fundamentally different understanding of budgetary constraints.

The teachers’ union insists that cost of living adjustments (COLA) that would assure fair wages could be financed through the city’s funds. In a press conference on January 28^th, Mike Schlegelmilch, the co-chair of the teacher’s Contract Action Team, declared, “The funding is there. This is a manufactured political crisis created by the mayor, not a fiscal crisis.”

On the other side, Mayor Ruthanne Fuller and the School Committee insist such funds are not there. In an email to constituents, they stressed that the union’s COLA demands were “a poison pill” that, if accepted, would require “a reduction in force of more than 70 valued educators and support staff throughout the life of the contract.”

The way each side sees the truth sits in direct contradiction to the other side’s version. In every press conference and email communication, the community of Newton witnesses each side double down on their accounting of things, accusing the other side of bargaining in bad faith and holding them responsible for irreparable harm to the children and families in the community.

Someone must be lying, right?

Two Truths Often Do Not Equal a Lie

Sometimes—I’d argue, often—when people land on starkly different versions of reality, no one is lying. We just misunderstand how the other side has arrived at a different subjective truth than the one we have arrived at.

The teachers’ strike in Newton offers one example of this phenomenon, and there are lots more where that comes from. In the couples and family therapy room, people often have entirely different versions of the truth. Misunderstandings around who was more cruel, what the budget really is, whose religion is “right,” and who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed sit at the heart of intractable conflict in our closest relationships, and in larger conflicts between and within nations. Misunderstandings like these lead to disintegration of marriages, family estrangements, and full out wars.

We Are All Blind Men

The costs of misunderstanding don’t just belong to a modern world and they aren’t simply the result of crummy people lying to one another for selfishly motivated reasons. Ancient stories and modern science reveal that the causes and costs of misunderstanding are fundamental to being human. An early version of a Buddhist parable dating back to around 500 BCE offers helps explain why. It’s a story about an elephant and some blind men that goes something like this:

Several blind men had never encountered an elephant before it came to their village. Each man wanted to understand what it was and used his sense of touch to learn and then share his perceptions with the others. But the creature was so enormous that each man touching the creature perceived something different. The one who made contact with the tusk said, "it's a spear!" The one who touched the trunk said, "it's a snake!" The one who touched the side said, "it's a wall!"

Each man experienced the truth of what the creature was for themselves. And each man was confident in their perception of reality. So, when they heard the other men describing an entirely different truth, they began to grow distrustful. And there are few things more frustrating than feeling like someone is trying to deliberately deceive you about something you know to be true. These men felt gaslit. And they quickly grew angry to the point of coming to blows with one another. Long after the elephant went on its merry way, the men continued arguing.

This ancient story feels familiar, doesn’t it?

The story of the blind men and the elephant help us to appreciate the universal human tendency to get wrapped up in subjective experience and knowledge; the universal human tendency to overlook the limitations of our own perceptions and instead grow overconfident that it's us that knows the "right" answer, the "full" truth. The other guy is full of it!

The good news is that some versions of the parable of the blind men and the elephant have a happy ending. The blows can turn to something more positive— but only when people recognize how rigidly attached to subjective truth we all are.

To Misunderstand Is Human. To Understand Misunderstanding is Divine

Understanding misunderstanding is the first step to exiting divisive conflict. When we can begin to consider that our own subjective experience does not represent truth in its totality, we are more likely to stop reflexively vilifying and instead to grow curious. Understanding how human it is to see the world and its truths subjectively opens us up to practice things like perspective-taking, empathic effort, curiosity, and reappraisals. Such practices hold the power to help unhappy couples and warring communities escape intractable conflict (for example, in research with Palestinians and Israelis).

We can begin by understanding that in situations around which emotions run high or in which we hold strong beliefs that the human brain only "sees" parts of the larger truth. This is basic cognitive science that study after study confirms.

Though it's hard to believe, most disagreements have less to do with villainous lying and more to do with the fact that we are all (metaphorically speaking) blind men trying to figure out what an elephant is through the parts of the giant creature we are able to make contact with.

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

I’ve offered other specific strategies to exit intractable conflict. But here, I want to emphasize the importance of wrapping our heads and hearts around appreciating the limits of our subjective experience.

In fact, we all fall prey to the idea that our truths are more well-evidenced, more true than the truths we disagree with. But no matter how strongly we believe our own minds, what we know does not and cannot represent the totality of truth. As Aristotle wisely observed, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Relaxing attachment to our own subjective truth opens us up to the valuing understanding how others view things.

More good news: we don’t need to agree with or adopt others’ truths. In fact, we shouldn’t. It is our ability to make contact with different parts of larger, complex truths that empowers us to know more as a collective society. There is no way we can access all of truth as individuals. Together, though, we know more and can make wiser decisions. But it only works when we learn to listen to how others view things differently than we do.

To foster relationships and be part of large communities of individuals, we need to be willing to try to understand people with whom we disagree. Refusal to do so cements a pathway to crumbling relationships and communities.

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Go Deeper With Me!

If you enjoy the kind of relational science I explore in this newsletter:

1. Pick up a copy of my book, Work, Parent, Thrive. In it, I explore the relationship between roles, parents and children, and partners, and the science guiding us in how to thrive in a life full of demanding roles. (Email me if you’d like to be sent a free copy of the first chapter.)

2. Follow me on Instagram, where I attempt to regularly share science-backed ideas for relational thriving: @yaelschonbrun 

3. And, a final reminder to enter the book giveaway to try to win a copy of ACT for Burnout by Debbie Sorensen and Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang!

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I spend much of my professional time thinking about how science and clinical practice can foster relational thriving, including relationships between parents, children, and even between our life roles. A newsletter isn’t therapy, but it can be therapeutic. Send me your questions via comment or email if you’d like to read about how social science and clinical practice can help you navigate specific relationship challenges more skillfully.

Relationally yours,

Yael