From Conflict to Connection with James "Fish" Gill (@james_fish_gill)
In today's episode, I'm delighted to be joined by James "Fish" Gill to talk all things conflict and conscious communication. Fish is a coach, teacher and facilitator whose work offers a compassionate paradigm for relating to and transforming moments of conflict in all of our relationships.
Our conversation covers a lot of ground, including:
Why we so easily end up in conflict and opposition with people we love
How we unconsciously escalate conflict
Using compassion and curiosity to understand someone else's perspective
Holding both positive intention and unintended impact as true
Reframing defensiveness, withdrawal and other assumed ill-intent......and so much more!
To connect with James:
On Instagram: @james_fish_gill
Questions for Discussion & Reflection
Reflect on a recent conflict you experienced. Can you identify any unconscious communication patterns, such as defence mechanisms or fault-finding, that may have played a role? How might recognising and addressing these patterns change the dynamic of the interaction?
Consider a time when you found it challenging to see the good intentions in someone’s behaviour that was generally condemned. What emotions did this stir in you, and how did it affect your response to the individual and the situation?
Think about an instance where you felt hurt by someone close to you. How did you react initially, and how might considering their pain and deeper intentions, as James suggests with his three questions, have altered your perspective and response?
Resistance in relationships can be a significant barrier to connection. Have you encountered resistance from someone recently? How did you approach it, and in hindsight, how could understanding and validating their experience have made a difference?
Analyse your own behaviour in conflicts. Are there ways in which you might inadvertently contribute to, or escalate, tensions? What steps can you take to become more self-aware and adjust your approach to conflict resolution?
Recall a time when your good intentions were misunderstood, leading to conflict. How did you address the situation? Going forward, how can you ensure that your intentions are communicated effectively, and how can you also acknowledge any unintended upset they may cause?
Think about the concept of compassion towards oneself and others during conflict. Do you find it easy or challenging to lead with compassion when facing resistance or hostility? How could adopting a more compassionate stance impact your relationships?
On a broader scale, consider an international or community conflict that is significant to you. Applying James' worldview of acknowledging the tender longings and pain of all humans, how might this perspective shift your understanding of the conflict and the parties involved?
Have you ever felt compelled to cut someone out of your life because they upset you? Reflect on the cultural misunderstandings around compassion that James critiques. Might there be a different approach that acknowledges your own boundaries while also striving for understanding?
When was the last time someone demanded that you make the first move to resolve a conflict? How did this make you feel, and what was the outcome? Reflecting on this, how might taking the first step yourself, despite the challenge, create new opportunities for connection and healing?
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Check out my couples course, Secure Together (& save $200 with the code SECURE)
Save $150 on my Higher Love break-up course with the code PHOENIX
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
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Episode Transcript
Stephanie [00:00:04]:
In today's episode, I'm so excited to be joined by my dear friend and teacher, James Fish Gill. Fish is a coach, yoga teacher and facilitator and his work focuses on conflict and using conscious communication and a compassion led approach to transform moments of conflict into deeper connection. His work has been incredibly impactful on my own work and I'm so excited to have him here on the podcast to share with you. Our conversation covers a lot of ground and there's so much wisdom in there, so I hope that you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed recording it for you.
Stephanie [00:01:14]:
Now, just before we kick off, a quick reminder that my signature programme, Healing Anxious Attachment, is opening for enrollment in a couple of weeks time. If you're not already on the waitlist and you would like to be, definitely head to my website or use the link in the show notes. The waitlist guarantees you a spot in the programme and also allows you to access exclusive early bird pricing. This is my signature programme that over 1500 people have been through in the past two years. So it's very near and dear to my heart and will be the last round that I'm running for the foreseeable future as I'll be taking some time away to have a baby. So if you are someone who's struggling with anxious attachment and you'd like some tools and a really comprehensive approach to understanding yourself better and learning a new way of being in relationship that is more spacious and freeing, I would love to see you inside healing anxious attachment. So definitely jump on the waitlist if you haven't already. Okay, now for my conversation with fish Gill.
Stephanie [00:02:21]:
Hi, Fish. So great to be here with you.
James [00:02:24]:
It's great to join you. Steph, I'm so always so moved by how articulate you are about the nuances of relationship and humanness. Yeah. So I hold you in very high regard, so it's beautiful to join you.
Stephanie [00:02:43]:
Likewise. We've been talking about this for about six months, I think, since I came to a workshop that you were running in Sydney and then I had to go and get myself pregnant and that put everything on the back burner for a bit, but we're finally doing it.
James [00:02:57]:
That's a reasonable excuse?
Stephanie [00:02:59]:
Yeah, I would hope so. But it's thrown some of my plans into disarray in the short term. But it's okay, we've made it. So maybe for those who are uninitiated in you and your world and what you do, you could give us a quick 101 of conscious communication. But I think that's like, even that is kind of a big umbrella thing. And I think you have such a distinctive expression of that work which I hold in such high regard. Obviously, I think we connected on Instagram maybe a couple of years ago now, but I was fortunate enough to come to a workshop that you ran, as I said, in Sydney last year and within about 3 seconds of that wrapping up, signed up for your facilitator training programme, which I'm doing at the moment. So suffice it to say, I'm a huge fan of your work and your way of doing things. So maybe you could give people a bit of a flavour of what you do.
James [00:04:00]:
Where do I begin? So many doorways that we could walk through. I think really the real essence of what I term conscious communication is realising that in the face of our inevitable relationship upsets, which, by the way, we don't necessarily relate to conflict, misunderstanding, hurts, fights as inevitable. We might even sort of relate to them as bad or wrong. But once we realise that relationship upset is inevitable, then we can start to get really quite skillful at how we meet it. And one of the essence of this work is really the realisation that to transform a moment of upset between us and others, we need to create open heartedness. And yet conflict will necessarily be characterised by closed heartedness, both in us and in them. And so the work that I teach and the invitations that I make to students at my work is, are you willing to be the one to recommence the opening between you and them? Because we can't evoke someone's openness by meeting them with our closedness. We have to evoke them with our openness.
James [00:05:45]:
And what I mean. So some people might be listening and going, what is this open and closed of which you speak? What I mean by openness is that sense that you get when someone reaches out to you and expresses their appreciation for you. Or someone sends you a message saying, I'm thinking of you, or I love you, or I care about you, or thank you, or I'm sorry, or you must have really been suffering recently and I can't imagine how it was for you. Like all these ways in which someone gets in our world, it opens us. Right. I've just received text message thread from my two sisters and we're organising to catch up this evening for a glass of wine. And as soon as they start to express how excited they are to see me, my heart naturally opens. And then what I mean by closedness is the other very natural state of the heart where something happens and we feel suddenly criticised by them, or misunderstood by them, or falsely accused by them, or cast out by them, or judged or unthought of or excluded.
James [00:07:04]:
And I don't even have to think about it, I don't plan my heart closing. It just naturally happens. I've recently been through a very tender experience where communication was cut by someone I love very deeply. And immediately upon that happening, I noticed this absolute stone cold closedness that arose in me. And so the work of conscious communication really begins by recognising that hearts have the capacity to be open or closed.
Stephanie [00:07:40]:
Yeah.
James [00:07:41]:
And to address our inevitable relationship hurts, misunderstandings, conflicts and upsets, we have to be able to create, evoke openness between us and between us and them. And we have to do that by evoking openness in us first, to meet them with our openness. Another way of considering conflict is my nervous system and your nervous system colliding in a state of distress. And as soon as nervous systems meet in distress, the distress amplifies, even if you're quite calm and I walk in the door home from work and I'm like, freaking traffic, you will start to feel a sense of distress in your nervous system that is responding to the distress in mine. So to be able to transform relationship upset, I have to create a sense of safety in me, in my nervous system. The absence of threat, that is, and meet you with that, so that I evoke your safety. And that might sound simple, but you know very well that that's not at all how we're hardwired. As soon as conflict arises, as soon as some uncertain moment surfaces, we immediately contract. And they immediately contract, and then we tend to start to communicate from that contraction. And that sounds like blame, it sounds like dismissal, it sounds like always or never statements. It sounds. What was that?
Stephanie [00:09:36]:
Why should I? And I think that so much of what you're saying, and I know we've talked about this, fish, is that it takes this openness, and I would say, like, immense courage to lead with openness when everything in our being is saying, like, close, contract, protect, defend. To be the one to open in the face of that, when you can't guarantee the outcome, it takes a lot of courage. And I think that certainly that fear based part of us, or the hurt, the pain can say, like, why should I have to be the one to open? Why should I have to lead resolution or lead repair? And I think that can in and of itself, be such a fruitful, juicy inquiry into our own stuff, our own pain and hurt.
James [00:10:33]:
It's a magnificent insight into humanness, Steph, that, you know, if I had a dollar for every time someone said, yeah, but why is it mine to do the opening? Listen to what they said or did. I'm not going to be the one to open. I've got to wait for them to do the opening because it's their job to do the opening for us because they are at fault. It's such a natural human response. And this is part of getting conscious, that is bringing our awareness to things that we're not aware of naturally, is we wait for the openness from them. We demand it. Think about the last time someone did something that really upset you. Chances are, metaphorically, even if not physically, you kind of crossed your arms and gave a bit of a.
James [00:11:30]:
And stood in the place of you. Better remedy this for us because look at how hurt I am. So we naturally adopt this stance of closedness and demanding them to be the one to reopen us. That's very natural. But when you consider that's happening on both ends of the argument, you start to realise why conflict escalates. Because the more I demand, if you and I are in conflict, the more I demand that you're the one to do the opening for us, the more you're going to feel blamed by me. And what does that evoke in you? Closedness, withdrawal, defensiveness, hurt, feeling villainized, feeling misunderstood. And the more you experience that, the more you're going to feel like it's my job to be the compassionate one, to get over there in your world.
James [00:12:33]:
And the more you do that to me, the more you demand that I'm the one to open, the more misunderstood I feel about how hurt I am and how it's definitely your job to do the opening. So it becomes like this mexican standoff where we're both just arms crossed in a hump, thinking, I'm only going to open when you do. With both human beings doing that, conflict is guaranteed to endure and to escalate. So, yeah, what a critical question. Why would I be willing to be the one? And as you know, another critical question becomes, how? Like, if I am willing, how on earth do I open and stand in a place of radical compassion? When I've been really seriously upset or hurt or cast out by someone who I have every right to be more loving than that, how and why would I be open? And this brings us to the fact that in our world, and I can't speak to whether this has always been true on the planet, but certainly in our culture or in our mixture of cultures, currently, there is this incredible misunderstanding of compassion, as if to be compassionate is to condone hurtful or unsafe behaviour. And so much of this is what I love about your work, Steph, is because you come from such a kindness and compassion and humanity about both people, what's the dynamic? What's going on for both people? What's their experience? But so much of the relationship, Instagram, pop psychology stuff around relationships and boundaries, takes the flavour of, if people upset you, then you deserve better. Cut them out of your life.
Stephanie [00:14:45]:
You know how that goes for you.
James [00:14:47]:
Yeah. If you take that path, you're just going to end up incredibly alone, while also just feeling justified that you're good and everyone else is not good enough. That's a lonely, lonely path. So to actually start to realise that we don't see all the ways in which we naturally contribute to opposition and upset in every moment, we don't see the ways. And as you understand the work that I do is, let's start to see all the ways. I was making a list the other day that was titled ways that we contribute to and escalate conflict. And my list is at 15. At the moment, there's 15 different ways that we usually can't notice that we actually make opposition between us and others, all the time thinking that we didn't do any of that.
James [00:15:51]:
It was them.
Stephanie [00:15:52]:
Yeah. And I think that, again, I've spoken to you about this in my own processes around this work. It can be really hard when you have a self image that is like, but I'm good. I'm the good one. I'm the one putting in the effort and trying to say the thing in the right way. And all of that stuff that we tell ourselves, how could my goodness, be misconstrued here and be landing so differently on this other person? And so there is this, I think, particularly for those of us who tend more towards that fawning response, or I'll fix it, and I'll very gently kind of manoeuvre around this to try and make everything feel really good and harmonious and connected, because that can look really sweet. We really can struggle to own or take responsibility for or get curious about how that might be received, or that there could be anything other than that good intention that we're kind of putting out there. It can just feel really unfair, like this sense of injustice, of how did this good thing become another conflict when that's the opposite of what I was wanting.
James [00:17:09]:
Exactly. Beautiful. So if we were to divide my work into two halves, you're speaking to one half of it, which is becoming masterful at having our good intentions land. Because all your listeners right now, if I asked you, what good intention thing have you done in the last week? You'd probably come up with 100. As human beings, we move from a place of longing and yearning for ourselves to be safe and well and happy and joyful and at ease, and also for others. So there's such upset that arises for us when we've taken some action or said something or even not taken an action based on some beautiful, valid intention that we had. Look how loving I was being. Right? Look how loving I was being.
James [00:18:10]:
And what we did or said was received so poorly by them. I'll use the example that I think you're familiar with. But when my daughter, who's now 24, when she was 22, I arranged a 22nd birthday party for her and we gathered around at a local bar and had this beautiful food and everyone was there. And midway through the night, I dinged my glass and I said, I just want to say a few words about this remarkable young woman before us. And I spoke to three of her greatest character strengths. She's also beautiful and accomplished, but I wanted to speak to the essence of her, like her character, the part of her that all of us get to witness and love. So I talked about her wisdom and I talked about her courage and I talked about her kindness. And there I am, just pouring out my heart and there's not a dry eye in the place because everyone feels like their love for my daughter also got recognised in my speech.
James [00:19:19]:
But down the end of the table, when I finally catch a glimpse of my daughter, her arms are crossed, her face is red, she's turned away from me. And when I go to speak to her after the speech, she's like, I don't want to talk about it, dad. And avoids me for the rest of the night. So there's an example where my beautiful, loving intention, which was to be fully expressed in my love for her and to leave her feeling deeply honoured on her birthday and make it all about her. I couldn't work out why it was a problem for her. And this is one of the unconscious assumptions, one of the two unconscious assumptions that we make. Because my intentions were so wonderful, they should have received it as wonderful in reality. It turns out, in every moment of conflict, that while I had beautiful intentions, they also experienced some unintended upset as a result of what I did or said.
James [00:20:25]:
So it turns out later on I find out, through getting curious, that she's left feeling unfairly put on the spot, ambushed with emotionality, dad's emotionality. She felt embarrassed and she felt like her needs weren't being considered. Like I was making her birthday all about me and my expression instead of feeling into her and what she wanted, which was just a light touch and a fun night. So once we start to look for all the ways in which we had such loving intentions, and our loving intentions landed as hurtful or distressing or upsetting for someone, we start to see, actually everywhere. That recipe is everywhere. Unconscious communication says once we can start to recognise that upset is characterised by I had a loving intention and my actions created an upset for you, then we stop resisting reality and we get connected to reality. Because only when I'm connected to that truth, that my loving intentions are real and the upset my daughter felt is also real. Only when I can get connected to those two things and hold them both and deeply honour them both to the extent that they both ache to be honoured, only then am I standing in reality.
James [00:22:02]:
And remember, back in the unconscious model, I'm standing there going, I don't know what your problem is, darling. I gave a loving speech. Get over yourself. How dare you respond that way? You should be more appreciative. Anyone would love a father who spoke so openly about his love for her. So can you hear how my natural response is to try and make her wrong for the experience that she's having? Whereas conscious communication says, of course you're having an experience, and it differs from the experience I wanted you to have. And both those things are true.
Stephanie [00:22:42]:
Yeah. I think that the speed with which we go to defend our good intention, it's so automatic. It's like muscle memory. And it's still something that I really struggle with a lot, because, again, it feels so true. Right. I've heard you speak about this before, fish. It's like, of course our reality feels true and of course we have infinite context for everything that we want and feel and everything we've ever experienced. It feels true because we're so deep in it.
Stephanie [00:23:23]:
And it can be unfathomable that there's this big disconnect between what we wanted and how we're being perceived or how something landed for someone else. I think that having that ability to hold both is not something that comes naturally to most of us and is something that we really do have to actively practise and cultivate because it's so counter to everything that we've ever really been taught about the world and in every story, in the media, in global politics, everywhere, it's just so deeply oppositional. We're always looking to figure out, okay, but who was worse and better or who was at fault or who was to blame. We just seek out that kind of clean cut certainty that invariably misses reality.
James [00:24:14]:
You can understand how, like, if I go back to my scenario with my daughter on her 22nd birthday, if the approach I take is telling her she shouldn't feel how she feels, then she's actually going to experience being dismissed by me and that's going to deepen the rift between us. She's going to feel like I'm completely unwilling to be responsible for the very real pain my actions caused her. But over here in my world, I'm just trying to convince her of my goodness, which is real as well. And so I think, Steph, you speak to it like a core ache or a core wound in us. Any moment that our goodness is not recognised, it fucking hurts. And we recoil from the accusation of being somehow bad or wrong or a pain causer or a villain, insensitive or nasty or controlling or any other label that they might give us. So let's for a moment validate why. Let's look at a little bit more deeply why we find it so hard to stay open and present when someone else expresses the pain that our actions brought them.
James [00:25:33]:
Going back to my scenario, number one is that I'm sending the gift of love and it's not being received. And that's heartbreaking for us anytime that the love that we're trying to exhibit or transmit to others for their well being, anytime that doesn't land, it's distressing for us, right? Because it's like the channel of love didn't remain open, it got pinched off somewhere. Number two is because we care about them and they're expressing pain to us. We don't want their pain because we care about them. So there's also distress in the fact that they're sitting with pain. And number three, it's likely that when they're expressing their pain to us, they're taking the form of blame, like saying, you did this to me. Very natural. Most human beings naturally communicate their pain through the lens of blame.
James [00:26:38]:
Look at what you've done to me. So that's painful for us because they're asking us to be responsible for some pain that they've got that we don't want for them. That differs from what we were trying to send to them. It's like if I used a postal service analogy, it's like me sending chocolates to you and you opening your front door and ringing me and saying, how dare you send this bag of dog shit to me? And I'm like, hang on a sec. I don't want you to have the dog shit because I care about you. I'm not at fault for the dog shit you think I sent. And why didn't you receive the chocolates? Right. So it's like, that might be a really clumsy analogy, but it starts to really make sense of why we naturally recoil anytime someone comes to us and expresses their pain.
James [00:27:30]:
For as long as I recoil from my daughter's pain, the relationship goes untended to the gap between me and her widens the more dismissed or uncared for she feels and the more falsely accused I feel. So the only way that we can repair that is one of us has to bridge the gap and hold both of those things. Look at what I was hoping for and look at what she was suffering with and, you know, making that sort of jump over the bridge between our self centred view into the expanded view of me and you. You know what that takes because you've been practising doing it. And I really think that's a spiritual practise, because we're having to get out of our little ego seat, which is so sure, based on our own data. I'm so sure, as her loving dad, because of the love I feel and the words I'm speaking and everyone's teary eyes, I'm so sure that the reality of that moment is that I was being loving. So clearly the problem's over there with her interpretation. Right? That's how the ego, which is a wonderfully protective mechanism to keep ourselves distinct and safe and have our identity maintained.
James [00:28:56]:
But in that case, my ego, the way that I'm trapped in my own view, based on my own data, keeps me in disconnection with my daughter because I start to just make her wrong effortlessly. You're being ridiculous. You've taken things the wrong way. You're being emotional. Here we go again. You should be more appreciative. And fuel to the fire. Right? So what that has to sound like eventually, if I can expand my awareness, I can come to her and I can try to hold both of those.
James [00:29:34]:
Which starts to sound a little bit like this. My love. When I gave that speech yesterday at your birthday, I was so longing to be fully expressed for the extraordinary love I have for you. And I just wanted you to be the recipient of that love, not just mine, but everyone's. And I've started to realise that how I went about expressing my love may well have left you feeling embarrassed, unfairly put on the spot, like you're being ambushed with dad's emotionality and might have even left you feeling as if I didn't consider your needs. So maybe you felt hurt or angry or disappointed or frustrated. Can you hear that? In those two parts of my offer, what I call an offer, I'm speaking very fiercely to the love in my heart, to the goodness in me, but I'm also speaking equally fiercely to the unintended pain that my actions created. We can only do that if we are prepared to recognise that as we move through our world with beautiful intentions in our heart, we are constantly creating unintended upset for others, like, constantly.
James [00:30:56]:
And that's a little confronting because we think no loving intention should just be enough.
Stephanie [00:31:04]:
Yeah. I think that hearing that expression, that offer, you can see how. You can feel how it just melts defences. Right? There's not much to fight against in that offer. And so it really is so contrary to the default mode that most of us take to conflict. Right. And it is really, really disarming very naturally. I think, in the same way that the alternative is naturally going to increase conflict and opposition and closedness can see how openness sort of just cascades from that kind of offer to someone of like, oh, yeah, my goodness.
Stephanie [00:31:47]:
But also I can see that and I really didn't want that for you, but I can see that it's real and I'm so sorry about that.
James [00:31:54]:
Yeah. And this is how we use communication to bring emotional safety into the room, because can you feel if I go to her and say, I don't know what your problem is, you're being ridiculous, and she says, why don't you give a shit about my needs, dad? It's my birthday. You can feel the direction that conversation is going to head. And in that moment of conflict, there's no safety for me because I'm not having my goodness recognised. And there's no safety for her because it feels like her very real pain is getting dismissed by her father. So to generate safety, that offer says, hey, I'm going to speak fiercely to the goodness in me and I'm also going to speak very fiercely to the very real pain that you may well be in. So what's happening there is I get to be valid and she gets to be valid. So we're vacuuming out of the space all the natural unconscious tendencies about who's right and who's wrong, who's more valid than the other, what should or shouldn't have happened, who's being x or Y or z in terms of how I label your behaviour.
James [00:33:08]:
So we're vacuuming out all the oppositional aspects of our unconscious way of communicating, which is attack and defend, right and wrong, you versus me, whose fault is it? And once we vacuum out all the oppositional tendencies, we're just left with two people having very real experiences.
Stephanie [00:33:28]:
So I wonder, because I think in the story of your daughter's birthday, your good intention is more readily discernible, and so no one's going to be looking at that and being like, what a dick, right? How could he have done that? So I wonder if we could talk about some more challenging examples where most people would look at a behaviour and go, not great behaviour. Where's the good intention in that? Where it feels a little bit more opaque or murky? Because I think that's where people struggle. It's certainly where I receive a lot of pushback online, and I know you do as well when you start to invite compassion for people whose behaviour is frowned upon, or that we generally condemn as being bad or unhealthy or whatever.
James [00:34:19]:
Toxic.
Stephanie [00:34:21]:
Yeah, toxic, everyone's favourite word. And as you said earlier, I think that misunderstanding that to be compassionate is to condone behaviour. And so people then have this big visceral response against, well, how am I meant to have compassion for that or feel into some positive intention there? Because that's such bad behaviour. And if I do that, doesn't that mean they're just going to keep doing that thing? And I don't want that. So I'll go back to holding my arms.
James [00:34:46]:
Yeah, exactly. Beautiful. Okay, so what we have just been talking about is the first half of this work, which is my beautiful intention, and the unintended upset that I created for my daughter and how they coexist. Now we're moving to the second half, which is the opposite. It's the very real pain I'm in and the deeper intentions behind what someone else did to me. Right. This is an extra challenging half, because the more pain we have experienced as a result of what someone did, the less we naturally have the capacity to be compassionate towards where their actions came from naturally our compassion goes offline under threat or in the space of unsafety or hurt or rejection or fear, et cetera, naturally goes offline. So I just want to say up front and you know this, but people listening to this kind of short little excerpt of this work might not know this.
James [00:35:59]:
Conscious communication has nothing to do with condoning behaviour that creates an unsafety or a hurt or a distrust in us. Nothing to do with condoning that behaviour and healthy relationship often will look like considering at what distance do I need to be from certain behaviours in order to still feel safe in myself? So let's get that kind of disclaimer up the front. And at the same time, there's some things hidden from our view. When someone does or says something that hurts us, there's a bunch of things that we can't naturally see that conscious communication helps us to see. I will use the example of a few years ago now finding out that my wonderful ex wife, she and I get on fantastically. It was just on the phone to her before we got on this call, finding out that my ex wife at some point had spoken to some people in my community that I don't even know, people sort of around and about, people who know me spoken to a few people and revealed some very kind of personal things that suddenly sort of spread like wildfire. And a client of mine came to me and said, hey, I've just heard some things about you and suddenly I'm just left a little bit unsure about whether I actually feel okay to work with you. So I was fortunate that this client came to me and shared that.
James [00:37:40]:
So obviously as you might be able to feel into that. What that left me with was feeling deceived, feeling unfairly revealed, judged, fearful of a judgement being in my community that I had no idea what it was or whether I could even have a chance to speak to it and really hurt. Actually, from that standpoint of being with my hurt, it's very natural for me to look at my ex wife's intentions and leap to some conclusions, such as she's being nasty, she's being controlling, she's being hurtful, she's being malicious, she's spreading rumours, she just wants to bring me down. It's very natural for me to leap to those conclusions. And that really is the world of unconscious communication where we immediately leap to our analysis about someone's intention that is wholly based on our pain. And by the way, our pain is very real. And if my pain is the only data I have access to, then it's easy for me to reach the conclusion that they must be a pain causer. Only when I can start to recognise that she would have had some deeper, valid yearning in her beautiful, tender heart do I ever start to get anywhere near the truth.
James [00:39:08]:
And that was difficult for me to start to do because I just wanted to say, what a such and such. What a such and such for bringing such ill repute on me and leaving me in such. How unfair, how unreasonable, when I look deeper into that, into her intentions. And here are three questions that I considered to go deeper into her intentions. Remember, I'm not condoning that behaviour. Number one, what pain might she have been wanting to express? And remember, we'd been through a divorce and I'd left the relationship. And me leaving the relationship was absolutely devastating and heartbreaking to her. She was left with both of our children to care for full time for a while before we could work out how to do that together.
James [00:39:58]:
It was heartbreaking. Heartbreaking for her. So much pain for her. Devastating. So question number one, what pain was she maybe trying to have expressed by sharing what she did with certain people? Number two, what pain was she trying to get out of or avoid or lessen? A good example of that is when we might deceive our partner, when we might not be transparent about something, which I'm not condoning. I'm not condoning an absence of transparency. In fact, I will champion transparency. But why we might deceive our partner is because there's some risk that we're trying to avoid.
James [00:40:46]:
The risk of upsetting them with the truth, the risk of being judged by being seen for who we really are, the risk of it being taken the wrong way and then plunging us back into conflict when we've just had such a beautiful couple of days after that big fight. So question number two is, what pain might they be trying to avoid? The risk of, or lessen or diminish by doing what they did. And question number three is, what pain of theirs do they need us to taste so that they feel much less alone and much more attuned to in the pain that they're in? And that question number three really goes to the very heart of the most malicious acts. If we look for a moment at Israel Palestine, the dropping of bombs, the shooting of people, the killing of innocent civilians, the holding of captives, on the surface, they just appear incredibly malicious. And, of course, the pain that they create, not just for the individuals involved, but for the whole world, is enormous. And I would never condone such actions at the same time. So many of those actions are based on that. Question number three.
James [00:42:17]:
Some of your listeners will know this in themselves. The pain that we've been through, some of the things that we've done in order to try and get someone else to finally taste what it's been like for us. I think I was sharing with you the other day that one of my wonderful clients that I worked with last year, when I got on a call with her, I said, how are you? And she said, a terrible, terrible. I said, what happened? And she said, I've just sent this terrible message to my ex husband on the eve of our court case to try and work out who gets the kids. And I said, me being me, me being a conflict nerd, I rubbed my hands together and said, let's read the text. Inappropriately fascinated by conflict. And she said, okay, I'll redid the text, but don't judge me. She said.
James [00:43:08]:
She read it out and it said, the day that I met you was the worst day of my life. So she'd composed this text, sent it off to her ex husband on the eve of their court case. Now, if we stand in his shoes, that just appears malicious, doesn't it? Just appears malicious. And he's probably going to reach the conclusion that she's a crazy bitch and the kids are better off with me. And here's how I'm going to add it to my court case, my legal proceedings, and I'm going to make sure that crazy mum doesn't get access like she wants. So things escalate that way. But when we stand in her shoes and obviously she's got regret and remorse for what she sent, but if we get under the surface of where it came from, where it was sent from, we start to realise, and it took her a little while to kind of feel into this with me, but I said, what were you ultimately hoping for? And where she got to was. She said, ultimately, I was hoping for my ex husband to feel the extraordinary pain I've been through since our separation.
James [00:44:10]:
And that's so human. It's so human. I'm not condoning the way she went about it at all. That was very unskillful because it didn't create. It didn't evoke in him an openness to her pain, did it? It immediately shut him down. So those three questions, what pain wants to be expressed, what pain is wanting to be avoided? And what pain do they want us to taste so that they feel attuned to in their pain? Those three questions take us deeper than the errant assumption that they are essentially bad or wrong and wanted our pain. And once we can start to feel into the fact that they wanted something valid and our pain is real, now we're standing in reality. Part of the beauty of that is once we can start to dissolve our assumptions about others as bad, something shifts in our heart in terms of our relationship with the world.
James [00:45:14]:
So the book I'm writing at the moment is called how to fall in love with humanity. Because what starts to happen over time, and I've witnessed this with countless clients, we can start to relate to someone's shitty behaviour as an unskillful way to go about what they were yearning for. That created very real pain for us that we don't need to be anywhere near. But that view of reality is far different than some people are just evil and out to get me and want bad things.
Stephanie [00:45:46]:
Yeah.
James [00:45:47]:
And I've never, in all the thousands of conversations, tens of thousands of conversations over the last 15 years of this work, no one has ever failed to find a deeper, more human yearning in the heart of someone who's hurt them. No one has ever failed to find something much more nuanced and rich and real than they wanted me to suffer.
Stephanie [00:46:16]:
Yeah. And I think that certainly in my experience, there is such freedom in that recognition because you can get really stuck in holding on to the story of, like, that person's just an asshole, that person is just bad, and they meant to hurt me. And we can just spin around in that for a long time. And I don't know about you or anyone listening, but that's never really helped me to feel better in a meaningful sense. It feels kind of juicy in the sense of a sugar hit. Temporarily it gives us something, but it doesn't really sustain us and it certainly doesn't free us from the pain that we're in. Keeps us in it.
James [00:47:05]:
Holding. Yeah. Latching on, being weathered to my assumptions of someone's malicious intent. The sugar hit of that, the kind of junk food aspect of that, that kind of feels zingy and tasty on the tongue is the fact that if I can label someone as bad, then it means that my pain must be valid. Like all the ex partners in the world now going, oh, it makes sense that I was suffering because turns out my ex partner is a narcissist. Like, everyone loves to reach for that, because it has this immediate flavour of validating the very real pain I've been through. Right. If they're the villain, then suddenly I must be valid in the hurt that I've sustained.
James [00:47:46]:
But you're right, it doesn't lead us into an interconnected world, an interrelationship. And if we're committed to interrelationship or inter being or interdependence, which is what relationship is, then we have to be able to move beyond the assumptions of malicious intent. If I come back to my story with my ex wife, it took me a couple of days to tend to my own upset of that. I felt really hurt, like really hurt and really falsely accused and really kind of, what's the word? Almost tricked, right? But when I started to really feel into the heart of the woman that for 15 years I loved more than anything, right? So it's like my heart can actually feel into hers if I allow it. I started to realise that what might have been behind her doing that was actually that she wanted her pain understood by others around her, even people who didn't know me. She wanted to feel like her pain that was still alive for her because of some things that had happened between us. She wanted to feel like she had allies. And so she achieved that by sharing what had happened between us that really left her pain.
James [00:49:02]:
And as soon as I can start to tune into that, I go, you know what? I also want her to have allies in her pain, just like she does. I also want her to have the experience in her heart that her pain is valid and not being dismissed. I want that for her as well. That is the essence of love, when you can start to feel into what someone was yearning for and realise that you would want that for them as well. Now, here's the thing. It might sound like I'm saying to her, it's okay what you did, but actually, no way. No way was that strategy okay with me. And I absolutely won't tolerate it in the future.
James [00:49:45]:
So then I came to her with my pain in one hand and her deeper yearning in the other, and I spoke it to her. So I said something like, I've just found out that some things have been said about me into my community. It's left me feeling kind of ambushed, hurt, unfairly accused and set up and fearful also for my professional reputation. And I can understand that your wonderful intention behind doing and saying what you did is that I imagine that the pain of our separation, that might still be alive in you. I imagine that you just want to be surrounded by people who you feel get your pain. And so you do that by telling some very personal things. And it really makes sense that you might have been really longing for an alliance to have people around you who could support you by knowing what you've been through. And we had this conversation over a beer and she just opened and she said, thank you for being able to see that.
James [00:51:01]:
Of course. That's what I was hoping for, of course. And she had a bit of a cry. And then she spontaneously said, I didn't go about it very skillfully. And I said, absolutely not. I won't tolerate the telling of stories in my community. And I really understand that you're yearning to feel supported in your pain. So I said to her, how might we in the future, have you express your pain? So it's really understood by me in a way that doesn't involve telling stories to people I don't know.
James [00:51:36]:
And she said, maybe I could just come direct to you and express the pain that's still here for me. And I was like, that would be wonderful, let's do that. So there's nothing in this work that says feeling into another's deeper yearning is to condone their behaviour. In fact, only by feeling into their deeper yearning can we ever address the behaviour. Because in that moment, can you feel how I evoked her openness to seeing that, how she went about it and what she tried to do were kind of a bit of a mismatch. She didn't want my pain. She wanted me to taste her pain. She didn't ultimately want my suffering.
James [00:52:24]:
She wanted her suffering. See, now let's consider what I normally would have done, unconsciously would have done if I hadn't had this notion of holding my pain and her yearning in equal measure. I would have just gone in there with what my pain and it would have sounded like, how dare you? It's not okay for you, too. I won't tolerate it. This is bad and wrong about you. It's not okay. I know that your pain is your shit. Don't spell it into my world.
James [00:52:54]:
That's how 99.9% of us will naturally communicate. Because the only data that we've got is our pain and we haven't yet felt into the rest of the data, which is that they were wanting something distinct from our pain. The greater the upset, the more difficult it is to feel into some deeper yearning.
Stephanie [00:53:17]:
Yeah, I wonder if fish, before we wrap up. I'm mindful of the time and I think we could talk about this forever, but something that I think a lot of people listening will relate to and question and struggle with is when you're faced with someone's resistance to this work, or just to. If you're doing your part right. You think you're being a very good student conscious communicator and it doesn't work, quote unquote, they don't spontaneously open and it doesn't all dissolve into. Because I think the examples that you've given for a lot of people, they'd go like, wow, that feels like a level of mastery that I don't know that that would happen in my relationship. I don't think we're there. I think that's probably true. Right? It takes a level of trust and deeper safety to be able to have those conversations heartfully.
Stephanie [00:54:17]:
And the reality is that oftentimes we will still be met with resistance or closure in someone. They might not immediately come to the table in the way that we would have hoped. And when you've been courageous in trying to lead the repair and you kind of get the door slammed in your face, then it's really easy to go back to, well, they're just the problem, right? I'm doing my part. You're still being defensive. This is bullshit. Why do I even bother? And then we're right back where we started. And I know that you speak really beautifully about validating that, like just continuing to validate. Validate the defensiveness.
Stephanie [00:55:01]:
Can I get really curious about what they're experiencing, the conditions behind that, and just keep going a level deeper rather than extending the olive branch once, then going, well, fuck this, you're not playing along.
James [00:55:13]:
So I give up. Beautiful. And that tendency is for us to go, okay, I'm going to try this out. I mean, I get to witness this all day, every day, because I'm working with people who are new to this work and asking them to practise it. And without fail, people will start and go, I tried it and it didn't open them. And so it proves that they're the villain, right? And I'm like, wow, look how quickly. Look how quickly we go from expansion back into contraction. We're certain that the problem is them.
James [00:55:43]:
And how's that's going for you? We're back in just escalating the conflict. Right? So it's very natural. It's very natural. And so, yeah, if we specifically look at how to respond to someone not responding. You've heard me talk about this, but the notion that all behaviour is an expression of an experience, everything that everyone is doing all over the planet right now, without fail, without exception, is a natural expression of the experience they're having. So when we use this idea that behaviour is an expression of experience, then rather than getting oppositional towards their behaviour. That might sound like my partner is so withdrawn, why aren't they willing to have a conversation with me? Why are they so avoidant? Why are they so this and that? Why are they so judgmental? Why are they so defensive? We can get curious about what's the experience they're having underneath their defensiveness or avoidance or withdrawal. And we're not saying I'm okay with your behaviour, we're saying, I see where it's coming from and that becomes a very, very powerful way to meet others where they're at.
James [00:57:06]:
So, for example, there's a relationship in my life that's been difficult and disconnected for twelve years. And I have approached this person numerous times indicating my care for them and my love for them and my willingness to have a better relationship with them. And for most of twelve years they've said, screw you, no thanks, not interested. The problems over there with you, I don't need anything from you. Happy with how things are all the way to, yeah, that might be nice at some point. Maybe so. For a lot of that twelve years, I kind of have encountered my own resistance to their behaviour. Thinking, look at all the love I'm pouring into this.
James [00:57:53]:
And the problem is clearly there with them because if they were really a good person, they would recognise my care for them and they would open to me. That didn't go very well because I was actually just making them wrong. Can you feel that? I'm just making them wrong for how they're being. So it wasn't until I started to think, oh, their unwillingness to have conversations with me, to take this relationship deeper is actually an expression of them not feeling ready or not feeling safe or not feeling recognised. And I myself and your listeners could maybe think right now, just like think about the last time you were unwilling. It was valid. Your unwillingness was actually an expression of where you were at, of exactly what you were feeling. You might not have felt trusting to open to someone.
James [00:58:45]:
You might not have felt ready because you hadn't had time to kind of sit with what you were feeling. And you might have been worried that you were going to make it worse. You might have just felt unrecognised and felt like it's not even worth me going there because my experience won't get seen. And so once we start to realise that people's unwillingness to be in communication with us is a communication, it is a communication of exactly what they're experiencing. Like this person who's cut contact with me recently, it leads me into a deeper understanding of what must be present for them in their experience in order to have to do so. And if I can take the time, and it's been difficult for me because I've been so hurt by it and so misrepresented for what my beautiful heart was actually intending. But also once I can start to feel into that person's heart, I'm like, wow. How much they must have been longing for the protection of an open communication and how much upset there must have been in the communication in order for them to need to close the door.
James [00:59:57]:
Because we close doors in order to create a container around us. You don't go to sleep with the front door open because you're worried about what might come in and also go out. So we close doors for containment. And that when we really feel into the essence of someone needing to withdraw in order to feel safer, to withdraw in order to not feel overwhelmed, to withdraw in order that they transmit how much pain that they're in to us so that we can understand them, like their longing to have their pain recognised, you can really start to feel into the humanness now. I still feel very hurt by that recently. And at the very same time I have the deepest. I'm starting to generate this very deep compassion that this person I care so much about. Felt like closing the door was their desperate need to have their pain recognised and to have their safety enhanced so that they could continue be in their life and do what they really want to do.
James [01:01:08]:
And I honour the fuck out of that. I honour that so deeply while also suffering the consequences of it.
Stephanie [01:01:15]:
Yeah. And yet social media snippets would say, like, well, that's just immature and those people shouldn't be in relationships. That's the one I hear all the time. If you can't have a conversation, you shouldn't be in relationships. That might sound nice and it might make you feel good, but can we feel into what sits beneath that resistance or that defensiveness or that pulling away that isn't just I can't be bothered or I don't care which I guess that's a really easy read on something, but it almost invariably is inaccurate and there's something much more human underneath it that if we took the time to try and feel into, we could actually go, oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense.
James [01:02:02]:
Yes, that's right. Feeling into the deeper. Like when we really stop, when we really stop and slow down and ask ourselves the question, I wonder what they were longing to feel by doing what they did. And we really give that some time. Like we really look for the validity in what they were longing for. I promise what you find is so beautiful and tender and human. And if we go back to the part one, the first half, where my intention is wonderful and they shouldn't have pain, we start to realise that no matter how wonderful our intentions were like for me in this scenario, I had such tender, loving intentions behind something that I did, and what I have to start to realise, if I want to be grounded in reality, that cutting contact is a very clear expression of very real, very real upset. And it's not an upset that I ever wanted for them.
James [01:03:05]:
And I feel so deeply remorseful and regretful that the way I went about my yearning created upset for them. But it's like my responsibility from an expanded, conscious place. My responsibility is just to recognise and validate the reality of their pain. Yes, it's not what I wanted, and yes, it is true for them. And once I can start to feel into their pain and their yearning, then the cutting of contact starts to just be like a natural. It was a natural action that they took that caused pain for me that they never wanted. They don't want pain for me. They want safety for them and their pain to be recognised.
James [01:03:52]:
And so that's the deeper invitation that conscious communication invites us into. It's like, can we feel into the me and unice of this, which is so different to just the meanness that we normally have access to? What's the me and you in this? What's the tenderness in my heart, yearning and pain, and the tenderness in their heart, yearning and pain. And, you know, how difficult this is. So I speak about it as if it's kind of simple. But for me it is a spiritual path. It's my devotion, it's the thing that matters most to me on the planet, to stand in compassion towards me and all other beings in as many moments as they can. And I fall out of that all the time. I fall back into just like, what an asshole.
James [01:04:49]:
All the time.
Stephanie [01:04:52]:
Yeah. And I think that as we've touched on, there is such liberation in irrespective of what you get back, like actually just deciding to live from that place and frees up so much energy. And I find that I see the world so differently. There's just so much more ease and space and peace in deciding, really consciously deciding to live from that place as much as possible.
James [01:05:20]:
Yeah, it's a beautiful worldview, isn't it? It's as simple as realising that the planet is densely populated with billions of humans, all with tender longings in their heart and pain from the past, and either skillfully or much more likely, unskillfully, going about expressing that yearning and pain. And the more unskillfully we express our yearning and pain, the more we create pain for others that we never wanted to be creating for others. And when we just see ourselves as unskillful beings, longing and suffering, then the whole kind of hue of humanity changes. It's like things take on a different colour. Now, once again, it's important to discern how close or how distant I need to be from certain behaviours. But the behaviours that we might like to label and the people that we might like to pathologize and villainize, they're just like us. They're yearning and suffering and usually unskillfully trying to express it.
Stephanie [01:06:31]:
So beautiful. Thank you. As I said, I'm sure we could speak for many, many hours on this, but, alas, I don't know. I hope that everyone who's listening has gotten as much out of this and loves this work as much as we do. Where can people find you, fish? If they want to dive deeper into your world, which I wholeheartedly recommend that.
James [01:06:55]:
They do, they can find my little junk food nuggets, reels and posts on Instagram. James Gill that's a good place to get a taste of the work that I do, bearing in mind that it's little snippets of. It's like junk food nuggets instead of the whole nine course meal, you're selling.
Stephanie [01:07:21]:
Yourself short by saying it's junk food.
James [01:07:24]:
I post something on Instagram and a million people on the other side of the world go, yeah, but what about.
Stephanie [01:07:30]:
This extremely niche exception to that?
James [01:07:34]:
Yeah, exactly. You get it. And then on the web, I'm leadbyheart.com. And the way that I work with people now is welcome people into a nine week group coaching programme. That's where we form our foundational understanding of these tools and get some practise in the kind of warmth and security of doing it in the community of people practising. Then following a group coaching programme, you can access one to one support with me. Otherwise I'll be down at Layton beach in north Fremantle. You can also find me there.
Stephanie [01:08:21]:
Look, I have to say to anyone listening, as I said at the start, I connected with fish a couple of years ago, sort of as colleagues, but given the opportunity to jump into being a student of his through his facilitator training, and I've shared his work with so many people, including my mum, my mum did your group coaching nine week course recently. So I really stand behind this with every fibre of my being and it continues to be a really profound influence on my own work and my own lens. So immensely grateful for you, fish, and all of the work that you do and for coming on and chatting to me.
James [01:08:59]:
Well, Steph, I know firsthand the courage that it takes to consider the conscious communication pathway instead of just believe our analyses and pathologies of others in the face of our very real hurt. So I honour you for that. And I love the work that you do. I love the compassion that you bring to the conversation around attachment and relationship. And it's so what the world needs is that compassionate approach to the humanness behind our dynamics instead of the vitriol and the blame that is generated in so many corners of this world, this relationship world. So I honour you for that. It's beautiful.
Stephanie [01:09:41]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of on Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com and if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here and I hope to see you again sooner.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
unconscious communication, conflict transformation, good intentions, toxic behavior, personal betrayal, understanding pain, compassionate communication, relationship resistance, validating emotions, cultural misunderstandings, conflict escalation, intention versus impact, conscious communication, spiritual approach, compassionate living, attachment dynamics, Instagram engagement, group coaching, open-heartedness, relationship repair, hurtful behaviour, yearning behind actions, addressing behavior, unconscious responses, defence of intentions, love recognition, open communication, emotional safety, court case communication, yoga teacher.