Conflict Resolution, Models of Trust And The Movies

I’m learning to enjoy the movies again by changing my frame of reference.

For a long time, I’ve been reverse-engineering the plots of the shows I watch on TV and the big screen in the theater. Where there is a struggle between good and evil, I have had a tendency to break down the conflict into a power struggle of skill vs less skill. You see, I don’t see people as being evil. Where most people see good and evil, I see a continuum of people who are confused (evil) and less confused (good).

I think that everyone has a genuine desire to go to sleep at night knowing they did the right thing. I think that the confusion lies in not knowing how to get our needs met without hurting other people, or without using force to get our needs met. I think that most human suffering is caused by a lack of skills or capacity to get our needs met without imposing our will upon others. We are collaborators by design, and we get our needs met through collaboration. We tend to suffer when we fail our design through a lack of skills.

I arrived at this conclusion after spending a couple of decades in therapy, meetings, step work and reading a ton of books. That effort came to a peak a couple of years ago when I encountered the work of Dr. Ross W. Greene, Ph.D., a child psychologist who figured out that behavior modification doesn’t actually work.