The Marketplace Magazine November/December 2021

Approaching differences as a growth opportunity

The Space Between Us: Conversations about Transforming Conflict

by Betty Pries (Herald Press, 2021, 232 pages, $16.99 US).

For some people, conflict is to be avoided at all costs. Others view disagreements as situations they can bulldoze their way through, oblivious to resulting relational carnage.

In The Space Between Us, Betty Pries asks readers to recognize the inevitability of conflict and view disagreements as a route to personal growth. That growth and resulting improved resilience come at a cost however: we need to face and heal our own emotional landscape.

The book is both extremely helpful and difficult, as it calls us to both recognize personal pain and take “a hard look at our own complicity in the conflicts in which we have participated — or the conflicts we have seemingly avoided.” Pries has spent more than a quarter century coaching, mediating, and consulting. That wealth of wisdom and experience shows through in her book. She skillfully commends using mindfulness, self-awareness, and deep listening as tools for greater understanding and dealing with disagreements.

Practicing presence to become aware of what makes us anxious, understanding how to turn people problems into situation problems and learning to live in our deeper selves rather than our defended (false) selves are disciplines she calls us to embrace.

Praying for both compassion and for healthy boundaries is part of Pries’ prescription for coping with conflict. She provides helpful insights on the nature of forgiveness and the elements of a good apology.

Noting that what we resist we entrench, she suggests allowing and accepting our pain, then releasing it and resting “in God, in self-compassion, or both.”