Episode 18: Mark Gerzon – Are You Big Enough? Expanding Your Identity

In this episode, Mark Gerzon discusses:

• The role of identity in conflict and the benefits of widening our identities
• A three day conference of “systems therapy” regarding climate change, Al Gore, attack ads, and An Inconvenient Truth
• Facilitating a system to become more aware of itself
• Individual, collective, and intergenerational trauma
• The temperature zones of conflict, and how to warm up or cool down a conflict

More about Our Guest

Mark Gerzon is the President of Mediators Foundation, as well as a leadership coach, mediator, and author. His most recent book is The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide, and his previous books include Leading Through Conflict and Global Citizens. Mark is best known in the US for his design and facilitation of the Bipartisan Congressional Retreats, and over the years, he’s organized a variety of conferences designed to bring diverse groups together into genuine dialogue. He’s also conducted trainings for a wide variety of organizations including the US Congress and United Nations Development Programme.

GUEST Resources

• Website: Mediators Foundation
• Twitter
• Books:
  • The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge The Partisan Divide
  • Leading Through Conflict: How Successful Leaders Transform Differences into Opportunities
  • Global Citizens: How our Vision of the World is Outdated, and What We can do About It

• TEDx talk: Loving Your Country, Loving Yourself
• Essay: Democracy in Danger

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

• • • Ken Wilber
    • Robert Kegan:
      • Wikipedia
      • Gord’s blog post that mentions Robert
      • Julia’s article that mentions Robert
• An Inconvenient Truth
• Robert Lifton’s book The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation
• Erik Erikson
• Richard McGuigan
• David Schnarch
• Blind men and the elephant metaphor
• Bob Dylan lyric

 

Quotes From The Episode

(Anything uncertain is either replaced by ellipses or put in square brackets, and some quotes are shortened using ellipses.)

• [1:47] Gord asks Mark what he sees as the central challenge currently facing humanity in the area of conflict engagement, and Mark says, “An excellent question, and for me, the word that comes up, if I had to summarize my answer in one word, it would be identity. […] To quote […] Ken Wilber, ‘When you choose the boundaries of your soul, you choose the conflicts of your life.’ […] Identity is both extremely personal and political. […] For me, the way a person enters the civic space, they enter it with their identity. Then we call them a citizen and we call them engaged, but what is their identity? How big is it, how wide is it, how porous is it, how flexible is it? Where are the boundaries of it? Who is the us and them in their identity? And I find that to be the root of conflict all over the world, in every culture that I’ve worked in and every setting that I’ve worked in. That identity is strongly at play.”
• [3:35] Julia asks Mark to elaborate on how identity is the central challenge currently facing humanity, and Mark says, “It’s central to our times because we’re constructed as human beings to grow up in local, small clans and overall, homogeneous settings. Culturally, we were members of tribes, and there was our tribe and there was some other tribe, and there was some ritualized, sometimes conflict sometimes not conflict interactions with the other, but we were basically with our tribe, and that wiring is still in us. And our identity was, ‘I am a member of this tribe or this clan or this group,’ and now suddenly […] we’re in these situation where we’re dealing with multiple tribes everyday […] and every system we’re in, we’re dealing with complexity and diversity. That’s why I think that identity is critical to the conflicts of our time, because in every culture I’ve worked […], can you hold the whole system you’re a part of? Can you identify with the whole system, or are you in a narrow identity left over from this earlier wiring? We’re being challenged to grow and widen our identities at an extraordinary rate of speed. […] We’re being asked to be global citizens when we’re wired like tribal members.”
• [6:36] Gord shares that what Mark said reminded him of a quote by Robert Kegan: “Conflict is a challenge to our pretense of completeness.” Mark comments that he tends to use the word “wholeness,” and says Gord captured it well.
• [7:15] Mark discusses his work with U.S. Congress, including its dysfunction relating to the rigidifying of identity and political parties. He compares this to being asked in college if he wants to be in an interdisciplinary major. Mark says, “We created disciplines, and then we make a big deal out of being interdisciplinary. The idea of being bipartisan, to me, is just being human.”
• [9:41] “When I coach people, I say, ‘I have a right hand and a left hand. You’re listening to me with your right hemisphere and your left hemisphere. We are walking examples of right and left working in harmony to maximize our performance, to maximize our capacity to live full lives. So why would we then suddenly say, ‘Oh I’m on the left.’ ‘I’m on the right.’ It’s all acculturation into an identity.”
• [10:14] “[Identity] creates a potentially useful institution (the United States Congress) and turns it into a dysfunctional, polarized, gridlocked system.”
• [10:23] Julia brings up the topic of structural limitations in politics that a previous guest – Elizabeth May, leader of Canada’s Green Party – discussed, and asks Mark about his thought. Mark agrees and says there are indeed many fundamental structural limitations in political systems all over the world.
• [12:18] Julia asks Mark to speak to his approaches, personally and politically, regarding identity challenges, and Mark says “Personally, what I found most important is that I listen to all the parts of myself, that if I try to repress or suppress a part of myself, it comes up and bites me one way or the other. So in that sense, there’s a whole system inside me of sub-cells, and I want to know all the – you know, little Mark who’s three years old and still hurt, or the seven-year-old who’s wondering if the other boys will play with him, or the fifteen-year-old who wonders if girls will find him attractive. All those parts of me are in me, and so I’ve found it most useful to try to think of, ‘Can I bring my whole self? Can I be in touch with my whole self?’” Mark talks about how the systems approach that goes back to some of his initial training in family therapy still really shapes him.
• [14:48] “I try to bring the whole system together so that we can take our fragmented, or our pretense of completeness that we’ve entered the room with […] and say, ‘How do I become actually not the pretense of completeness, but how do I see the complete picture?’” [15:28] “Bring the whole system into the room, whatever that system is, and create a set of ground rules so that the system has to become aware of itself, and all of the people in the system develop a system awareness that makes them more constructive, creative problem-solvers inside that system. They don’t stop being an environmentalist, they don’t stop being pro-business, they don’t stop being an oil and gas executive, but they start to see, ‘Oh I’m part of a larger system,’ and their system awarenesses strike them.”
• [15:58] Gord acknowledges the sophistication and complexity of the concept of systems becoming more aware of themselves, and Mark says, “To make a group feel like a group, it has to have a boundary.” Mark then goes over examples of past conflicts he’s worked on and how everyone identifies as being between the two extreme poles (e.g., left and right wings) of whatever matter they’re working on. He says “If we can get the poles to feel like they belong in the room, and if we can get the poles to start feeling like, ‘Okay, we’re a part of this group,’ then everything that’s between the poles is also part of the group.’”
• [18:44] Julia refers to a previous response that Mark gave about all the parts of himself, and brings up a talk with Thomas Hubble and Peter Levine that involves impacts individual and collective trauma preventing parts of us from showing up. She asks for his thoughts about working with trauma in these contexts. Mark says, “The most important thing I want to say about this is that trauma is both a personal and collective word, and that’s why I work with the concept of identity, because identity is also personal and collective.” He goes over an example of Jewish trauma, both individually and collectively, and talks about the importance of working with one’s own personal trauma in order to ethically help others deal with collective trauma.
• [23:42] In response to the question of how to motivate people to come to the table, Mark says he needs to think about what motivates him, and that “No matter how conceptual or how big or how political the issue is, even if it’s nuclear war or peace between the United States and Korea, [it’s important to] remember, why are we doing this? Well we’re doing it because it’s not just our job, but it makes our lives better, it makes us feel more meaningful. More meaning, more love, more connection in our lives. I think most people, when they go to a narrow identity, they’re going to a narrow identity because they’re trying to get love and connection and peace and safety and security and all those things, and I’ve got to present them with another alternative […] that will actually give [them] what [they’re] looking for.”
• [26:46] “All of these great teachers [Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King] and change agents have led us on the path of the smaller, narrower, tighter, exclusive identity to a wider, more inclusive, more embracing identity, and that’s the journey of the human heart.”
• [27:00] Gord talks about an author he likes named Robert Lifton, who wrote The Protean Self, and the threat of fragmentation to identity. [27:32] Julia adds that a definition of trauma she heard recently is that “Trauma is the disconnection to relationship – fragmentation, actually.” Mark talks about how Robert Lifton was a mentor of his, and how he (Mark) worked with Erik Erikson at Harvard. Mark says, “What I loved about Erikson’s work was that he didn’t think we were finished at 21 with our identity, and I think that’s the key to, I think Robert Lifton put his finger on it, which is, if we’re going to keep up with change in our lives, we have to change throughout our lives, and that to me is one of the greatest challenges for the conflict resolution field is, whoever we’re working with, can we inspire lifelong change and growth? And that’s key.”
• [31:54] Mark discusses a metaphor he came up with that he’s found extremely helpful to use with a variety of people: “When I’m working with people trying to teach them about conflict, I’ll often say, ‘What did you have for breakfast?’ and they’ll tell me what they had for breakfast, and I’ll say ‘Well the key to that was the temperature, wasn’t it? That if that was too hot, you would have burned your food. And if it wasn’t hot enough, it would have been raw and cold. So those eggs, or whatever it was that you ate, that quiche, there’s a temperature zone that you cook in. And conflict is the same thing. Conflict works well in a temperature zone. There’s certain temperature zones that conflict can cook things, that make life nourishing and make life move forward.”
• [38:46] Julia asks Mark, “What do you see as the deeper purpose of this right-left divide, and why does it seem so intractable, no matter what the societal context?” [40:50] Mark says, “I think we’re born whole. I think we’re born complete. And then as we get acculturated, various experiences – sometimes traumatic, sometimes not traumatic – but various experiences shape us and then we’re very clearly given these choices in adolescence, like in America, often, am I white or black? Well, there’s a lot of people who aren’t white or black, but the country thinks in terms of white or black. Right and left, am I conservative or liberal, am I straight or gay? And all of these categories are narrow identities that we need to grow beyond.” Mark then discusses asking progressives “Why do you think conservatives exist? Would you like them all to disappear off the face of the earth?” To those who say yes, Mark says, “Well that would be really dangerous, because a car needs an accelerator and a brake. Would you buy a car with only an accelerator or only a brake?”
• [47:18] Julia shares a situation with two dear friends of hers who have gone to the other end of the political spectrum from her, and talks about how difficult it is to be empathetic to their views when they don’t reciprocate. Mark brings up a Bob Dylan lyric and says “If there are people who don’t want to hold your perspective in their heart when you’re holding their perspective in your heart, that’s a crisis in a friendship, and you have to ask yourself ‘Why am I continuing […] to be friends if they can’t hold [me] in their heart?’” Mark suggests having a conversation with them about the pain of not being held in their hearts and seeing how they react. Julia points out the courage involved in such a conversation and situation. Mark talks about how he reframes such situations into deep learning experiences for himself.
• [51:41] “I think the most important thing I want to share with your listeners is that if they decide they want to learn more about this field and dive in deeper, it shouldn’t be just to make a better world. It should really be for their own deepest self-interest, that it’s really about, ‘I want to do this to have a better life, the same way I’d go to a yoga class, the same way I’d see a great movie. I’m going to do this because this is on the growth path of my soul, and taking this next step around this, whatever conflict [I’m] engaged in, is going to really deepen and enrich my life. And when I come to the end of my life, I’m going to feel better about my life because I took this step.’ So I really want to underscore this self-interest piece, because for one thing, it will make them a more honest participant in whatever they do in conflict, and secondly, I think it will give them more endurance because if you’re just doing this to make a better world, you’ll wear out in a year or two. But if you’re doing it because it’s your life and your soul, you’ll do it forever.”