Limitations of the Situated Model of Conflict: The interplay between identity, loss and the predetermined conflict landscape

In prior blogs, I’ve discussed the importance of understanding power, dependency and group dynamics when negotiating with another party, and especially how this context impacts disabled employees. Now I want to share another perspective - that of a disabled person - which highlights the interplay between identity, loss and the predetermined conflict landscape.

The painter and the painted, just as we as individuals enter the conflict landscape and claim a sense of agency.

There are specific experiences that relate uniquely to disability, such as loss, courage, and reframing of identity and values, that create a shift in the conflict landscape. The conflict landscape is formed by the degree of power, dependency, and dynamic (collaborative vs. competitive) between parties. Although the conflict landscape from the Dynamical Theory of Conflict provides important implications for the context disabled employees confront in the workplace and the impact it has on their negotiation of accommodations, there’s more to consider. This is the fact that due to strategies in responding to these specific experiences, they might not be defined by the power, dependency and group dynamic characterized in the conflict landscape, as well as the repercussions they will experience for breaking this societal bond. They’ve already experienced great loss and courage. While the conflict landscape still exists, the disabled person may not define themselves by it, thereby both experiencing and being free from it simultaneously. 

Identity

The profoundness of experience that disabled people go through shifts the conflict landscape while maintaining it at the same time. Humans are complex beings with a multitude of contradicting energies happening in one moment. Here I’ll share an example of this contradiction. The experience of going through surgeries at a young age and through my adult life has left a lasting impression on me. Face to face with the unknown, letting go of all control, laying my life in the hands of another as I step into the darkness of anesthesia where no one could come with me for six hours, ten, fourteen; snip, cut, drill. I try to live my life with the boldness it takes to face these experiences head on.

Deep loss can create a shift of hierarchical value associated with maintaining a specific status quo that may not be serving you and this, in turn, changes the meaning of the conflict landscape. Living with boldness means I’m not afraid to speak up for what I believe is true and important no matter someone's role or status; no matter the dependency I have on the job. I have nothing to lose because I already lost my physical movement and through this experience began identifying with my soul. The wholeness of my soul can’t be taken or lost. It also means I’m not as assimilated as others because I can’t be. My body physically won’t allow me to. I can’t move at the rhythm needed to build my career as others do, instead I have to move at my own pace. This means I don’t have as much to lose because I don’t place my identity on earthly things as much as within self and soul. When I lost everything, including movement, I still had my soul and nothing can take that away.

Freedom or Dependency, which is it?

I experience freedom and I experience dependency due to the recovery from surgeries. Such a foundational loss as movement has created a contradiction within me; two directly opposite emotions happening at the same time from the same phenomenon. These two opposing emotions are the sense and faith that nothing can be taken away from me. And at the same time, when every decision I make is linked to a pain response that could put me down for a week, I intimately feel the repercussions of my actions in creating comfort or pain for myself. In this sense, I do have a lot to lose and therein lies a contradiction. Although I don’t identify with my body, I am in my body. I identify myself with a freedom that can’t be marred by power, dependency or group dynamics. Even still, right alongside this freedom and soul identification, is fear of being left behind, the need to work with established structures, and the great dependency on work for my own quality of life.

In conclusion,

In conclusion, the individual themself has agency as they enter the dynamic that creates the conflict landscape. At the surface level, the unspoken power contract is present. Yet at a deeper level, there are many varying factors that determine what each person is willing to lose or gain and how they define losses and gains. The fact is that there are real implications to the conflict landscape. Yet, we also choose at every moment what we consider to be a loss and create a hierarchy of values to determine what we are willing to lose.