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The well-known conflict cycle model places the self-aware adult in the otherwise destructive spiral of tough relationships with youth. Young people who are insecure and hurtimg perceive their world as hostile and rejecting, and they relate to others in a defence and attack manner. True to form, the others in their world react to their behaviour in turn with hostility and rejection ...
The worst thing about this cycle is that the attitudes and behaviour of the youth are continually adjusted to deal with this increasingly hostile world, and so we ratchet up the mistrust, aggression and ill-feeling. The young person is moving away from trust and the ability to interrelate constructively and rewardingly with others – instead of getting closer to these ideals – and is honing ever sharper and fiercer tools to live everyday life.
Aichhorn observed, in fact, that such youth lost their normal prosocial skills and that when adults treated them with kindness they were plunged into crisis because their whole repertoire of living and survival skills was thereby rendered irrelevant and useless. Having travelled this dark and unfriendly course, and for which they had collected their own set of weapons and tools (Aichhorn called them wayward youth), they had to experience themselves as lost to be drawn back into ordinary human discourse.
In the conflict cycle, instead of being hooked into the youth’s feelings as we so easily are, the self-aware adults recognise how these feelings are evoked in themselves but decide to respond differently – with respect and affection rather than with anger and rejection – and the young person moves on into his or her next encounter (with whoever) with less resentment, less vengeance, less self-depreciation, less embarrassment, and hopefully with some change of course, however slight, away from conflict.
We do not aim for dramatic conversions or sentimental reunions. We know the youth must still be strong, must manage a difficult life stage in difficult families and a difficult world. We aim to soften the black-white, good-bad, for-against dichotomies of the world they experience into the more complex grey realities of humanity where one can both love and criticise, both affirm and correct, both value and challenge.
In our practice today we are careful not to respond in kind to the anger and offensiveness of our ‘wayward’ kids. We offer them something different. When they expect meanness in return for their meanness, we offer kindness; when they expect censure for their discourtesy, we offer respect; when they expect rejection for their rebuff, we offer acceptance and nearness.
The spiral turns upward.
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For further exploration:
https://www.cyc-net.org/quote/quote-158.html
https://www.cyc-net.org/features/ft-pinocchio.html
https://www.cyc-net.org/Journals/rcy-3-1.html#edits
https://www.cyc-net.org/CYC-Online
/cycol-0303-belonging.html
