A new friend of mine told me a story recently about her neighbour who’d gone through a divorce. After the divorce, the woman seemed changed as all she could do was talk about how terrible her ex-husband was.
Perhaps you recognize those moments when someone is complaining about someone else to you.
The person telling me this classic tale said she was quite uncomfortable with the litany of complaints but didn’t know what to do. Finally, she said to her neighbour: “Well, I don’t want to pass judgment on him, because I don’t know the whole story.”
Well, that backfired as her neighbour responded in anger: “You’re supposed to take my side!” My friend then felt confused and guilty, like she had failed in giving the support her neighbour was expecting.
What neither of them knew is that the expectation that someone is supposed to take your side when you’re hurting is a common cultural norm: we’re expected to take their side. Since it’s a cultural norm, many of us can relate to this dance. Someone complains, we don’t know what to do except agree that the other person must be horrible.
Yet, my friend didn’t want to engage in that dance. She wanted to be a third sider: risky business in our culture.
In a peace-oriented culture, this dance, and empathy itself, looks very different than what we expect of each other.
Bill Ury, mediator, author, and anthropologist, has studied peace cultures around the world – including the Semai of Malaysia, known for their remarkably non-violent society. Through his research, he was able to identify specific behaviours of communities that resolve conflict without taking sides.
One key behaviour happens when someone comes to complain about someone else. Just like the neighbour of my friend telling me the story. We all talk with each other about each other.
However, the expectation in that moment is different in a peace oriented culture: the listener is not expected to agree with the person complaining. In peace cultures, friends take what Ury calls the Third Side. He wrote a whole book about it, entitled The Third Side: Why We Fight and How We Can Stop.
In peace cultures, we don’t pick a side. Instead, everyone – individuals and the community generally – takes an active interest in helping the conflict resolve. Taking sides is even seen as socially in appropriate. Instead, people are active in supporting peace, doing things like going to “hide the spears” as tensions might be escalating.
The Third Side is a way of looking at the conflicts around us not just from one side or the other but from the larger perspective of the surrounding community. Ury says there are always at least three sides to every argument – we are that third side.
Another key aspect of peace cultures is their use of community discussion to resolve disputes. So, individual conflicts, if continuing, also come to the community in the form of community circles, for healing.
What my friend did – refusing to take a side while still offering her listening ear – reflects this peace culture and collaborative mindset.
It’s a rare and valuable stance in a culture where we are taught to show care by agreeing with the person hurting that the other person intentionally harmed us and is wrong and vile in some way. We expect others to join us in making another enemy.
Given that, it takes practice to shift from taking one side to being a Third Sider. It’s worth practicing.
Mini-Practice: Try Being a Third Sider
We change culture in little pockets that can create islands of coherence. So, in that spirit, here are a few ideas to integrate third side thinking. It would delight me to know you might share some of these ideas with a friend, or a group, or a community.
- Simply notice – What do you notice after thinking about the idea of a Third Sider? When someone shares their frustration with you about another person, what is their expectation of you? And, is that the definition of support you want? Or can it be about giving emotional support while also offering more perspectives, curiosity, and compassion all around?
- Ask yourself – Do I really have the full story? There are always at least two sides to every story, and often even more. Can you hold the third side? None of us knows the whole truth; only the Creator of the All knows the full truth. Our job is to continue to seek out multiple truths to deepen our own understandings as well as to share our perspectives with others. Be a perspectivist.
- Talk about it – Can you have a conversation with others, perhaps starting with those you feel most comfortable with, about these ideas. How do you want to respond with each other when we are hurting about another’s actions. Just because we don’t talk about it, doesn’t mean the dynamic isn’t going on. Taking the time to bring the behaviours to light gives us power. We then can choose how we want to act, with more intentionally and perhaps with more compassion.
You could choose to make this Third Side way of thinking a practice for the whole month – until the next new moon newsletter. It’s small, mindful actions like this one that gradually builds a culture of peace.
Warmly,
