A mom and a stepmom share stories, ideas, friendship and family
Posted in Co-parenting, Divorce, Holidays, Love, Parenting, Peacemaking, Remarriage on Apr 26th, 2008
I was selling my book at the LA Times Festival of Books today, when I heard a woman’s voice say “Don’t I know you?” After about five minutes of cross-referencing, we figured out that we had shared a cabin at a church camp about 12 years ago, had had Thanksgiving together at my old [...]
Posted in Peacemaking, Quotes on Apr 4th, 2008
“Peacebuilders do not collude with the mindset that dehumanizes and demonizes ‘the other,’ seeking instead to listen, to discuss, to learn, to feel compassion for, and to see themselves in the other, the other in themselves. They realize that violence only begets more violence, that polarization only splits us further apart, and that ‘either/or’ thinking [...]
Posted in Peacemaking on Mar 4th, 2008
Here’s the secret the way I know it: it’s not about making the other person be different. It’s about working with what is. It’s about weaving a picture and a life I like out of the materials I find.
Nothing anyone else does can make me go to war with them in my heart. That is [...]
Posted in Communication, Peacemaking on Feb 28th, 2008
Pain looks different from the inside than it does from the outside.
From the inside when we act out in pain, we see ourselves as victims. From the outside, when we act out in pain, we look like monsters.
Outsiders who haven’t lived through a similar kind of suffering don’t see the pain; they see the actions.
The [...]
Posted in Peacemaking, Perspectives, Quotes on Feb 11th, 2008
“All appears to change when we change.” — Henri Amiel
I didn’t always know Kathy the way I know her now. In the second half of our interview at Continuing the Stepparenting Journey, I told Karon that Kathy is “flexible, warm, open, willing to keep showing up and trying, and willing to start over and over [...]
Posted in Peacemaking on Feb 9th, 2008
The trouble with good guys is that everyone is the good guy — or a sympathetic character who has reasons for making the choices they did — in their own story.
Everybody is a sympathetic character in their own story. A person who plays a bad guy in our story plays a good guy or at [...]
Posted in Peacemaking on Feb 7th, 2008
I’m divorced, too. I was not happy in my first marriage. Even though I have much better relationship skills now, I still would not want to go back and apply them in my first marriage. (You know how people say that most folks divorce because they lack the relationship skills they’ll have to learn anyway [...]
Posted in Peacemaking on Feb 7th, 2008
The way out of an entrenched conflict is not to do a better job of hiding what we feel and think about the situation and the other people — I don’t think that’s possible. I think on some level the people in our lives in both houses know what we really think or feel no [...]
Posted in Peacemaking on Feb 7th, 2008
The trouble with having a bad guy causing conflict and pain is that if they have a point — if their point of view is ever right — if they ever stop looking entirely like a bad guy — all of a sudden there’s a bad guy void that somebody has to fill. If the [...]
Posted in Peacemaking, Quotes on Feb 6th, 2008
“As I listen to many people talk about their lives, I am struck that the first layer we encounter in sitting practice is our feeling of being a victim — or feeling that we have been sacrificed to others. We have been sacrificed to others’ greed, anger, and ignorance, to their lack of knowledge of [...]
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