an idea

Healing Friction is a method of accessing conflict directly through the body at work and at play to get at how wanting different things and being different people can work well in service to life and the building of community rather than poorly in service to domination and needless suffering. By this route a group begins to teach itself how ideas and their consequences are related in order to look for ways through turf wars and systems that are designed to make either victims or victors of everyone involved.

The title, Healing Friction, is an homage to James Hillman's book Healing Fiction which works the way psychology works by way of fictions which both contribute to the healing of the psyche and heal our ideas about fiction being false rather than the fundament of creative imagination and thereby thinking itself.

After coming to terms with the degree to which culture is now made as an artifact more than ever before, by early practitioners of the Process Arts, the next step is to characterize that making. From the basics of fiction and narrative (conflict drives plot) to the interplay of international diplomacy, or lack thereof, it is Friction that defines a given system. The way conflict is processed is a key, if not the key factor in discerning the nature of a given sphere of influence. I would like to suggest that building community in a world struggling with estrangement from what it is to be human requires the redefinition of peace not as avoiding struggle but as conflict done well. This is Healing Friction. As our tired fantasies of the ways to deal with difficulty are fading into history, a new psychological mythology (fiction) of friction is emerging. Healing Friction is the peace-practice arising from this emergence.

What will follow here tracks dilemmas, case studies, interventions, and the rising of this work. For trainings, recommendations, consultation, and more personal reflections from the person who formulated these words for this way of thinking, please contact Brandon WilliamsCraig via (866) 236-0346 or public at bdwc dot net.

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