-GUEST BIOGRAPHY-

Kai Cheng Thom is a cultural worker, mediator, facilitator, pleasure activist & writer. She has incorporated skills grown from crisis intervention, trauma-informed activism, community mental health practice, and somatics in order to develop a facilitation style that is gentle, boundaried, accessible, and fiercely compassionate. She is the author of the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir, the essay collection I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes at the End of the World, and the poetry collection a place called No Homeland. 

More about Kai Cheng:

• https://kaichengthom.com/
• https://ariseembodiment.org/  
• www.instagram.com/kaichengthom 

-EPISODE SUMMARY-

PRACTICES: 

• Repeat what someone has said without any additions or reservations. Disconnect the 'I'm listening' & 'here's why you're wrong' parts of your speech. 
• Ask someone, 'is there anything else that you want me to know ?' Or, 'is there anything else that you'd like me to understand?'
• When listening, notice how your perspective might actually change from the beginning of the conversation. 
• After you’ve listened, ask, 'are you feeling able to hear my perspective?’

IDEAS: 

Conflict

• Each human being is sovereign (right to body, thoughts, feelings, fantasies, my sexuality, i.e. 'my domain'). Often our sovereign spaces have overlap and conflict is born. 
• When someone reaches past the threshold of the overlap and tries to force or coerce, that goes into the realm of harm.
• When working with conflict with a group, we try to lift people’s resistance into the conscious space and look at it with love. 
• Every relationship is unique and there is no one size fits all conflict process.
• Conflict resolution needs to be a consent based process for it to work. 
• Running away is a great survival mechanism. People don’t need to remain in a relationship.
• Jungian shadow is an unintegrated or unwanted part of the self. We often project our shadow onto other people. 
• Having a value compass helps us to guide our behaviour in conflict. 
• Accountability can be divided into account (telling the story) and ability (the capacity to do so). We should focus on building capacity instead of punishing. 

Victimhood

• We often want to keep conversation focused on our own injury, which is a convenient excuse to not reflect on our own errors. 
• It can be easy to conflate harm and abuse and interpersonal conflict. 
• Narratives of victimhood often co-exist in overlapping layers. 
• By remaining connected to our own sacredness, we are better able to listen and hear others’ perceptions of us.

Humour

• Humor can be an ally in challenging situations. This said, we need to focus on rehumanizing the other person, not dehumanizing them. 
• There is room for play in the ritual around conflict. E.g. the prompt ‘share something you would rather be doing today’.

Book recommendations 

• The hero with a thousand faces by Joseph Campbell
• Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair, by Sarah Schulman

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