Written by: Soleida Perez, Program Director, ADR Learning Institute
Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how easily we step into conflict that isn’t ours.
As conflict practitioners, we’re trained to notice, respond, and support. It becomes second nature.
But we’re also living in a moment where there is so much happening—globally and locally—that we can’t influence. Wars, violence, and ongoing suffering that we witness from a distance, but still feel deeply. It can leave us with a sense of helplessness, or a need to respond in some way.
For many, these conflicts are not distant. Those connected through diaspora communities may be holding very real and immediate impacts through family, identity, and lived experience. The line between personal and professional can become harder to navigate.
The impact is that, sometimes without realizing it, we start to insert ourselves into the conflicts around us, closer to home, in our workplaces, in our communities.
Not because we’re needed, necessarily.
But because we feel the weight of everything we’re not able to do elsewhere.
Triangulation doesn’t always come from poor boundaries. Sometimes it comes from care, from empathy, from a genuine desire to help. It can also come from a need to stay connected to our community.
But it can still pull us into roles that aren’t ours.
This requires us to be discerning.
To ask:
Is this mine to step into?
Am I being invited?
What happens if I don’t intervene?
Stepping back is not indifference, but rather a part of the practice.
