There’s a lot of discussion going on these days about conflict resolution… what it is, what it means, and how it should be approached. I think this type of discussion is good and I’d like to contribute my own little story. The following happened to me when I was an undergrad at UW-Milwaukee:

I had an interpreter who didn’t like me. That’s about the long and short of it. We had run-ins more than a couple of times during the fall semester of my junior year. I had her for Psychoanalytical Theory or something like that. And I must add that I did indeed consider her to be an excellent subject for ongoing psychoanalysis.

ADA was a newborn fawn back then. Everybody was trying to make sense of who the hell was entitled to what. I stayed out of the melee for the most part. I was set. I needed interpreters and note takers. I already had my own TDD and vibrating alarm clock, and I didn’t much care about the flashing light fire alarm thing. My roommates would often set it off as a joke, but nine times out of ten I’d just sleep through it anyway.

Now before I get into this, there’s something you need to understand about UW-M: “Lectures” are not tiny little classrooms of fifteen students listening to a professor drone on and on. Lectures are huge auditoriums nearly packed with hundreds of people listening to the professor drone on and on. All of the deaf students were expected to sit in the first row. But nobody else sat in the first row. So after a while, I didn’t either. I sat in the second so that I could put my foot/feet (I’d switch a lot) up on the armrests of the first. After about a week the other deaf students were doing this too.

To us it was no big deal. We could still see the interpreter. She could still see us. There were plenty of seats left. If somebody else wanted to sit down we would’ve moved our feet. Plus we weren’t the only people doing it. You might wonder how I could know this since everybody was behind me. I left class once to go to the bathroom while the lecture was still in session. What I saw was utter bedlam! Wherever there was an empty seat, the person sitting immediately behind it had his or her feet up on an armrest!

When you look at it that way, I guess it isn’t hard to understand why our interpreter was so lividly enraged with me all of the time. I mean, obviously the whole class was out of control due to my corrupting influence! So one day she rebelled and stopped interpreting in the middle of class.

As luck would have it I was the only deaf student who bothered to go that day. Right in the middle of a fascinating stream of discourse on just how much coke Freud actually snorted, she signed: “Put your foot down,” and let her hands drop to her lap.

Believe me, she was not kidding. She had been silently glowering at me since the semester began. A week earlier I nodded off for about five minutes during a discussion on Maslow’s hierarcy of needs because frankly I needed to sleep (it was the morning after that one time in ten where my roommates’ setting off the flashing fire alarm actually woke me up). She may have taken this as an insult to her skills, which was why she kicked the chair. I tried to apologize after class but my apology was muffled by a yawn. This probably didn’t do much to improve relations between us.

Still, even way back in that fledgling ADA year of 1990, I was pretty sure that it wasn’t kosher for an interpreter to just stop signing like that. Especially if she was withholding information in the first place in order to make me do what she wanted me to do.

Thus after she hadn’t signed a word for nearly a full minute, I put my foot down. Regardless of what anyone tells you, doing this is always the first step in conflict resolution. If you do it right, putting your foot down can be both a peacemaking gesture and an act of assertiveness all at once.

Then I waited for class to end. As soon as it was over, I told her that I wanted to speak with her privately out in the hallway. She initially shook her head as if to say no, and then moved to walk past me. I spoke quietly yet forcefully and said we could either talk privately or we could talk in front of her boss. She rolled her eyes and stalked toward the hallway, where she then waited.

After most of the students had left the lecture hall and filed past us, I signed, “Do you have a problem with me?” This is the second step in conflict resolution: Find out why you are not getting what you believe you are entitled to. But as you set about finding out, give the other person as much dignity and privacy as possible.

“I’m fed up with your attitude,” she signed. “You slouch in your seat, you sleep in class, and you don’t pay attention! You’re lucky to be getting an education at all! Meanwhile I’m sitting there interpreting and you’re half-dead!”

This is the third step in conflict resolution: listen. Use your ears, your eyes, or your heart—whichever works best—but shut up and listen. You lose nothing in conducting a thorough study of your opponent’s belief system. At worst you gain insight into how to handle him or her should the conflict escalate. At best you gain an idea of how to make peace, or whether or not peace is even warranted.

I looked at her. She was all of twenty-five, twenty-six years old, tops. I was twenty. In a way the whole thing reminded me of past fights with my older sisters, who were always pushing or shushing me one way or the other. The memories were irritating, and this interpreter was irritating, but I kept my patience. That’s the fourth step in conflict resolution: keep your patience and rephrase your opponent’s argument. This makes your opponent feel “heard,” which can go a long way toward calming that person down.

“Okay,” I said, “basically what I’m getting is that you resent it when I put my feet up on the seat and nod off once in a while. It makes me look unappreciative and lazy—and in fact you think I am lazy—and that angers you. A lot of deaf people never make it this far. I should be more thankful for my education and the work you’re contributing toward it as my interpreter.”

She softened noticeably when I said this, and signed: “There are a lot of people who never make it to college. Not just deaf people. Hearing people too.”

Her clarification led us to the fifth and final stage of conflict resolution, which is standing up for yourself.

“All right,” I replied, “After this semester, I don’t want to work with you again. Furthermore, if you ever again stop signing in one of my classes like you did today, I will immediately report you to your supervisor. I’m also going to tell every deaf person I know on this campus to not put up with the kind of thing that happened here. But I won’t mention you by name when I tell them.”

She immediately became defensive again, but I held up my hand, indicating that it was still my turn to speak. “The reason I won’t mention you by name is that you deserve a chance to screw up. And you did. I don’t work for you. I don’t answer to you. I answer to myself, and then the professor, and someday my boss. You don’t figure into that at all. You never did, and you never will.”

She gasped, her eyes widening in shock. “This is what I mean about your attitude,” she signed, hissing. “There are days I don’t even want to come to this class. Because of this!” She gestured as if to point out the words that still hung in the air between us.

“Then don’t,” I said, and walked away. There was much more I could have said, but didn’t. So I was already earning an “A” in the class (in fact I also eventually passed with an “A”). So half of the class—yes, the hearing students too—had their feet up on the armrests and were dozing away. So what? Justify myself with any of this in her presence, and I’d in effect be answering to her!

In standing up for yourself, strive to do what you said you were going to do. And strive to never do what you said you wouldn’t. This maxim will bring you to an immediate and in-depth understanding of exactly what you are and are not capable of. This in turn will cause you to define the consequences you will administer with extreme care. If you do not develop the capability to do this, people will not take you seriously.

And once they don’t, it becomes that much harder to stand up for yourself.

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