It sounds like the beginning of a joke: A lawyer, a mediator, and a therapist walk into a conflict... But this is real life, and how you approach disputes truly matters.

How do you handle your conflicts? Often, it depends on the situation. For a serious legal matter, you'd call a lawyer. If you're open to compromise, you might seek mediation. And if you're looking for personal growth and want to prevent future conflicts, a therapist can guide you. Of course, you could also try to handle it yourself, or simply avoid it altogether.

(Full disclosure: I wear all three hats, and I believe each has its unique value.)

The Traditional Paths

Each traditional approach offers a distinct way to address conflict:

• A lawyer typically focuses on what the law dictates, aiming to protect your legal rights and secure a favorable outcome within the legal system.
• A mediator explores the mutual interests of all parties, helping you find common ground for a win-win solution.
• A therapist helps you delve into your inner world, exploring what you can learn from the conflict to foster personal growth.

Pros and Cons of Each

While valuable, each path comes with its own set of challenges:

• Lawyer: Often expensive, and you can feel disempowered as you rely on the legal system to make decisions for you.
• Mediator: You have more agency since it's a voluntary process, but it usually requires compromise from both sides. Also, most mediation styles (unlike transformative mediation) focus solely on finding an immediate solution, not on understanding the deeper internal processes that led to the conflict.
• Therapist: This is a longer process that might not always resolve the immediate external conflict or yield a practical solution right away.

So, while lawyers and mediators typically focus on external solutions, a therapist guides you toward self-growth. Choosing the right path depends on your ultimate goal. If you just want to resolve an immediate problem, mediation or even legal threats can often provide quick fixes. And sometimes, that's precisely what's needed.

But what if you want more? What if you want to leverage conflict as an opportunity for deep personal learning and prevent similar issues from arising in the future? Then keep reading.

The Self-Explorative Approach: A Fourth Way

There's a fourth way, one that combines elements from all three, focusing on both self-growth and practical solutions. My approach, which I call the Self-explorative approach, is based on a core principle: you've invited this conflict into your life for a reason.

This external conflict often stems from an inner conflict between your ego and your Higher Self – your inner wisdom that exists beyond disputes. Before rushing to solve the external conflict, let's first explore what's happening within you. By understanding this inner dynamic, you gain a wider perspective, enabling you to manage the external conflict much more effectively.

Benefits of My Self-Explorative Approach

The Self-explorative approach offers significant advantages:

1. Reclaim Your Power

First, you take control of the process, steering it your way instead of relying on someone else's decision. While you can't always control the external outcome (as it depends on the other party), shifting your goal from "getting something from them" (money, a house, an apology) to "growing from the process regardless of the outcome" means you always win.

2. Heal the Source, Not Just the Symptoms

Second, if you only address the symptoms of a conflict – how it manifests as a crisis with someone else – you miss the crucial underlying cause. We are always creating our reality, often unconsciously. Yet, we tend to focus on the visible outcomes of something deeper within our consciousness.

Our lives are shaped by our conscious and subconscious beliefs, family and cultural imprints, past lives, karma, soul lessons, and various energetic disruptions. Focusing only on symptoms is like taking a painkiller without understanding what the pain is trying to tell you. It provides immediate comfort but prevents deep healing.

Most people instinctively seek quick relief, unaware of the deeper layers that create our reality. However, if we view symptoms as guiding lights to an inner conflict, we can address the true source of the problem instead of just "killing the messenger." This is often the only way to ensure the conflict doesn't resurface, as it often has, perhaps for thousands of lifetimes, because we've only ever addressed the symptoms.

We can live a life with more abundance, less disease, less pain, and greater self-fulfillment. We just need to start focusing on what prevents this from happening on those deeper levels.

3. Align with Your Life's Purpose

Third, and this delves into philosophy, what is our purpose here? Many spiritual traditions suggest that life is a stage for learning and perfecting our role. If you asked someone before coming here to play the "villain" in a specific event so you could learn something (or settle karmic debt), then suing them might miss the broader logic.

Does this mean every lawsuit is wrong? No, it's not about right or wrong, but understanding the bigger story. For instance, if you owed someone money in a past life and they took money from you now and refuse to repay, suing them for not paying back might indeed be "wrong" in a karmic sense. But if the interaction with them is meant to teach you a lesson about abundance because you struggle with self-worth, then perhaps suing to reclaim your value and set boundaries could be the right action. We can't simplify complex situations without exploring their deeper layers.

Bridging the Gap

Lawyers handle legal disputes, and their work is essential in our current world. Mediators strive for reasonable solutions based on the parties' defined problems, but they aren't trained to address deeper inner conflicts. Therapists, especially spiritual ones, can explore these deeper questions but don't typically handle the practical, immediate issues.

I believe in creating a bridge between these professions, which often seem to run on parallel paths rather than intersect. That's why I became a lawyer, then a spiritual healer, then a mediator and conflict resolution specialist.

To offer my clients the most effective advice for interpersonal conflicts, I first ask: What is the problem at its source? What is the lesson to be learned from this conflict? And how can we best address it? Sometimes it's through inner healing alone, sometimes it requires collaborative interaction with the other party, and sometimes the legal system is indeed what's needed.

In every situation, self-exploration and regaining inner balance through the conflict process are essential to truly resolve it from within. This ensures you "win" no matter the external outcome.