Conflict Is Not Abuse Audiobook By Sarah Schulman cover art

Conflict Is Not Abuse

Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

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Conflict Is Not Abuse

By: Sarah Schulman
Narrated by: Sarah Schulman
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From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between conflict and abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning.

Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how supremacy behavior and traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.

This important and sure-to-be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians.

©2016 Sarah Schulman (P)2018 Tantor Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Relationships Social Psychology & Interactions Social Sciences Inspiring Thought-Provoking Middle East Social Conflict

Critic reviews

"A concluding call to address personal and social conflicts without state intervention via police and courts caps off a work that's likely to inspire much discussion." (Publishers Weekly, Starred Review)
Illuminating Perspectives • Important Exploration • Faster Playback Option • Compassionate Approach • Healing Content
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Absolutely painful listening to the sections on Gaza. More people need to read this book.

About time

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I really appreciate how Sarah explores the complicity of conflict in our time. She doesn't resort to simplifying and demonizing language to make a point (as we often see), and backs up her points with both research and relatable stories.

Important Perspective

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Downloaded this book because I'm interested in understanding ways in which transformative justice can be executed. I knew the author wasnt a mental health professional, but her diversity of experience peaked my interest. It starts strong, but the subject matter gets muddy after chapter 5. narration is unfortunately very under stimulating.

conceptually great, delivery flat

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I found the cadence of the reading far too slow so I listened at 1.5 - 2x the speed and that worked great! Amazing book! Comprehensive content. Got far more out of it than I was expecting to. An easy 5 Star!

Wow! For anyone who experiences conflict!

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I believe many people will find something they like in it. I personally did not care much about political parts of this book. However, the book is full of advice on personal emotional intelligence, which I loved.

Great book

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The outpouring of empathy from the words on the page is truly staggering.

Made me reconsider what it is to be progressive. And gave a profound sense of understanding to why people to bad things to others, and ways this can be stopped.

Will likely shape how I think about others and their experiences, maybe forever.

Completely enlightening

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This author uses her decades long experience working with several types of groups and 1x1 communication - but all in serious or complex settings - to describe the levels of the cycles of projection, assumptions, trauma responses we all have. It's a learning tool for communication and conflict to see oneself through our interactions with others. For myself I used it as sort of an emotional and intellectual mirror, that I'm certain will take me calmly into work and life human interactions.

for anyone who interacts with other humans!

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I am so grateful for this book. It is so timely and really helped me feel more logical and prepared to recognize and work through conflict in a meaningful and equitable way.

Incredibly timely!

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This book was recommended by YouTuber Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints) and this book is a much better, more concise, more cerebral, more compassionate, more empathetic, more historically relevant, and more progressive view of group shunning and supremacy mindset that takes place on the internet (I.e. cancelling) than any other piece of literature out now. I hope people really embrace its core message because it genuinely has the power to improve so many lives if folks with power and authority take its message to heart.

What a fantastic, eye-opening book!

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This book is a meandering exploration of the dynamics and psychologies of various forms of dehumanization and abuse but also group conflict resolution. there are a lot of anecdotes and discussion of topics that I feel that discourse and activist communities can really learn from and that we need to work on, as well as ways that we can all improve our interpersonal conflict resolution, but I also feel that there are some places where the author is wildly off base in her assessments, such as textual mediums being inherently inferior for communication when, especially for neurodivergent people such as autistic people, text you a mediums can be a lot more productive and send a lot fewer incorrect signals than face to face.

despite some seriously flawed takes, I feel that this book is a collection of important exploration on a very important aspect of our lives, both of the political and in the interpersonal level.

Flawed but valuable

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