What is Real Dialogue?
Healthy Conflict & Respect for Differences
Real Dialogue™ is a set of principles, practices and methods for healthy conflict as the means for growth and development in relationships, creativity, and productivity.
Like fire, conflict is used by people for both creative and destructive purposes. Healthy conflict increases problem-solving, wisdom, and love while unhealthy conflict, and avoidance of conflict, result in polarization, dehumanization, and war. Ending war is plausible if we can engage in healthy conflicts and learn from all sides of our disagreements.
Every project we develop, from science and technology to art and culture, to religion and personal relationships, involves searching for truth through opposing viewpoints.
Real Dialogue™ offers evidence-based skills, methods, and knowledge for welcoming differences and regulating our drive to simply defeat others. Our human superpower is self-awareness: our ability to perceive our own thoughts, feelings, and sensations. As humans we can train our awareness (mindfulness) and develop self-knowledge and self-acceptance. These experiences permit us to regulate our emotional reactivity to respect diverse viewpoints, ways of being, ethnicities, and cultures.
Our Curriculum includes online and in-person events and courses that teach, explore, inquire into our principles:
// Know Thyself: Discover the meaning of living a human life
// Speak and Listen Responsibly: Use the skill of Real Dialogue
// End Dehumanization and War: Defeat delusions of superiority
// Learn from Failure, Defeat, and Death: They are your teachers
Ultimately Real Dialogue™ is a social movement for guiding the future of human consciousness towards development, not destruction.
What is the Center
for Real Dialogue?
The Center for Real Dialogue is a non-profit organization that was founded and developed by Polly Young-Eisendrath who is a widely-recognized psychologist, Jungian psychoanalyst, and mindfulness teacher.
The Center provides evidence-based practices, education and training in the skills and methods of Real Dialogue through free podcasts and other public programs, fee-based affordable training for individuals and groups, and continuing education for mental health professionals in Dialogue Therapy.
Real Dialogue Skill
The three-part skill of Real Dialogue is Speaking for Yourself, Listening Mindfully, and Remaining Curious. Through learning, practicing and teaching this skill, individuals learn how to speak and listen in ways that foster healthy disagreements, learning from conflicts, and remaining curious, even when emotionally activated.
Real Dialogue Method
This facilitation method (for difficult conversations) is rooted in evidence-based and precise techniques from mindfulness, psychodrama and psychoanalysis. People learn how to do both solo and co-facilitation through advanced training processes. Contracting our Real Dialogue Specialists for facilitation of difficult conversations is also a fee-for-service offer that can be arranged with the Center for Real Dialogue for your group or organization.
Dialogue Therapy Training for Professionals
The Center offers comprehensive training for mental health professionals in Dialogue Therapy — a time-limited, structured therapy that draws on mindfulness, psychoanalysis, and psychodrama to address the complexity of 21st century relationships for couples and other adult pairs.
Our Impact
Reaching out globally and locally, the Center offers free education through two podcasts and local public programs to help people understand and master our natural tendencies to make enemies, blame others, and create stereotypes when we avoid conflict or become polarized.
What you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you.
What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessity, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you; I’m describing me.
— James Baldwin, Author
Read, Listen, and Watch
Hear how the skill and method behind Real Dialogue™ can make a difference.
