A lot of groups and projects break apart because of internal conflict. Here are some pointers on how to engage in productive conversations to keep movements together.
This article is adapted from a Mutual Aid 101 session Shareable hosted on November 20, 2025, titled “Navigating conflict when building power with Dean Spade.” Access to the webinar recording and supporting materials is available here. A shortened version of this piece first appeared in Nonprofit Quarterly on December 18, 2025.
There’s a lot of really intense conflict in groups doing resistance work, and it can get in the way of the work and stop new people from joining the work. It is my firm belief that if you do things that you care about with other people, you will experience conflict. We live in a conflict-avoidant society that tells us this is a bad thing, but conflict is actually normal and inevitable. Conflict doesn’t mean anybody’s doing anything wrong. Some very simple things can help us be a little more prepared to have conflict and to not end up leaving groups or leaving social movement work when we encounter conflict with other people.
We are living in very hard times, under great stress from ecological crisis, wars, increasing poverty, widespread criminalization, and so much more. One question we can all be asking is, how do we want to treat each other, knowing everyone is having a very hard time?
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I have found that burnout is not usually just a result of being tired…it was the loss of trust, the feeling of being blamed or stigmatized, or not being listened to.
It can be hard to have a generous interpretation of others’ words and actions when you’re stressed out and feeling a lot of scarcity of time and resources. It can be hard to be patient and generous with kids, lovers, roommates, family members, friends, and people we are collaborating with on community projects. We could all be asking right now, what’s it like to try to be generous, even when we feel defensive or afraid? We can recognize that when we’re tired and stressed, we might be extra sensitive. People’s small mistakes or infractions might stir up old histories of times we were betrayed or not listened to across our lives. How can we be gentle with ourselves and others when everyone’s on edge, trying to get by?
Disappointment, conflict, and burnout in care and resistance work
People often experience a special kind of disappointment in resistance work. We join groups to do something that we really care about. Often, we are relieved to finally find people who see things the way we do, excited to be understood and have accompaniment and solidarity. We have high expectations for each other. And then we find out that we’re all very human and imperfect. We encounter some of the same hard things from the broader world in the movement group. Some people are bossy or flaky. People enact racism, sexism, ableism, and all the other systems of meaning and control we’re trying to fight. People disappoint us, and it hurts. Our reactions are often proportional to how high our hopes were.
I have found that burnout is not usually just a result of being tired. Most people I’ve talked to who feel burned out and leave movement work, during the last 28 years that I have been in these movements, are actually in pain because of unresolved conflict. They joined work they really cared about, something went wrong that made them feel betrayed or left out or disappointed, and that is the pain of the burnout. It wasn’t just the hard work; it was the loss of trust, the feeling of being blamed or stigmatized, or not being listened to.
Sadly, so many urgently needed groups and projects entirely break apart because people are in conflict. And so many people who want to join the work are driven away from our groups because they sense the bad vibes in the group, or they hear people talking badly about each other, and can’t really figure out what is going on. We so badly need our work to be bigger, more people doing care work and fighting back against genocide and ecocide, criminalization, and immigration enforcement. If we treat each other badly in our groups and have conflicts that tear us apart, we can’t do the urgent things we need to do to stop the ecocidal monsters who currently control so much of our lives. So, to me, conflict is one of the biggest security issues in our movements. Alongside political repression of our movements and apocalyptic conditions, there is the stuff we are doing to each other and our difficulty in addressing conflict together.
One dimension of this is that many of us are very good at using political language and identifying political and identity-based dimensions to conflicts, but not at identifying emotional dynamics. So when we are having strong feelings, we use our politics to justify them. We weaponize our political language, not on purpose but because when we’re afraid and defensive, it’s a comfortable set of concepts and words to use to protect ourselves and defend our actions. We’re doing work across a lot of important identity and political differences—as we must. And we’re having emotional reactions to each other, to the work, to the decisions our groups are making, to the group dynamics. We’re all having moments of feeling not listened to, or not belonging, or left out, and we often don’t have words for that, but immediately apply a lot of political labels to others in our groups, ask people to take sides, and engage in very binary frameworks that make repair difficult. Often, we become unsatisfiable, not willing to hear apologies or move forward, stuck in resentments, unable to access compassion for everyone’s imperfections.
I am hopeful that if we could get a little more skilled up on the emotional skills piece, instead of just throwing political words at each other, I think we could repair more often and actually stick together. We could love and care for everyone, even if we don’t like them all the time. We could make mistakes that are inevitable, have disagreements, and still work together, or at least not tear down other people and groups that are close to us in our movements, even if they have some differences. That’s my hope with workshops like this, and my recent books, podcast, and videos—that we might do some simple things that reduce the intensity of our conflicts. I think of Margaret Killjoy’s words: “Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.”
Abolitionism and transformative justice
I’ve spent the last decades in the movement for police, prison, and border abolition. I believe we shouldn’t have any of those structures. Abolitionists use a concept called “transformative justice” to describe the work we do to address conflict without using police. There is a lot of conflict, harm, and violence in our communities. We know the police don’t help and only make it worse. Transformative justice practices do three things:
- Work to figure out and provide what the person or people who have been harmed need to heal and participate in community, to not be isolated by what happened to them, to be listened to, even though we can’t undo what happened;
- Work to figure out and provide what the person or people who did the harm need to stop doing it;
- Work to figure out what the community surrounding the harm could do to make it less likely—how did we all set up a situation that made this more likely?
These three things are all things the carceral system does not do. They are practical, effective things that people in communities can do. This work can even happen if the person or people who did the harm are not available or won’t participate. We can still figure out what made it possible for them to harm others and try to stop it—whether that is making sure people have safe housing, or rides, or that people in our community are learning skills for supporting people in crisis, or intervening in harassment or violence. There is so much that we can all be doing. Much of this is mutual aid work—direct support for basic needs that builds community connection and improves safety and survival.
When we think about conflict in our groups, it helps to move from abolitionist principles. That means we don’t think there are a few bad people who do bad things and we need to get rid of them. Instead, we realize that everyone does harm, everyone experiences harm, and everyone has things to learn. When we are doing group work together, I always remember the slogan “imperfect people doing imperfect work.” It can help build patience with ourselves and each other. And when we feel embarrassed or ashamed for making a mistake or learning in public, or when someone is criticizing us, it can be helpful to remind ourselves, “I’m not the best person, I’m not the worst person.” This phrase can help us dial down defensiveness, shame, and grandiosity, all of which show up in conflicts and can cause us to act outside our values and disorganize our groups.
It is not surprising that we run into conflict, that we are imperfect, that our group had disagreements. We can persevere, especially if we can stay away from perfectionism, blame, and shame cycles that are pervasive in a carceral society. We’re all so afraid of being labeled “bad” and we’re so quick to label others. Dialing that down a notch and remembering we’re all making mistakes can help. It can help us not jump to actions like posting about other people or groups on social media, or cutting someone out of our lives, or asking others to cut someone out of community spaces or work. It can help us cultivate patience, remembering that we all have learning to do, and to come up with creative ways to share the work of bringing each other up to speed and building everyone’s solidarity skills.
A fundamental abolitionist idea is that no one is disposable. This means practicing actually believing that it’s possible for people to change. It doesn’t mean we have to say yes to everything with everyone. We’re allowed to have limits and boundaries, to decide who we want to live with, or how long we want to talk on the phone with someone, or who we want to collaborate most closely with. But this principle asks us to try to be more open to people being different than us and being on learning journeys. Can I be compassionate with other people in my movement who are imperfect (just like I am)? Can I care about them and tolerate them even if I don’t like them or they are annoying me? Can I tell them directly if they are doing something I don’t like rather than talking about them behind their back or cutting them out? Can I notice if I’m feeling grandiose by judging them?
Abolitionism encourages us to seek right-sized responses. This can be hard when we are upset. When our old scars of being left out or not listened to are stirred up, we might get so mad that we want revenge. Fundamentally, an abolitionist approach acknowledges that shame, punishment, and stigmatizing people doesn’t work. It doesn’t help people learn. This is very countercultural in a carceral society. It means that when we have strong feelings and we want to punish someone, we have to notice it is happening, and ask our friends for help to make sure the responses are right-sized. There is nothing wrong with having big feelings, and we deserve care and support when they come up. And that includes getting help making sure our responses are right-sized and aligned with our values, not damaging or disorganizing to our communities.
Abolitionist skills for preventing and addressing conflict
An abolitionist approach to conflict centers on building skills that help us all address conflict, help it not get bigger, and have some shared principles for that work so that we can support each other when things get hard. If we build these skills, we might resolve conflict without throwing each other away, campaigning against other people in our communities to try to get them excluded, or tearing down groups that disappointed us. We might find more ways to repair conflict and keep working together. We might find ways to welcome new people into our movements and share these methods with them, so that we are all learning about building long-lasting, trusting relationships with each other that include doing hard work together and having disagreements.
Another core value in abolitionism is that we take care of things directly with each other; we don’t turn to authority figures. In a culture that tells us to go to teachers, cops, parents, HR, or other authorities if we have trouble, this is a big difference. Most of us don’t have skills for talking directly with people who have done something that upset us or that we didn’t like. Instead, we hold it all in and then blow up at them, which often means it’s more damaging than if we’d addressed the smaller things sooner. Or we never say what we think and we just disappear from the relationship or group. Both of these things aren’t working well. A core skill that I work with mutual and other organizing groups to develop is a shared value of direct feedback. This means people learning to take the risk to share the feedback and trying to learn to do that in compassionate and caring ways. And it means learning to be as non-defensive as possible when people share feedback with us.
Many of us fear that if we give someone feedback, we will break the connection. And we fear that if we admit making a mistake, we will break the connection. So instead, we withhold feedback and we are defensive when people give it to us. But the truth is, if you give me feedback you are reaching for me. You are telling me that our connection matters, that something I am doing matters. If I can take it like that, even if you didn’t say it nice or it wasn’t all accurate, I have an opportunity to show you that I heard you. And since most people in our society have had very few experiences of being listened to, this could make our connection so deep, build so much trust. If we are willing to give feedback and try to be nondefensive when receiving feedback, we could build such trusting relationships. We need those so badly now, facing brutal conditions, and needing to take dangerous, bold, life-saving actions together. We can’t afford to turn away from people who have made a mistake, or people who have told us that something we did landed badly on them.
I recommend people just start with anything small. I’m working with some groups on language they can say at the beginning and end of meetings to just affirm that we believe in direct feedback whenever possible. We believe in trying not to talk behind each other’s backs and instead talking to each other directly. We believe that we are all learning together in public, we are all imperfect, we don’t want to throw each other away, and we believe apology and forgiveness are possible. Just saying this at meetings is counter-cultural and can help people be brave about giving feedback on small things to start rather than saving them up and building a case against other people. It can help newcomers learn the values of the group and build these abolitionist skills.
Most of us have only experienced really high-stakes feedback, so we are very afraid. Feedback is top-down in our society: getting fired, failing in school, or getting hit by your parents. There are power dynamics like race, gender, class, age, and disability that can make it all so much scarier in every direction. I often ask people in workshops to think of someone in their life they are not giving feedback to—not telling your roommate how you feel about the dishes, or not telling something to your lover or co-worker—and we all have so many examples. We all feel very familiar fears, tell ourselves stories about why it isn’t worth trying, and together we are creating a disconnected culture where conflict is often relationship-destroying when it doesn’t need to be.
When someone gives you feedback and you feel defensive, one option is just to try to listen for the truth and repeat back to them what they’re saying. It’s a little bit of faking it till you make it, especially with someone you don’t have a lot of intimacy with. You listen to what they are saying, repeat it back to them so they feel heard, and then go process it with another friend so you don’t show all the defensiveness in the moment. Try to sort out what of the feedback is useful. Remember, they are giving it to you because they think something you are doing is important. And come back to them with as much authenticity as you can about what parts you are going to take action on and how. This can build enormous trust. You don’t have to take on everything they said; you’re allowed to look for the parts that are grounded, but ideally, do so with genuine curiosity and willingness to learn something new about how your words or actions are landing on others.
When we give people feedback, it can help to tell them, “I want to share something with you because I really value you. Is now a good time?” Getting consent can really relax someone, and reminding them that you are sharing this because something about their work or their relationship to you is important to you. It can help to share things you value about them, like “I know we both care a lot about this group, and I appreciate these things you are doing in the group. That makes me want to share one thing that is troubling me, in case we can resolve it. Can I talk with you about that now?”
There are no guarantees when we give feedback. Sometimes a person has to hear something five times, 15 times, 20 times, especially if it’s important, like they are not a good listener, they don’t pay attention as much when women speak, or other heavy patterns. But it is still meaningful to be the first, or third, or thirteenth person who gave them the feedback. I am grateful to all the people who told me things that I had to hear dozens of times before I could make change. This is something we all can do for each other, even though it is uncomfortable to get the defensive reaction. It is still worth it. They might come back later, or they might change later and not come back, but your feedback may have mattered. We have to try. We have to choose connection and mutual development in this way.
A fundamental abolitionist idea is that no one is disposable. This means practicing actually believing that it’s possible for people to change.
It can be helpful to share feedback using a simple formula: here is what I observed and here is what I felt. For example, “When you didn’t show up to our meeting twice in a row, I felt frustrated and like my time wasn’t valued.” This is different than saying “You’re irresponsible!” It helps to avoid making generalizations about another person, to avoid saying “always” and “never” when we give feedback, and stick to specific examples. This can reduce the reactivity and is more likely to be accurate feedback. It is more likely to be right-sized. The other side of this formula is that the person receiving the feedback repeats back what they heard about what the person observed and how they felt. They don’t have to agree, but they show that they heard it. And, ideally, they ask if this is a good time to respond or if it should be later. Often, hearing the other person’s side of the story later can mean people are less reactive and defensive. And asking consent, in any case, can show respect and help relax everyone. Even if the other person you’re in the dynamic with doesn’t know this formula or follow it, even following it on one person’s side can help a lot.
When big reactions happen
Something that concerns me is that, from what I have seen over these decades, almost any group can be taken down by one person who is having a big emotional reaction. This is not sustainable for our movements. We need to become better at supporting people who are activated and getting support when we are activated, so that we don’t do damage.
When somebody is having strong feelings in our meeting, or talking to us individually, we usually also have a strong reaction. Your reaction could be that you get very still and calm. It could be a reaction where your heart is racing. It could be a reaction where you feel like you want to get away from them or make them shut up by minimizing what they are complaining about or giving advice. It’s helpful just to know when someone is freaking out in front of us, know I am probably having a reaction too, and to be curious about it.
Because most of us go to three responses when someone is upset in front of us: we shut down and turn away, we try to quiet them by minimizing or offering advice, or we join their reaction and encourage revengeful action. All three of these are normal and reasonable, mostly learned in our families. However, they are not very helpful, and they can lead to the conflict getting bigger, to people going on a rampage of revenge because they don’t feel listened to, or because they are being encouraged.
What would really help is if, when someone was upset, we could listen to them and say “That sounds hard.” We could take them seriously and sit with them while the reaction moves through them. We could assume their words are confidential and not spread them to others in the group or community without their permission. And if they are plotting revenge, we could gently ask them to pause that until they’ve had some time to digest the experience, perhaps reminding them that the people they are seeking revenge from are part of our community or movement. We could also, perhaps, encourage them to speak directly to the people who have upset them if they haven’t done that yet, helping everyone move toward repair instead of rupture.
And when you are the activated person, you need to seek support to find perspective. When you are up at night worrying about something that someone said or did, that’s how you know you’re activated. When you keep thinking critical thoughts about them when you’re trying to do other things during the day, you’re activated. It can cause a kind of tunnel vision where we only see the negative about this person, the group, and even our own lives. I shared an exercise in the workshop from my new book, Love in F*cked Up World, called What Else Is True?, that can help you get out of this mindset. You can find a short podcast episode that goes through it here. The aim is to get out of the tunnel vision, to remember the broader context of the person, the group, our own lives, and support systems, so that we can take action that is aligned with our values about what is bothering us. It’s not to tell ourselves not to care or have feelings; it’s to find right-sized responses to what happened, not accidentally making disproportionate responses that we’ll regret or will hurt others.
One thing that is surprising and challenging about the emotional dynamics of conflict is that we do the most harm to others when we are feeling aggrieved, victimized, left out, and/or resentful. It’s counterintuitive because those are the moments when we are focused on what others did wrong and how we are hurting. But those are the times we are most likely to do something harmful, like go and write the really messed-up email to somebody, treat somebody with a cold shoulder, gossip negatively about people in my group or about another group in town, post a bunch of stuff on Instagram that’s really inflammatory, or violate someone’s privacy. So, as strange as it might seem, it’s when I’m feeling like the victim that I should ask for help from a friend to figure out what a right-sized response is, or to figure out if I’m still too upset to decide how to respond and need more time.
It’s not that we aren’t legitimately sometimes victimized, but the victim narrative in our heads can cause us to skip our value assessment and then do stuff that later we wish we hadn’t done. It’s not bad to feel this way, but what can we do with these feelings since they are inevitably going to come up in our groups and in ourselves? This work addresses the question: how can we hold this with care? Conflict and strong feelings are part of our lives, especially since we all have wounds of living through violence, exclusion, stigma, betrayal, and other painful losses. We show up to movement groups with these wounds, we get our hopes up for finally belonging, we get disappointed, and the feelings can be huge. We need to hold each other and ourselves tenderly in this, caring for the feelings, and trying to take actions that align with our values.
If we could catch each other in the moment of pain and listen, I think it could be a huge change in the likelihood of those conflicts escalating.
Centering belonging
I was just talking to somebody earlier tonight who’s doing a conflict support process with a group that’s had a major difficult conflict. And one of the things the person is doing is individually reaching out to the 40 or 50 people who all were involved in the group over these many years where these hard things were happening.
The people from the group have been telling this conflict support person, who’s not even in the group, “it just means so much to me that you’re listening to me.” We live in societies that minimize our experiences of pain and harm. And so, we join movement groups and we hope we’re finally going to be part of something where we feel heard and seen. And then we have a bad experience where people don’t hear us or see us at some point. And then we wreak havoc. We’re like, “I have to tear down everybody in this group and this group itself, because I’m feeling all of my historical cumulative pain of being dismissed.”
If we could catch each other in the moment of pain and listen, I think it could be a huge change in the likelihood of those conflicts escalating to the most disorganizing behaviors between us.
A lot of us show up to movement spaces like a meeting or a conference, and we are not aware of it, but we’re actually programmed to look for how we don’t belong. I’ve seen this so much. We go in excited to finally find our people, but we have had a lifetime of not feeling belonging, so we look through that lens and soon find something that feels familiar. We’re so hopeful, and then we are so let down when something isn’t perfect.
There’s so much vulnerability. Knowing this, we should plan our meetings and spaces understanding everyone’s showing up like this. So, can we be more welcoming? Can we be less cliquish, enact less coolness hierarchies, and be more kind? The more awkward the person is, the more we love them.
Can we give new people more space to share what motivates them to be here with us. Even though we’ve heard it before and we are well-versed in the analysis, new people need chances to share their insight and experience, to feel like they are becoming part of the fight. Can we avoid being jaded and instead welcome their passion? And when they say or do things that show they need to learn some aspects of solidarity that they haven’t encountered yet, can we lovingly give the feedback (even if we have to give it more than once), remembering that we all have to constantly learn and unlearn things to practice solidarity?
We are all harmed and wounded in groups, like our families, schools, churches, and workplaces early in life. And when we join groups to work for liberation, we can find healing for those wounds. Those wounds will come up when we do things together, and rather than freaking out and shutting down and splitting, we could hold on to each other through those storms, find out that we won’t throw each other away, that it’s okay to say so when something is hard for us, that it’s okay to listen when someone has been hurt by us. It works this way: you join the group with all of your excitement about liberation, and then all your old stuff gets stirred up, and then there is opportunity to have healing, belonging, and care with others.
Perhaps you never felt listened to in your family. And in this group, you’re starting to feel like no one’s listening. Can you create an experience with others where you get listened to and learn a new, deep lesson about your value? Or where you learn a new lesson about being recognized for your labor, or about being cared about as a person with a disability, or being seen in your experiences of racism and white supremacy in this culture, or of transphobia? Can we create groups where we build these skills together, so that more people can experience increased capacity to stick together in these very, very hard times?
