“Conflict is a challenge to our pretense of completeness.” - Robert Kegan

“the conflictual relationship creates the parties; the parties do not create the relationship.”

“The postmodern view suggests a quite different conception, something more like this: "The protracted nature of our conflict suggests not just that the other side will not go away, but that it probably should not.
The conflict is a likely consequence of one or both of us making prior, true, distinct, and whole our partial position. The conflict is potentially a reminder of our tendency to pretend to completeness when we are in fact incomplete. We may have this conflict because we need it to recover our truer complexity."

“Like respectful and enlightened anthropologists, they regularly visit, and deeply appreciate, the other's "culture of mind." At their best, they suspend the tendency to evaluate the other's "culture" through the lens of their own, and seek rather to discover the terms by which the other is shaping meaning or creating value. Not only does each seem to benefit from frequent "travel" to the other's "culture," but the one who is "being visited" also seems to appreciate the experience of having the other come in with a nonimperial stance to see how reality is being constructed.”

“More and more we're refusing to act out the other's opposite, to be the "stand-in" for the other's own oppositeness.”

“…at our best, we get a good glimpse at the fact that the activist, also has a contemplative living inside him. The one who is strict with the kids has a part of herself that has a whole other, looser way of feeling about them. And on and on. It isn't easy, and it doesn't happen all the time, but our favorite fights are the ones in which we don’t try to solve the conflicts but let the conflicts “solve us,” you could say… if a conflict does not go away it's a good bet that one of us, or both of us, has gotten drawn back into being too identified with our more comfortable position. Like the end we're holding onto so passionately is our whole story, our whole truth in the matter. When we can get out of the grip of our more familiar side then the fight doesn't feel as if the other one is trying to make us give up anything. The fight becomes a way for us to recover our own complexity, so to speak, to leave off making the other into our opposite and face up to our own oppositeness.”

This book is more accessible and practical than the Evolving Self. It’s a terrific read and a great introduction into Constructive Development theory.