Restorative Practice Resources Tagged With: listening

'Phillips helped pave the way for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which aimed to bring restorative justice to victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses under Apartheid, the nation's strict system of racial segregation that came to an end in the early 1990s.'

Beyond Conflict founder Tim Phillips speaks as part of the SNF Agora Institute's "Talking (and Listening) Across Divides" conference Wednesday

'When we become a polyvagal-informed society, we’re functionally capable of listening to and witnessing other people’s experiences, we don’t evaluate them. Listening is part of co-regulation: we become connected to others and this is what I call our biological imperative. So when you become polyvagal-informed you have a better understanding of your evolutionary heritage as a mammal. We become aware of how our physiological state is manifested, in people’s voices and in their facial expression, posture and basic muscle tone. If there’s exuberance coming from the upper part of a person’s face, and their voice has intonation modulation or what’s called prosody, we become attracted to the person. We like to talk to them – it’s part of our co-regulation. So when we become polyvagal-informed, we start understanding not only the other person’s response but also our responsibility to smile and have inflection in our voice, to help the person we’re talking to help their body feel safe.'

The psychiatry professor on the polyvagal theory he developed to understand our reactions to trauma