Final reflections on my learnings from CPT Training

Many have of you have asked about my experience in CPT Training in January, and it’s been hard to answer. I needed to talk to Doug P. (CPT Co-Director) before talking about it more publicly, and now feel ready to respond.

I am not continuing with CPT because I was rejected. I was shocked: because I believe it is not a good decision; because of the lack of transparency in the decision-making – I was told on the second last night – and because of the hurtful way the decision was communicated. I was given no warning, no opportunity to respond, and nothing but a broad general statement as a reason (“the way your gifts played out would not be good on team”). I found it very difficult to accept that an organization dedicated to peacemaking could behave like this, and I mourn the impossibility of further involvement with CPT because of this exclusion at the very end of a month’s good-faith effort.

I feel fortunate to have the support and nurture of a devoted spouse and close friends at church, but it has been especially hard thinking about being at church together with Doug and Jane. I am thankful however that Doug has listened respectfully to me, and has named what he hopes CPT can learn from this experience. We have decided together that naming what we have learned is one way to begin restoring this relationship in our strong church community. We've read each other's statements which will be printed in the church newsletter.

And so I would like to share some of what I have learned from my month in CPT.

1. I want to learn more about my own personality; how others might respond to my personality and what I can do to minimize the impact of those reactions; how and why I respond to the personalities of others. I have generally avoided personality profiling in the past but am committed to learning more.
2. Another learning about myself as a person is the strong reaction I have when I see interpersonal injustice. My first instinct is to figure out how to fix it, and I have a hard time letting go; even when I realise that I can’t fix it, or that it’s out of my area of responsibility and influence, I still want to convince people who are are a position to do so, that they need to fix the injustice.
3. I experienced the difficulty of having conversations across barriers created by privilege (of citizenship, skin colour, education, etc.) and moved from despair at the seeming impossibility of openness to the hope that acknowledging my own privilege will somehow be part of the movement toward more justice for all.
4. The most interesting and potentially useful part of the training for me were the three days of conflict transformation, with a large emphasis on the non-violent communication tools of Marshall Rosenberg. The workshop gave us a good initial familiarity with the tools, and learning about these transformative possibilities has given me reassurance that I don’t need to pursue CPT to obtain justice; it has been enough for me to be able to imagine various scenarios if CPT and I were to talk.

I want to thank readers of this blog for supporting me. I'm in an intensive Spanish course at the moment, trying to get more comfortable speaking. I'll be off to Paraguay for two weeks over Easter, and will get to see how much I've progressed. It'll be a linguistic feast for me, since many of the Ratzlaff cousins speak Spanish, German, English. I'm looking forward to discovering new places.