Los Gatos Weekly-Times Photograph by George Sakkestad Jim Creighton's new book looks at 'How Loving Couples Fight.' Fighting Fair Jim Creighton, who mediated the Vasona Substation battles, turns his skills to the subject of love By Jeff Kearns For most people, Valentine's Day conjures up images of school children making hearts from pink and red construction paper, a couple having dinner at a romantic little Italian place with candles melting into chianti bottles, or maybe exchanging flowers or a box of candy. In any case, nobody thinks of a good fight. Fighting is exactly what happy couples are supposed to avoid, and if you're fighting too much, then maybe it's time to rethink the whole relationship, or so goes the conventional wisdom. But according to Jim Creighton, that's not the case. In his new book, How Loving Couples Fight, Creighton makes the case that fighting may not be so bad after all, if it's done right. Creighton knows all about fighting. Since the early '70s, he's been one of the leaders in the field of conflict resolution, especially through his work handling public participation for corporations and big government agencies. Around Los Gatos, many might remember Creighton, who lives in the Almond Grove District, as the poor guy who walked into the middle of the maelstrom of protest over PG&E's Vasona Substation. His newest effort, however, isn't on behalf of a large government agency or corporation: it's on the side of love. How Loving Couples Fight might be a departure from Creighton's usual line of work, but isn't much of a departure for Creighton himself. Creighton's wife, Maggie, is his partner in the consulting business (aptly named Creighton & Creighton) that they run out of their home, but she's also someone he has had to work with over the years as another kind of partner, in their marriage. Creighton is proud that he and his wife, while both respected as professional conflict resolvers, can do for the Army Corps of Engineers what they can with their own relationship. That is, make it work. And for Jim Creighton, that's what it boils down to: what works. Even with a Ph.D. in psychology, Creighton maintains that all the education in the world won't make anyone an expert on how to keep a relationship going. The only way to do that, he says, is to find out what works. "I've always been more interested in what works, instead of what the theories are." And what's in the book, Creighton says, has been field-tested with Maggie. "Everything in there we've tried out," he says proudly. "It's the book I wish someone had given me when I got married." How Loving Couples Fight, recently published by Aslan Publishing, is actually a reincarnated and rewritten version of Creighton's 1991 book, Don't Go Away Mad, published by Doubleday. For that book, Creighton put in more than 100 appearances on radio and television on a national publicity tour, including spots on Sally, Montel and the ABC Home Show, and Bantam snapped up the rights to the paperback version. But the paperback never came out. In fact, sales flagged dramatically just after the book came out, which happened to be at the same time as Operation Desert Storm. If he's lucky this time, sales will reach the level of the 1978 book he co-authored, Getting Well Again, which has sold more than a million copies worldwide and has been translated into 17 languages. Essentially, the main principles behind a good relationship aren't much different from those needed to broker peace between an environmental group and an oil company. What's most important is making both sides realize that it's in their best interest to have a good dialogue. And to do that in a relationship, Creighton says, means realizing during clear weather that there will inevitably be storms lurking somewhere over the horizon. "I was raised in the kind of home where fighting just wasn't done," Creighton says. "But the first thing you have to do is accept that fighting is a natural and normal part of any relationship." Most people, he explains, think of fighting as an indicator that the relationship isn't working, and the usual conclusion is that they don't love each other enough. Not true, Creighton insists. "Some couples who rarely fight have unhealthy relationships because their issues never get resolved, but on the other hand, couples who do let themselves fight usually get to the bottom of whatever issue it is that's causing the fight in the first place, so small problems don't wreck the relationship." Photograph by George Sakkestad Los Gatan Jim Creighton's mediation work is normally done in the public arena, but his newest book is about healthy fighting for couples. The other two cross-sections of couples--the good couple that never fights, and the bad couple that always fights--aren't as common. The caveat is that the couples who do fight and stay together actually become closer as a result, instead of moving further apart. "The whole idea is that you fight in such a way that protects the relationship," Creighton says. "A lot of us fight in a way that escalates the conflict, and as it escalates to the top, the goal becomes hurting each other, so that when the fight's over, you've destroyed the basis of the relationship." In other words, making mountains out of molehills. "The classic fight," Creighton says, "is when leaving the cap off the toothpaste becomes 'you're messy' and then goes to 'you're a loser.' " But once the fight is over, most couples say: "Let's never fight again." Yeah, right. Creighton says that's the time to lay down the rules, because although the next fight is inevitable, it doesn't have to be so bad. What works for Creighton? "We use the five-minute rule," he says. "It's a mega rule. You have to agree to it in advance, and it trumps everything else. What it is is when a fight begins, you stop doing whatever you're doing. Whoever goes first gets five minutes to say whatever they want, then the other person gets five minutes, and so on, until you're done saying things. "And you can't interrupt. That's what makes it work. For five minutes, nobody is interrupting you or telling you you're wrong. It's been one of our escape valves." Creighton says that most of the couples he's worked with don't go more than two or three rounds, and people rarely use the whole five minutes. When Creighton was called in to help facilitate the Vasona Substation, the meetings didn't use the five-minute rule, but it was a similar approach, in which all sides relied on ground rules that everyone agreed would help them arrive at a conclusion beneficial to everyone. The crusade against the substation, for its opponents, was more of a jihad--a holy war. Even for Creighton, who has earned a reputation as one of the most gifted and influential public participation facilitators in the field, it must have felt a little bit like walking into a boxing ring. By the time Creighton sat down with all sides--neighbors, town officials and lawyers--for a series of weekly meetings, the battle lines had been drawn, recriminations made, and a lot of testy public hearings held. In the end, PG&E won approval from state regulators to build the substation, which was originally proposed in the early '70s and was more or less inevitable. Still, after the facilitation, some neighbors insisted that Creighton was working for the utility (he wasn't) and slammed his report, which was actually more of a summary, as biased. "I was called in to work on the project after the sides were already polarized. It would have been easier if they had called me earlier," recalls Creighton, who also facilitated when another controversial substation was proposed in Almaden Valley--and helped both sides come up with a mutually acceptable solution. As a facilitator, however, Creighton's job was not to make decisions, but rather to help people communicate with one another. That's what he was starting to do in 1972, when Congress passed the National Environmental Protection Act, a sweeping reform that required, among other things, public participation. Before any environmental impact report could be adopted by a public agency, for example, that agency was required to hold an open hearing to gather public input on the subject of the report. One of Creighton's first big jobs was for the U.S. Forest Service. "They were spending all their time in meeting sessions trying to figure out how many cops they would need on hand at a hearing to prevent a riot," he says. In those days, Creighton says, many of the meetings were run military-style by authoritarians. And, predictably, opponents in the audience liked to show up and scream. Creighton went to work teaching Forest Service officials how to stop the tension and acrimony of hearings by scheduling workshops earlier in the process, and giving all parties a chance to make their feelings known to the decision makers and have a hand in the actual decision-making process. He also taught officials and wrote guidelines for the Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Reclamation, and spent 10 years heading a dispute resolution team for the Army Corps of Engineers. These days, Creighton has a three-year contract teaching public participation across the country for the Department of Energy, sometimes working on sticky subjects like nuclear power plant closings. In all, Creighton has conducted nearly 300 public participation programs for more than 50 government agencies, utilities and companies. "He operates with the idea that if you peel the onion far enough, you can generally find more agreement than disagreement," says Los Gatos Town Manager Dave Knapp, who worked with Creighton during the facilitation sessions for the substation, and credits him with cooling off a very hot situation. "He's calm and deliberate, but also very caring--and he's a very careful listener." Knapp adds: "He's practically a miracle worker." Ken Schreiber, Palo Alto's deputy city manager, also has high praise for Creighton, who has run public participation sessions for that city. For one of those sessions, scheduled after Hewlett-Packard applied to put a large research and development lab on the edge of a residential neighborhood in 1991, Schreiber suggested that HP hire Creighton to run some meetings with the neighbors. "It was potentially very controversial, but the way he handled it really defused the situation," Schreiber explains. When the project came to the city's Architectural Review Board, nobody showed up to speak against it, and it was never appealed to the City Council. Doug Sarno, executive director of the International Association for Public Participation in Alexandria, Va., calls Creighton one of the leaders in the field of public participation. The association, which Creighton co-founded in 1990, now boasts more than 1,000 members, and consists primarily of professional conflict resolution professionals working with corporations and government agencies. "He's been so vastly influential that you can't be in this field and not have learned from Jim," Sarno says. "There were a lot of people doing public participation before Jim, but he did one of the earliest and most visible projects in the field, for Bonneville [Power Administration]. What he learned there and what he was doing there has really set the tone for public participation across the country, and there are a lot of people who model their public participation projects on Jim's teachings." [ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 10, 1999. ©1999 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.