What is Real Dialogue?

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Real Dialogue is a growing movement aimed at counteracting stereotyping, racism, bias, polarization, and dehumanization. While conflict and differences are a natural part of life, how we handle them is critically important. Healthy conflict promotes personal growth, insight, and deeper understanding, whereas unhealthy conflict—including conflict avoidance or repetitive conflict—leads to defensiveness, enemy-making, and destruction.

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At Real Dialogue, we move beyond winning, debating, or traditional conflict resolution. Our approach focuses on a set of principles, practices, and ideas that encourage meaningful engagement with all aspects of human experience. This includes embracing both positive and negative emotions, success and failure, health and illness, and even the profound cycles of life and death.

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Ultimately, every human experience is deeply personal and individual. How we see, hear, feel, and remember the world is unique to each of us. In this sense, there is no single, shared "world out there" that everyone can fully agree on.

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Featured Training

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Ride the Waves:
Training in the Skill of Real Dialogue

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Would you like to improve your relationships and leadership capacity in a two-day training that will enhance your confidence in speaking and listening, as well as mastering your own emotions?

Where: Osher Center for Integrative Health, 184 South Prospect Street, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont

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What is the Center
for Real Dialogue?

People engaging in meaningful dialogue to overcome stereotyping and bias

The Center for Real Dialogue is a non-profit organization that was founded and developed by Polly Young-Eisendrath who is a widely-recognized psychologist, Jungian psychoanalyst, and mindfulness teacher.

The Center provides evidence-based practices, education and training in the skills and methods of Real Dialogue through free podcasts and other public programs, fee-based affordable training for individuals and groups, and continuing education for mental health professionals in Dialogue Therapy.

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Real Dialogue Skill

The three-part skill of Real Dialogue is Speaking for Yourself, Listening Mindfully, and Remaining Curious. Through learning, practicing and teaching this skill, individuals learn how to speak and listen in ways that foster healthy disagreements, learning from conflicts, and remaining curious, even when emotionally activated.

Real Dialogue Method

This facilitation method (for difficult conversations) is rooted in evidence-based and precise techniques from mindfulness, psychodrama and psychoanalysis. People learn how to do both solo and co-facilitation through advanced training processes. Contracting our Real Dialogue Specialists for facilitation of difficult conversations is also a fee-for-service offer that can be arranged with the Center for Real Dialogue for your group or organization.

Dialogue Therapy Training
for Professionals

The Center offers comprehensive training for mental health professionals in Dialogue Therapy — a time-limited, structured therapy that draws on mindfulness, psychoanalysis, and psychodrama to address the complexity of 21st century relationships for couples and other adult pairs.

Our Impact

Reaching out globally and locally, the Center offers free education through two podcasts and local public programs to help people understand and master our natural tendencies to make enemies, blame others, and create stereotypes when we avoid conflict or become polarized.

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What you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you.
What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessity, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you; I’m describing me.

—  James Baldwin, Author

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Read, Listen, and Watch

Finding Ourselves on Different Sides: The Skill and Method of Real Dialogue (Preview)

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Cover of a book titled 'Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path' by Polly Young-Eisendrath, PhD, with a foreword by Daniel J. Siegel, MD. The cover features the words 'LOVE' and 'EQUALS' in large yellow font and the word 'between' in smaller black font.
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