Identifying incompatibilities and resolving conflicts in research
JESSIE YOUNG-ROBERTSON: My name is Jessie Young-Robertson, we are at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the Akasofu building. I am talking to Kira. She used to be my boss/supervisor, but now she’s my friend. 
KIRA HANSEN: So I’m Kira Hansen. We started off as colleagues-slash-supervisor, and I consider us colleagues and friends. 
JESSIE YOUNG-ROBERTSON: There is a budding conversation about mental health in STEM, mental health in academics, mental health, etc. However, there’s not a lot of meat behind that argument and it really bothers me. From your perspective, how do we start venturing into the conversation about the academic institution, the science institution? 
KIRA HANSEN: My background has become, as a counselor, very much DBT-informed. DBT is dialectical behavior therapy. A lot of what I emphasize from that perspective for people is learning to evaluate the facts first. So, when we have a feeling, and when we’re having this problem, is removing our judgements and our emotions to the extent we can at the moment, and then really focusing on the facts. I think we can’t really look at a solution until we really see the array of what’s really going on. Like, what is the problem here?
It’s really challenging as human beings to put our thoughts and feelings and beliefs aside and just look at the facts from everybody’s perspective, shall we say, without feeling defensive? 
JESSIE YOUNG-ROBERTSON: It’s interesting, because I was talking to an individual the other day and they were mentioning about a student they were working with. Now, from the nature of the story, it sounded like, maybe a 10 percent systems problem and a 90 percent person problem.
I think if I refer back to my own experience, when is this a me problem, when is this a them problem, and then when is this an us problem, you know?
Mentor-mentee dynamics comes up a lot. So some of what I’ve heard from people who are on the mentee side is like, “I’m looking for this support but then the relationships are really toxic,” and really, that’s the word I’m trying to back away from. Because, what I want to know is, what are the parameters that go around it being toxic? And what I’m realizing what we are talking about are incompatibilities. 
I feel like when people see or experience an incompatibility, there’s all of this feeling that goes with it, like “somebody has to be in the wrong here,” when really it’s okay. It’s part of life to be incompatible with a place or a person. I think where the “toxicity” comes out, is if you stay in an incompatibility, and the behaviors become disruptive. 
KIRA HANSEN: I think a lot of us, we just come with different values and beliefs. And those are shaped by our life experiences, what we saw in our family or around us. Some people, “I’m not here to make friends.” Other people want or believe that it should be more like, “We’re a family here.” 
So knowing that, knowing what you are expecting out of this relationship to begin with really, I think, shapes that. Because when it doesn’t live up to that, that’s when we start struggling. When we are not getting what we think work should look like, is when we’re like, “What is this?”
JESSIE YOUNG-ROBERTSON: “This is toxic.”
KIRA HANSEN: A lot of times we get stuck in this idea of who is responsible for changing? “Not me. I’m not in the wrong here.” 
So really evaluating the options for change, which look like, we could do nothing and normally stay miserable. We could change how we feel about it. So sometimes, we could change how we look at a situation, or just acceptance. So interpersonal skills-wise, we could change how we interact with a situation to change our feelings. Once we exhausted those items, do we need to change our relationship with that system or that person? I think we rule out or don’t know how to do the stuff in the middle, so we only see “stay miserable or leave.”
JESSIE YOUNG-ROBERTSON: Whether it’s a collaboration or it’s a mentor-mentee relationship, people launch into that relationship. They think about it like, “Oh, well there’s this neat project to do, this neat thing to do, what an opportunity, blah blah blah,” instead of like, “Can we work together? What are the things that are going to get in the way of being able to have a productive relationship?”
Very rarely do those conversations happen until people are mid-career and they’re like, “You know what, I need to work with people I get along with.” 
When it goes south, that’s when things really blow up for people. So if I see knowing yourself as one of the key ingredients to develop a healthy interpersonal relationship, how does somebody do that? 
KIRA HANSEN: First off, distress. Distress is the level to which we are experiencing any emotion and how uncomfortable that makes us feel. As our discomfort grows, our ability to cope and other items decreases. And so a distress scale, we tend to look at on a 1 to 10, 1 or 0 being just the lowest, no distress or little that you’ve ever felt, 10 being the most you’ve ever felt, absolutely intolerable.
What we do first is what does this physically look like? How does it feel in your body, in your brain, what are you doing to some extent with physical items, maybe like rubbing your hands, clenching your fist stuff. Some people become more verbal and vocal and activated and some people become more shut down. 
Then we look at next, for each of those, what do you do? Going back to those behaviors, active versus checking out. 
When do you begin to feel uncomfortable?  When is it just starting to be, “Eh, I wish I wasn’t in this situation?” When then on that scale is what we call the cliff or the point of no return? We all have this point where we are unable to respond well, maybe we have checked out, maybe we are yelling if we’re more of an activated person, like we’re not, it’s kind of just done. Like after this point, nothing good or productive is happening. 
So you create a box there, of your low and your high, and then looking in between that box is also what we call the danger zone or the beginning of the end. If we really look at when you start tumbling down the hill towards that cliff, when would that be? And then these become quite useful because then you’re talking about knowing ourselves, we can look at the events. So, “what puts me in this space?” 
Further down, it takes time and work, but also developing a plan for those. So knowing, these are the things I can quickly do to remove myself from the situation or cope in the moment so I don’t reach that point. 
JESSIE YOUNG-ROBERTSON: When I see people, I’d say maybe more senior personnel, get very angry about this, that, or the other, it almost comes out as like, an entitlement to that anger. “I have every right in the world to be this way,” and there’s no longer any room to be like, “Hm, maybe we need to take a step back.”
You have the urge to fire off the email, you have the urge to make the call and tell someone off. You have the urge to burn this to the ground. Versus creating some distance, like, “You know what, I’m going to wait three days, and if I still have to write the email, I’m going to share it with a trusted colleague who’s going to be like, ‘What is the goal of this? Is it to burn it to the ground? Is it to create understanding? Is it to show somebody you’re right? ‘”
KIRA HANSEN: A concept I really love from DBT that goes with that is this idea of our feelings are always valid to us. Okay, you feel angry, and I’m not going to come in and be like, you don’t get to be angry.
JESSIE YOUNG-ROBERTSON: You should be angry about that, yeah.
KIRA HANSEN: But it doesn’t mean that our anger is appropriate for the moment. I think that resources are scarce, right? A lot of times, people have to fund their positions through grants. What that does is instead of creating this space where we invite other people in and let me help you succeed, well that’s competition. 
JESSIE YOUNG-ROBERTSON: That’s a huge part of this. We get talked to about you should collaborate across the board and do all this stuff and it’s just like, I have people to pay and I have a lab to keep open. So I think about money all of the time. For a lot of the research faculty, it’s almost like you’re paying rent to be here. That’s part of, I think, the mental health aspect and the scarcity issue, is there are not enough jobs for the number of higher degrees we’re producing. 
KIRA HANSEN: I feel the same about mental health, I mean, not that we don’t have enough jobs. Personal opinion, disclosure there. I feel like we don’t do enough to prepare people for the reality of working in the field. There are plenty of jobs, but those jobs are at a community agency. 
We have actually less people pursuing their degree because there’s not a lot of financial incentive. But those people are leaving that do get their degrees with some very unrealistic ideas about what they are moving into financially, paperwork, all this other stuff. So we are having all these people move through this field but not actually coming out willing to fill the needs that are genuinely occurring.