This heuristic, multi-sited ethnographic study uses Process Work as a lens to evaluate the facilitation of conflict. The research conducted in this study explores the inner experiences of conflict facilitators as potentially purposeful tools for informing and optimizing the facilitation of dialogue and conflict transformation efforts.

Consciousness is deconstructed and explored in terms of the awareness of signals, roles, relative rank dimensions, edges, symbolic psychological figures, archetypes, and phenomenological experience within an analytical, structural framework of deep democracy and a spiritual framework of eldership. Innerwork—an approach to unfolding the inherent meaning in previously marginalized signals and experiences—is explored as a purposeful methodology for optimizing interventions in facilitation. A key aspect of this dissertation is to show the importance of innerwork and the ability to understand the outer and inner worlds as reflections of each other.

Process Work's structural framework and spirit of deep democracy and eldership provide constructs for exploring experiences, signals, disturbances, and body symptoms in the conflict, in the field, in participants, and in facilitators. These experiences and disturbances are shown to be teleologically meaningful phenomena that are related to the conflict structure and can aid in facilitation, deepen awareness, and help lead the way to sustainable conflict transformation.

Data is collected through interviews with conflict professionals, field experiences in NGO's, public forums on social issues, and self reflection of the author's own social, organizational, and interpersonal conflicts, and analysis of various historical conflicts.