Interpersonal Conflict Resolution: Beyond Conflict Avoidance Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School
Just because you value keeping things the same, however, doesn’t mean you’re totally fixed in your opinions. Your friends might value your flexibility; you find it easy to see both sides of a disagreement, but you’d rather not voice your personal view on any given matter, should it sway heavily in one direction or another. Learning how to confront someone assertively won’t happen overnight. But you can still take small steps each day toward feeling more comfortable facing your fears and speaking up for yourself. Instead of trying to sedate emotions like anger, sadness, or fear, try looking at them through the lens of self-compassion, and allowing yourself to see your negative thoughts with empathy. While avoidance sometimes seems like the best way to deal with conflict, in the long run it ends up harming our intimacy.
Sanz believes that these couples avoid facing the changes in their intimate relationship, as well as their own changes as individuals. “They are trying to sweep certain fundamental facts about their life process and their interaction under the rug, where they supposedly will stop interfering with their life. By acting like this, the imbalances of the common project pile how to deal with someone who avoids conflict up, until a situation — not necessarily serious — breaks that idyllic, fake balance, and blows everything up,” she warns. One technique taught in mindfulness-based stress reduction classes is to sit and meditate the next time you feel an itch instead of scratching it immediately. See what thoughts and feelings arise, and how long it takes for the feeling to pass.
Toward Interpersonal Conflict Resolution
But when conflict is resolved in a healthy way, it increases your understanding of the other person, builds trust, and strengthens your relationships. When we avoid conflict with those we continue to interact with, we allow it to fester and grow. Imagine that you hear that you hurt a coworker’s feelings with a thoughtless remark.
Once engaged in a confrontation, the Thinking or Feeling preference comes out — Thinkers prefer to focus on purely the facts, while Feelers want to take some time to explore differences and evaluate needs. If your perception of conflict comes from painful memories from early childhood or previous unhealthy relationships, you may expect all disagreements to end badly. You may view conflict as demoralizing, humiliating, or something to fear. If your early life experiences left you feeling powerless or out of control, conflict may even be traumatizing for you. When it comes to personal life, conflict avoidance can increase boundary violations and decrease mutual respect between intimate partners, parents and children, siblings, and friends. Unaddressed anger and resentment can fester, potentially resulting in a sudden and unexplained explosion over something minor and even unrelated.
What’s Your Conflict Style?
You shut down, space out, and show very little energy or emotion. The child’s need is to explore, so venturing to the street or the cliff edge meets that need. But the parent’s need is to protect the child’s safety, a need that can only be met by limiting the toddler’s exploration.
Some form of conflict is a normal part of our personal and professional lives. Rather than endlessly ruminate and allow conflicts to fester in your head, try taking a more assertive approach. Similarly, if you’re more comforted by smells, you can keep an essential oil on hand to take a quick whiff of when you’re feeling anxious. If you’re a visual person, for example, you can relieve stress by closing your eyes and imagining soothing images. It’s also about ensuring that problematic issues (like the one with your co-worker) are dealt with so they don’t happen again in the future.