With conflict comes growth

Systems theory has always made a lot of sense to me. We don’t live in a vacuum. At the minimum, what we do affects those around us, and has the potential to affect both our local and larger community.  In a holistic sense, each person is a part of a system and although each individual is important, how we interact with each other is even more important because it affects the system (community) as a whole.

The authors of our book write, “A system also has some purpose—it is goal-directed and adapts to its environment through self-maintenance and regulation.”  They compare this to marriage. I can relate to this. My husband and I have been married for many years, and we wouldn’t still be married if we didn’t continually work on our relationship as potential conflicts come up from external factors such as income reductions (he’s been laid off five times) and the need to take care of aging parents, etc.

Just as humans and creatures who don’t adapt to their environment don’t thrive, people in a relationship who don’t adapt to the demands of the other person or the environment don’t thrive and neither does the relationship. But with that adaptation comes conflict. I have found that it is through conflict that I’ve grown as a person and our relationship has grown stronger. If it was always the same-old, same-old, I think we both would have grown bored with the marriage long ago. However, if we didn’t effectively and respectfully deal with the conflicts, the marriage also would have suffered.

Egg on my face

Within the last couple of months, false attributions I made about my husband exacerbated a conflict situation. Since he hadn’t done the vacuuming he usually does over the weekend, I asked him to do it the next Tuesday when he had no other obligations. I called to let him know I was on my way home and he told me he hadn’t vacuumed and wasn’t going to that day because he was online taking a course for personal enrichment. To myself, I thought “he’s just being lazy.” I told him that from now on I would insist that he does the vacuuming on Sunday no matter what else he had to do, and that it wasn’t fair that I did my chores and he didn’t do his. He broke in to say “Good for you” and hung up. I stayed angry on the way home only to come home to a wonderful dinner he had taken most of the day to prepare because he knew I was tired that day.

On the other hand, there are many times when I’ve made accurate attributions about the other person in a conflict that has helped me. If another person is short-tempered and gets into a conflict situation with me; I try to give them the benefit of the doubt and figure that something must have happened that upset them that day, or they are tired or frustrated about something. I try not to take the conflict personally. Many times I will find out later that I was right when the person comes back to apologize for getting upset with me because something else had upset them or they were tired or upset.

Revenge is apparently a popular concept

An Internet search of the words, “forgiveness,” “reconciliation” and “revenge” provided interesting results. The sites for “forgiveness” were ones that dealt with physical, mental and spiritual health. The results for “reconciliation” were sites that dealt with spirituality, peace movements and coalitions, and heartwarming stories. The results for “revenge” focused on medium such as an apparently popular TV series named “Revenge,” videos, concerts and music. It was interesting to note that medium with “revenge” in their names seemed not to need to be related to the definition of revenge; just having it as a title seemed to attract attention.

An Internet search provided the most results for revenge at 277,000,000, with 55,900,000 results for forgiveness and reconciliation coming in third with 52,500,000 results. I believe this is because people tend to prefer sensationalism to warm and fuzzy. Pick up a newsletter or listen to the news online, on TV or on the radio and the topics discussed are generally bad news, not good news. Bad news sells. Good news doesn’t. Forgiveness and reconciliation are good for people; revenge is not.

The authors of our book write, “The best way to stop the cycle (of violence) is to switch to forgiveness and perhaps initiate reconciliation. It may be the best way; however, according to a comparison of the number of websites related to forgiveness, reconciliation and revenge, people apparently are more interested in revenge than either forgiveness or reconciliation.

Forgive and reconcile your way to better health

The concepts from this week’s readings that stood out for me were core relational rules and relational transgressions.  The authors of our book state that “Core relational rules define our expectations about the way we should behave toward others as well as the way they should behave toward us,” and that these rules are “sacred” to us. Relational transgressions are violations of these core relational rules.

I have a friend who, after several years, still has not forgiven her brother for continuing to be friends with her ex-boyfriend, which has resulted in their alienation from one another. I now better understand why my friend feels this way. One of her relational rules is obviously that when she is hurt severely by someone, her family needs to support her 100 percent, which she didn’t feel her brother was doing by continuing to be friends with her ex-boyfriend.

However, according to the authors of our book, “forgiveness (is) related to our psychological health…(and) our physical health.” Since my friend has been in poor health since her break-up and since it’s her brother who she hasn’t forgiven, I feel that she needs to forgive him and reconcile with him so that they can once more have a relationship that is worthwhile for both of them, which hopefully will lead to a healthier life for her.

Forgiveness, but not reconciliation

Years ago, after I broke up with an alcoholic boyfriend of a seven year relationship, I did not see the need to forgive him for the abuse he piled on me when he was drinking. I moved from Southern California to Northern California to make a clean start.

I neither saw the need to forgive him nor did I even want to forgive him. I nurtured my hurt feelings as I slowly rebuilt my self-esteem, which had taken quite a beating. However, in coming to terms with ending the relationship and building my self-esteem, I discovered that in order to find peace and the ability to form a trusting relationship with another person, I would need to forgive my previous boyfriend.  Realizing that the heavy drinking contributed to the way he acted toward me freed me to forgive him and let the hard feelings go.

I did forgive him, but still did not see the need to reconcile with him because I neither needed nor wanted him any longer in my life.

Social Networking and conflict & communication

I am a member of Facebook; however, I joined only to learn about Facebook when it was first introduced in connection with my job at the time, and was active on it for only one period of time because of a project due for a previous class I took with our professor. So I am currently not using Facebook. I am on the social networking site, LinkedIn, so I will write about that.

I am obviously not doing a good job in presenting myself on LinkedIn. I only have the barest of information in my profile. Since LinkedIn is a social network that I joined to advance myself professionally, I should make the time to update my profile because I want people to have a good impression of me both as a person and as a professional in my field. So far, the only people who have asked to join my network are people I know, job recruiters, and a few random people whom I have no idea of why they asked to join my network.

The only person who I accepted into my network and realized I should not have is someone who used LinkedIn to make posts that were appropriate for Facebook, but not LinkedIn. I gave her a couple of weeks of access and then took her off my network. I did not think her social postings were what I wanted other professionals to see as related to me.

This relates to conflict and communication because rather than appropriately using assertive communication, I used non-assertive communication that avoided conflict and concealed my opinion. Since she was a member in a small work group in a current class of mine, I did not want to cause hurt feelings that might have affected the outcome of our group project. I achieved that; however, I believe it was a win-lose situation because if I had confronted her, it might have helped her realize that her postings may be inappropriate for LinkedIn.