Reflections

Conflict is what happens when two different truths rub up against each other causing friction and, sometimes, embers and flames. When each person insists on his or her side being “right”, this adds fuel to the flames, escalating conflict to the point where it threatens to blow up and leave only one survivor.   This is called a win-lose situation and is the adversarial model of court hearings where one person’s truth consumes another’s. There is an alternative to this which involves validating both sides of a conflict.   But each side has to be willing to relabel his or her side as a story, to separate facts from feelings and stop trying to claim absolute authority.   Not easy to do when one is also seeking validation. The key is letting go any notion of the objectivity of your point of view.   This means, aside from (agreed-upon) facts, you stop claiming to know anything which is not your own (and your only ) experience. This is also what is called ...

I haven’t been taking my own advice .  When dealing with situations that feel harmful, I always say, rather than trying to change the other or others involved, get out of the way yourself.  This is the quickest way to put an end to a bad situation, since the other guy may not see it as you do, or he might ignore your entreaties to stop doing whatever it is you don’t like.  (He has the right to.) Since the only person you can change is yourself, I always say: Leave. I still think this is good advice. But I haven’t been applying it.  That’s because I’ve failed to consider that we sometimes cannot see when a situation is harmful.   Even if we’ve been unhappy, or complaining, trying to resolve conflict or trying to get others to resolve it, we may have never really seen the situation as harmful.  There are times when we perceive a situation as intrinsically inescapable. This could be a result of learned helplessness , codependency, enmeshment, ...