Beyond Beliefs by Melanie Joy PhD

Author:Melanie Joy, PhD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cameron + Company
Published: 2017-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

UNRAVELING CONFLICT: PRINCIPLES AND TOOLS FOR CONFLICT PREVENTION AND MANAGEMENT

Conflict management is one of the most essential skills for all people to learn, and it is especially so for those in veg/non-veg relationships. Yet very few of us ever receive the instruction necessary to manage our conflicts skillfully.

Imagine driving a car with as little training as most of us are given to manage conflict. When you’re old enough to get behind the wheel, you’re simply told to figure out what to do. You’re never even taught the rules of the road. So you fumble and grope and draw on your memories of watching others drive—others who also learned entirely without instruction and who developed bad habits in the process. Finally, you get your car on the road. But during your drive, and the drives that follow, you have many mishaps. At best, you have minor collisions in which you (and those you hit) are only temporarily injured; at worst, you have major crashes that cause permanent damage. And your bad habits, such as not wearing a seatbelt and passing in no-passing zones, become more ingrained as you repeat them over and over. Because you don’t understand the rules of the road, you blame others for your violations, or you blame yourself for theirs. And fear is your constant companion: fear because of past crashes that haunt you and fear because you lack the skills to keep yourself safe. You may never venture into high-risk situations, such as freeways, because you’re too afraid of being hurt again.

Conflict, or interpersonal conflict, is the struggle between people that emerges when one or both are unable to get their needs met, especially their needs for security and connection. In more secure relationships, conflict is generally managed skillfully and with integrity, and it strengthens security and connection. In less secure relationships, conflict tends to decrease each individual’s sense of security and connection. And although conflict is usually less frequent in secure relationships, it is normal and inevitable in all relationships. What matters is not whether we experience conflict in our relationships but how we experience it—how we think of it and how we manage it.

When we don’t understand the nature of conflict and we fail to appreciate its value, and when we have not learned how to manage conflict effectively, we can cause great pain to ourselves and others. But with an awareness of the nature of conflict and an appreciation of its importance, we can head off all but the most necessary of conflicts. What’s more, we can appreciate that each conflict we have is an opportunity: when we respond to conflict with integrity, our mutual trust deepens, as do the security and connection of our relationship.

CHRONIC CONFLICTS: KILLERS OF CONNECTION

In general, the conflicts that cause problems in our relationships are not one-time or short-term events; they are chronic conflicts. Chronic conflicts are ongoing conflicts that often result from our failure to manage or resolve the shorter, or simpler, conflicts, which can then grow into something more complicated and problematic.

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