Conflict

Conflict is normally understood as a negative interaction, or disagreement, between independent people. Personally, I always thought of conflict more as a disagreement or fight between people of different beliefs or opinions. Throughout every person’s lifetime there will be thousands of different conflicts. A particular conflict that I can think of is between my mother and I. I really wanted to go to a friends birthday party but a set of my grandparents were coming to my house that weekend so my mother didn’t want me to. We fought about it throughout the week and on Thursday night the disagreement got worse. We finally came to the conclusion that I could go to the birthday party on Friday night but that I couldn’t spend the night and I had to be home by 9 o’clock that night as long as I promised to come back and not be rude and cranky. I guess we managed the conflict by compromising but I found the compromise unfair because it was more of what she wanted than what I wanted. It could be categorized as a challenging strategy because she was able to be assertive because at the end of the day, she was my mother and in charge. Looking back, I do see a broader range of solutions. I could have been able to go and just be home early on Saturday morning. Or, I couldn’t have gone at all if I was able to possibly have all of the girls over the weekend after. I think that those would have been more productive, especially the second option, because it would have been a compromise that was more of a win-win than a lose-lose situation. With the compromise that we had, we both lost in the situation. Yes, it stopped the fighting and was still able to produce a nice weekend but neither of us got what we truly wanted. If we would have had me stay home that weekend but get to see my friends the next, we would have both gotten what we wanted; me, a sleepover with my friends and her, a family weekend with her