Conflict (part 1)

One of the biggest challenges of any relationship is dealing with conflict. Regardless of the nature of the relationship – staff/student, colleagues, family, or partnership – how we handle our conflicts will help to determine the quality of the relationship.

I don’t know anyone who hears the word conflict and feels a warm fuzzy glow of anticipation. We tend to attach negative connotations to the word, in varying degrees. Our emotional response to conflict has a lot to do with how we define it, and that definition is largely created within the culture of our family of origin. In families where agreeing and getting along is valued highly, any disagreement may be considered a conflict. On the other hand, a family that enjoys a healthy debate may not consider the same situation to be a conflict at all. But once we have decided that we are encountering a conflict situation, we each have a set of emotions and behaviours that are automatically engaged.

In actuality, the definition of conflict is simply a situation in which there are opposing ideas, opinions, or wishes. Mediation Services of Canada begin their literature with the following basic precepts:
1) Conflict is a natural and inevitable part of life.
2) Conflict happens even in the best personal and professional relationships.
3) In itself, conflict is neither bad nor good. It can be constructive if handled properly and destructive if handled poorly. http://www.mediationserviceswpg.ca/

Until I worked at the regional Support Centre, an alternative school setting for students with behavioural challenges, I would have been surprised by Mediation Services’ third point: I had no consistent evidence in my life to support the idea that conflict could be constructive – at least none that I had paid attention to. I considered conflict something best avoided and while outcomes of conflict could be positive, I rarely saw the actual process as valuable.

When I worked at the Centre, where conflict was part of every day, I learned that conflict could have consistently positive results in relationships with our students. However, I had a lot to learn before that realization became a practice with consistent results.

I had to learn about the nature of conflict itself: to see it as a process with understandable parts and predictable patterns. I had to understand and internalize the notion that there was nothing that I could control in a conflict situation except myself. (That’s harder than it sounds!) I also had to learn about the things that contribute to conflict and the different styles that people employ when dealing with conflict.

I was willing and able to learn all of that, but what I needed most was an understanding of my own behaviour in a conflict situation and confidence in controlling it.


Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."