As a psychologist, it has been a very interesting experience for me to engage people in the topic of conflict.
There are three common responses I get when I say I'm a conflict coach:
1. I didn't know there was such a thing.
2. I know someone who could use your help!
3. Oh, I don't really have any conflict in my life.
The first response is pretty expected. Unless you are a person who has had professional dealings with conflict management, you don't typically hear of conflict coaching.
Response #2 always makes me smile (at least, on the inside). It is so true that we look at relational difficulties through the lens of "it's the other person who's the difficult one." We forget that many times we are someone else's difficult person!
I've been most intrigued by the third response because I know whatever our walk of life, we encounter friction, confusion and conflict in some relationship. Work, family, church -- we don't escape it. So I continue to be curious about what makes us want to deny that.
It seems there's something about admitting we're not getting along with someone that makes us feel less than we think we should be. For whatever reason -- our position, our culture, our perceived expectations -- somehow we're supposed to be able to handle those difficulties, or maybe that they shouldn't even be happening. It's as if the level of conflict in our life is the measure of how capable we are.
But that's not true.
The reality is as long as we are moving through this life with other human beings, we will have difficult situations because we are not all clones. We are individuals. Each of us has our own thoughts, desires, and plans, and it is our shared task to learn how to be on this planet together.
Acknowledging we have conflict in our life is not a statement that means we've fallen short of something -- it's simply a declaration that we, too, are part of the human race.
DrK
If you have any thoughts about why we don't like to admit we have conflict in our life, I'd love to hear them!
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