Handling Conflict

An observation my mother made a few months (or years) before she passed away, was that we (my siblings and myself) were never taught appropriate ways for handling conflict since we were never confronted by much conflict in our home.

Mum and Dad never fought and anytime they disagreed, they would do so privately. When they tried to convince people that they didn't fight, many didn't believe them and then would comment, "But then you missed out on the fun of making up!" Mum's standard answer, "We're always having fun being made up" or something to that nature.

Now, I'm sure as children, if they had have fought, we would have known about it. We would have told someone that "I heard mum/dad......."

Mum and Dad also protected us from adult kind of talk, like budgeting, saving, spending etc. We knew that we didn't have much money but unlike some children today, we were oblivious to grown-up economic pressures. In fact, we actually got to enjoy our childhood and be children.

When we got married, we assumed that we would live happily ever after like mum and Dad did. We assumed that love would conquer all and that we wouldn't fight or raise our voice with our spouse. We assumed wrongly. We all married spouses who had a different upbringing to us and whose personalities were different to our own. Coming from a family of six children (Mum had 5 children under 5) and marrying an "only son" whose sisters were 11 and 13 years older than him, you can imagine that our (Russell and I) expectations of home and family life did have some differences. Russell's parents were 42 and 47 years old when he was born, had been through the depression, WW2, and lived in a rural area on 42 acres of their own property.

On the other hand, my mum had 6 kids by the time she was 31, Dad was a mechanic, we lived in suburbia ... well my childhood was somewhat different although we still held the same values and beliefs. In fact, nearly all of us married someone who had quite a different upbringing to our own. (We're pretty unique.)

Being a middle child, I can tend to be a peace-maker and I learnt it was much easier to "go with the flow" than to confront someone from outside of my home. Make a scene in a restaurant?! Never! Take something back if it's not of good quality? It will be fine! Get pushed out of line? Well, I've been here waiting longer but it's OK, I'm not going to say anything to the person who barged in front of me. "Friends" talk about me behind my back or say unkind things to my face? I'll go find someone else to play with.

I recall working at Dad's workplace (a garage) as a receptionist on work experience when I received a phone call from someone who decided to abuse me. Instead of fighting back, instead of telling Dad or the foreman, I stewed on it for most of the day, then on the way home, tearfully told Dad about it. "Why didn't you tell me?" he asked but I only shrugged.

I can tell you lots of similar incidences. The circumstances, the people, and the weather might be different, but I handled them all the same way - I didn't. I avoid conflict whenever possible. If someone offends me, I figure it's my problem so "get over it". It's not always the best and healthiest option but I didn't have the confidence to do anything else about it.

In the last five years, I have become a lot more assertive. I have learned to deal with things but usually only after lots of prayer and lots of sleepless nights. I know that I will continually come up with situations that require me to be pro-active but I still don't enjoy it. Because I am an outgoing, sociable person, people tend to interpret from that that I am strong-willed and "speak my mind" but that is really not so. I wish I could just give the job to someone else to deal with.

I do need to learn to watch my "tone" and to try and be less defensive. However, no-one's perfect and I realise I just have to keeep growing in this area. I only wish I didn't have to worry about conflict at all!