Just
like every other human on Earth I have encountered conflict in my life, some of
which still remain unresolved. One of these unresolved conflicts involves a
former friend from high school, who will remain anonymous, that I met during my
senior year. I had seen him hanging around some of my other friends but I never
talked to him. That year I started to see him more often so I decided to
introduce myself and get to know him. It turned out that he was a really nice
guy and overtime we became good friends. As the friendship developed we started
playing basketball outside of school, watched sporting events, and so on.
When
I reflect on our friendship I find that we had so many good times it is hard to
identify anything negative that happened between us. But towards the end of my
senior year the trust in our relationship was damaged for a number of reasons.
When I asked him to hang out he would say that he wanted to and that he was
going to, but then he never showed up. He took it to another level when he threw
insults my way, which is when I severed communication with him. I cannot put
the blame entirely on him because I also lied and retaliated to his insults to
an extent, which I am not proud of. I no longer believed that he took the
relationship seriously and I didn’t trust that he would act in ways that not
only respected me, but acknowledged my feelings as well. When graduation came
we never got a chance to resolve the conflict, so we went our separate ways
without making amends.
If I didn’t lie or retaliate with insults I’m sure the conflict
wouldn’t have led me to severe communication with him. In all honesty, we probably
would have resolved the conflict in a few minutes if we had just sat down and talked
it out. I certainly don’t look back on how I acted with fondness, but I have made
the effort to learn from that mistake to prevent the same thing from happening again.
Since the conflict wasn’t too deep or complex it would have been easy to apply
the suggestions in the section, “Forgiveness: Repairing Relationships Damaged
by Conflict,” and resolve the conflict (Verderber & Verderber 378). This section
describes the seven steps of forgiveness, “a communication process that allows you
and your partner to overcome the damage done to your relationship because of a transgression,”
that we could have utilized (Verderber & Verderber 379). Our resolution would
have started by confessing our mistakes and acknowledging the wrong that had been
done. Then we could’ve vented our negative emotions and come to understand why we
fought in the first place. It would’ve helped if we apologized to each other and
forgave our mistakes because it would have shown me that he appreciated our friendship
and wanted it to continue. Setting new conditions and rules hopefully would’ve prevented
such conflict from arising again, and it would’ve been up to us to follow those
rules and monitor our behavior to ensure that trust in the relationship had been
restored (Verderber & Verderber 379-381). I still have a sour taste in my
mouth regarding that conflict and he may have the same taste. It would’ve been
better to resolve the conflict so we would remember all of the good times we
had instead of the bad times we had during our last interactions, and maybe we would
still have a relationship.
Works Cited
Verderber, Kathleen S. & Rudolph F.
Verderber. Inter-Act: Interpersonal Communication Concepts,
Skills, and Contexts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.
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