Navigating conflicts in my personal life.
Disclaimer — I write to clear my thoughts, most of the time. So this particular article is more for me to understand myself better. Typically, this would have ended up in my journal, but I hope it provides someone else value.
I often have a good read on people and situations. I guess it’s what most people refer to as emotional intelligence. However, I suck at conflict. I either keep quiet or say dumb shit that gets me in trouble. In fact, in all my close relationships, I think the only person I usually have a conflict with and we come out the other side still laughing is my co-founder and friend, Kelvin. I’m not sure why, but I think Kelvin has a way of discerning things objectively regardless of the tone applied. I honestly admire that about him. To date, I have never seen him lose his cool. He has principles he lives by, and that’s about it.
I, on the other hand, am a lot more complex and nuanced. Sure, I have a set of principles I try to live by. And yes, I try to articulate my thoughts clearly…and yet, I wonder why I never fair so well when it comes to conflicts or arguments. Especially with those that are close to me. I’ve been thinking hard about that.
I use to be a black and white person. I think, for the most part, I still am in a lot of ways. This is how I do things. Take or leave it. And then one time, my best friend told me, “Henry, not everyone is you. So don’t expect people to think like you”. He wasn’t the only one that expressed those sentiments. People often referred to me as selfish, sometimes egotistical. Maybe I was. I remember one time someone told me that my feelings had to be the only feelings that mattered. I took that to heart.
Church’s words cut deep. I embarked on a journey to try and be more open and receptive to other people’s ways of doing things. I needed not to understand it, only to respect it. Sure, that’s not how I would have done it…but it’s your way, and that’s fine. I’m not sure, but I think someone down the line, I stopped trying to “force” people into my line of thinking. I almost become meek. For most people who know me, to term myself meek sounds a bit like a lie. Me, with the aggressive personality calling myself meek?
From a professional setting, I’ve not had a problem with this transition of being more open-minded whilst making my stance and opinion not only known but also heard. I’ve wondered how I can do that professionally but struggle with it in my personal relationships. Stuff irks me, but I brush them off and often don’t say a word about it. I chalk it up to compromise.
The pattern, however, has become a bit repetitive to the point I decided to do some introspection. Everything is fine and dandy, we argue, I blow up aka bring up bottled stuff, the other person thinks I am invalidating their feelings ( I usually am not. I just want to make sure that my side is also heard. I know, wrong time to bring it up), and then shit hits the fan. So this here is my attempt to try and understand why I often blow up during conflict with my close friends.
I think there’s a problem with an attempt to try and put yourself in other’s positions too much. I don’t claim to be an empath but I have, at least over the last few years, tried very hard to take the other person's viewpoint over my own to a point it’s becoming detrimental to myself. And boy do I do a poor job at it. Instead of trying to truly understand where the other person is coming from, I bottle things up. And then, unfairly, expect people to do the same. Which if you think about it, am still expecting people to behave and act as I do. The result? I’ve often felt misunderstood, unheard, and a sense of injustice. It hurts when someone says things like “I am selfish” or “inconsiderate” while in my head I am thinking…really? Didn’t you do the same thing as well? Like how’s mine any different? This double-standard, created in my head, doesn’t yield well in arguments. It makes me defensive and deflective. So both of us end up feeling like we are unheard. I realize now that I need to be more expressive about how I feel when I feel it. And not bottle things up.
I know for a fact, that I suck at personal boundaries. The closer we are, the more my stomach churns if I have to say no to a request. I’m not sure why that is so. I had no problem saying no back in the day, but nowadays I struggle with it. So much so, that I intentionally start saying no to even reasonable requests just to try and “feel” like I have set boundaries. Going forward, one of the things I am learning is to be more assertive around what my boundaries are and to express them clearly. I also need to relearn getting comfortable with simply saying, “No” or “That doesn’t feel right to me”. And I think a more realization is my gut feeling is a good enough reason. It doesn’t need to be logical for me to decline. That feels nice saying it out loud :)
And finally, I think I have a skewed sense of loyalty. In my head, being friends with someone means showing up all the time when they are in trouble (It’s weird how I define what this trouble is. I need to think about this). Nonetheless, this feeds into my inability to say no. Because saying no means you are a disloyal friend.
That said, there are definitely things on my end I also need to improve on. Among the ones listed above, I also need to look into my intolerance when things don’t go how I’d planned it in my head, being really empathetic while also realizing I cannot relate to every story and so it’s pointless to try and put myself in each shoe, and most importantly, to communicate more honestly about how I feel or when something pisses me off.
