I've come to realize recently that I am really, really bad at dealing with conflict. I don't know if I can even say that I'm bad at it, because if I'm honest, I don't really deal with conflict at all.
But I've also come to realize that I am not alone in being conflict-challenged. Actually, I'm in good company.
For the first month and a half of this summer, I lived in a house that operated mostly out of what my friend Ashleigh called "fridge-based communication." From the very start there seemed to be a lot of conflicts arising, over using each other's stuff, cleaning (or not cleaning) our dishes, over unexpected guests, and yes, even toilet paper. But I personally only witnessed one face-to-face conversation about any of these issues, and that happened way before any of it became a huge problem. From then on, our conflict "resolution" consisted of a series of notes left on the refrigerator, each with carefully chosen words that hid the extent of our frustration, but always had a hint of testiness. By last week, our communication had deteriorated to the point of there being a different note on the refrigerator everyday, responding to the one left the day before. The house was split into two groups of people who had known each other prior to moving in, venting our frustrations to those within our group, but never did the two groups meet.
Seriously? This is NOT the way to deal with conflict and frustration. Fridge-based communication is a TERRIBLE way to communicate, if it can even be called communication at all.
Now, I am speaking about this from a position of fault. I have been a part of the problem. And all of this has really opened my eyes to how horrible I am at engaging conflict. This certainly isn't the first time that I've experienced conflict, and it's also not the first time that I have avoided dealing with it like the plague. But I heard a statistic a couple of years ago that scares me a little, and tells me that I need to learn how to deal with conflict in a healthy and productive way: The number one reason why missionaries leave the field is... conflict. Not spiritual burnout, not family problems, not culture shock or even health reasons. Conflict. We need to learn how to engage conflict, friends. If we don't, it will destroy us.
And I have experienced that destruction first-hand. I can't even count the ways that failing to deal with conflict has caused pain and hurt in my family. The words "I'm sorry" aren't heard too often in our house, and I think that has a lot to do with why I don't deal with conflict well. You do what you see, and I never saw people engaging with conflict in a constructive way. The hurt and frustration has been building up in all of us and has caused unbelievable damage in each of our hearts. I don't know if we will ever see the full extent of that damage. I'm just beginning to dig into myself.
About a year ago, I was hurt very deeply by a good friend of mine. We had dealt with conflict before, and apologies had been given on both sides. But nothing seemed to change, and they continued to hurt me in profound ways. I haven't shared with them just how much they hurt me, and our friendship is basically non-existent at this point. And here I am, a year later, and the hurt and anger is rapidly getting worse rather than better. Whether we can ever salvage the friendship or not, leaving it unresolved is slowly eating away at me and turning my heart black. Forgiveness becomes more and more difficult with each day that passes, and I don't like the person that I am becoming. One conversation, or even several, is all it would take to turn this situation into something that could benefit both me and this friend of mine. Just one conversation.
I have only recently come to realize how much my aversion to conflict-resolution has affected my experience in Vietnam. I never told the Vietnamese-Americans on my program how much it hurt me when they constantly left me out of what they were doing, or how isolating it was for me when they talked about Vietnam as "their" country and "their" culture and never tried to include me in that. I and the other Americans never talked to our Vietnamese roommates about the things that they did that were frustrating and hurtful to us. We just talked about it with each other, letting the frustration build, never even attempting to resolve the issues with them. One of my biggest problems in Vietnam was a lack of community and feeling very isolated from the people around me. I'll never know what might have been had I been willing to lean into these hard situations and work through these conflicts.
But I'm not completely without hope. Over the past year, I've also been able to meet conflict head-on with a couple of people in my life. Although I didn't approach them at the onset of the conflict, I wasn't willing to leave my frustrations unsaid and kiss our friendship goodbye. So I shared with them how I was feeling, and they did the same for me. And we were able to get past those conflicts and move on. Now, I will say that both of these resolutions happened over the phone and email, and I really think that face-to-face communication would have been ideal. But dealing with it over the phone and email is better than not dealing with it at all. And now I'm starting to see the fruits of resolving those conflicts, and it gives me hope. Hope that I'm not a completely lost cause when it comes to dealing with conflict.
Most people that I know would say that they avoid conflict at all costs. And most of us would probably say that it is just part of our personality. But I am slowly coming of the opinion that this aversion to conflict is a part of our collective personality that we need to weed out. At our core we are relational beings, and that has its benefits and its setbacks. We can gain so much from being in relationship with each other, but we also have the potential to hurt each other in very deep ways. We need to learn to communicate with each other about those wounds. We need to have the humility to call each other out in the spirit of reconciliation instead of condemnation, and also the humility to admit when we are in the wrong.
This is the way of life, friends.
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