Those who love confrontation and conflict – End of the Day for July 9, 2014

I try to as honest as I can when writing the End of the Day pieces. There are times I have shared a bit more than I might have wanted to, but I always believe the truth is always the best place to start. Of course, there are times when being entirely honest, can actually hurt others or — more likely — make them like you a little bit less, cause business troubles or eve ruin relationships. So, in those moments, I decide to say nothing. I can’t away couch my words in enough generality to insure that people don’t identify themselves here. At these times, I find it is better to say nothing, rather than create larger issues than those that already exist.

I am big proponent of “making the problem go away” for most issues. If I find someone is troublesome, I simply find a way to no longer deal with them. This can be difficult, if you are in a situation where you feel trapped due to monetary or personal reasons, but it is often the best way. Large confrontations — or conflagrations — seldom do any good. It all tends to be “sound and fury, Signifying nothing” as Shakespeare said. No one is changed. No one is healed. No one feels any better about the situation. In fact, most times everyone simply feels worse. It is frustrating and angering for all parties involved. It would be much better to tie up any lose ends and simply walk away.

Inner Conflict, Jeremy Blanchard, under Creative Commons

Unfortunately, while I might prefer this method of problem solving, there are others who seem to take great joy in confrontation, pettiness, meanness and conflict. Where I shrink from it, they seem to seek it out. It energizes them, while is saps my strength. They spend their lives leaping from one conflict to another, never understanding that there might be a different way of handling situations. Worse still, these people ail start to wonder aloud why “no one wants to hang out with me anymore?” It can be so clear to others what the “cause” is, but they only notice the “effect”.

I talk about this today because, being who I am, with my personality, my faults, my limitations, I can easily be pulled under by people of this type. They exhaust my ability and desire to deal with conflict and leave me shrinking off to some quiet corner to recover. Sure, there have been times in my life where I haven’t been able to get away from the conflict, where I have had to turn and fight, and while I survived them all, no matter the end result, I was injured deeply inside. I am not made for battles and fighting and each one takes a little piece of me.

The most frustrating thing to realize, though, is often these battles that are brought to my door mean nothing in the grand scheme of life. No one will die. No one will be injured. No great sums of money lost and won. Yet, people can fight as if their life is on the line — like the tiger is just behind that tree and ready to eat them. Without any sense of scale in regards to the threat, the sense of scale in their response can spiral out of control. If you felt you were about to die, you would fight with everything you had. Unfortunately, there are some who fight about the smallest things with the same fervor. This is so different from my own frame of reference, I have a great deal of trouble understanding people like this, which probably just ads to the conflict. Hence my method of distancing myself from these people whenever and wherever possible. It isn’t worth the damage to my own mind, mood and money to deal with them in the future.

Previously on End of the Day: