THE SHRINKING UNIVERSE
Confront and resolve
BY VIJAY NAGASWAMI
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While conflicts are inevitable, they can be resolved only when the underlying cause of tensions is sorted out.
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Photo: ARUNANGSU ROY CHOWDHURY
Towards harmony: Conflicts play a positive role.
We live in an age of conflict. We hear of international conflicts, political conflicts, industrial conflicts, communal or racial conflicts, and of course, closer to the realm of this column’s concerns, gender conflict and marital conflict. And,
going by reports, these conflicts seem to be raging on and on, with no apparent end in sight. They only seem to result in confrontations of a hostile nature that usually give rise to conflagrations rather than resolutions. And when we realise that continued conflict can threaten our very survival, we initiate, with a sense of great urgency, steps to mitigate the adverse impact that such conflicts may have on us. And we negotiate for all we are worth. However, as anybody who has attempted to deal with conflicts by negotiation will tell you, although the confrontations and conflagrations are kept at bay, the underlying tensions that define the conflict continue to operate, and given a certain mix of environmental conditions, will likely erupt again. This is well borne out by what we see around us, whether in the marital domain, the family domain, the work domain or the community domain. If you think I am implying that relationship conflicts cannot be dealt with by negotiation alone or that keeping confrontations and conflagrations at bay are not enduring solutions to conflicts, you are absolutely correct. We can and need to do better. However, to make this possible, we do need a framework with which to understand conflicts and their resolution.
I began by saying that we live in an age of conflict. But, we also live in an age of choice. As a race, we have worked very hard ever since the Industrial Revolution to expand our choices, whether in the realm of goods and services or in that of human relationships. We all want choices and feel stifled and denied when these are taken away from us. Having said that, it is also true that we sometimes find it difficult to deal with expanded choices, like contemporary young adults do when faced with choosing between two or three suitors. Whenever we are faced with a choice we are hard pressed to make, we are in a conflict. And considering that our development as human beings can happen only when we make our choices and learn to live with them, it can be readily seen that conflicts are inevitable.
In its most basic form, a conflict is the concomitant existence of two opposing and apparently incompatible ideas, thoughts or feelings. It might be correctly argued that problems of conscious choice rarely remain conflicts for long, since over a period of time, the human organism’s natural resilience helps define personalised frameworks that the individual can then use to resolve these conscious conflicts. The conflicts that would be of greater consequence and more difficult to respond to, since they are less accessible to the conscious mind, are the unconscious conflicts that bedevil many of us because we do not make the effort to come to terms with them. To understand unconscious conflicts a little better, we need to make a distinction between intra-psychic conflicts and interpersonal conflicts, both of which also exist in the conscious form. Intra-psychic conflicts exist within the individual’s mind and represent the individual being at odds with her/ himself for reasons s/he may not even be aware of. Interpersonal conflicts are better known since conventional wisdom has it that the only conflicts that really matter are those that operate in the interpersonal realm. However, conventional wisdom cannot always be expected to be infallible. And this time, it has indeed got it wrong.
Easy way out
It is extremely tempting to lay the blame for interpersonal conflicts at the opposite number’s doorstep and seek validation of the victim position from one’s supporters. In fact, this path is so tempting to take that most of us end up going down the victim road and feeling sanctimoniously indignant at the opposite number’s foibles. However, this road is really a cul-de-sac simply because, in reality, interpersonal conflicts usually have their origins within the respective psyches of the participants. In other words, the interpersonal domain is merely a stage on which intra-psychic conflicts are played out. And although an interpersonal conflict may be more than merely the sum of intra-psychic conflicts, not unravelling the intra-psychic threads of the conflict is what results in the conflict remaining in the interpersonal space and therefore, unresolved.
It is a fallacy to believe that confrontations worsen conflicts since they sometimes lead to conflagrations. Actually, confrontation is the only known manner in which a conflict can be resolved. And if confrontations do not seem to have produced the desired result in the past, let us not ascribe blame to confrontation and abandon it as an invalid method; let us instead understand who or what we are supposed to confront to resolve conflict. As long as we think of confrontation as taking place in an adversarial context, we will continue to believe that the conflict is generated by the “antagonist” and, therefore, it is this person who is to be the target of our confrontation. However, if we think of confrontation as a process directed at our own unconscious mind with the object of understanding and dealing with whatever conflicts are housed in it, we will probably find that confrontation can be ameliorative rather than inflammatory. In other words, we need to use an interpersonal situation to confront our own selves and not the opposing party, whether spouse, family member, friend, boss, neighbour, colleague or stranger.
Once we recognise our interpersonal conflicts as having their origins within our own minds, we need to learn how to deal them. First off, we need to own the conflict. By this I mean that the conflict needs to be recognised as a conflict and the responsibility for dealing with it should be completely accepted. Rather than wait for a conflict to become a conflagration to recognise it as one, we would be better off engaging in the early detection of conflicts. In their earliest recognisable form, conflicts manifest as mixed signals. When accused of throwing mixed signals, one would be well advised to explore why this is happening, than throwing something back at the accuser. Once the conflict is owned, we need to understand the origins of the conflict by establishing connections between the present behaviour and past experiences that may have been difficult to deal with at the time. Following this, we need to legitimise the conflict by valuing the unpleasant past experience as having played an overall positive role in our development. And finally we choose to eliminate the conflicted behaviour from one’s repertoire. Thereby one sends fewer mixed signals and experiences fewer conflicts.
Pointers to the self
If we conceive of conflicted behaviour as being akin to fever, which is a pointer to an underlying infection somewhere in the body and which goes away only when the underlying cause is treated, we can deal with our conflicts more efficiently. Learning how to use conflicts to make choices is of critical importance in developing the human identity. And choosing between the devil and the deep sea also has to be done at some time or the other. Our conflicts are wonderful pointers to issues within our own psyches. Let us not fritter them away. Let us milk them for all they are worth.
The writer is a psychiatrist, columnist and author. His latest book The New Indian Marriage: Laying the Foundations is due out in late 2008. He can be contacted at vijay.nagaswami@gmail.com
A fortnightly column on mental heath.
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