Chapter Twelve: Post Three

For this post I wanted to discuss overblown conflict. Although I feel that it is a relatively simple concept, I feel that it is a common issue that everyone has experienced at one point or another. I find that I am more prone to exacerbate a conflict when I am tired, hungry, or if I am angry about another related, or unrelated issue. I usually experience overblown conflict with those who are closest to me; often these people are family members. Most likely, this is because I know that these people will always be around and so I have been more careless with my behavior, moods, or attitudes in the past. This is not something that I am proud of, and it happens very rarely. As the book states, overblown conflict often subside when the instigator of the overblown conflict realizes their wrong-doing and apologizes. I find that when I take responsibility for my actions, I am usually easily forgiven by others.

Chapter Twelve: Post Two

I come from a family that is very opinionated and defensive. Most of the people in my family love to be 'right,' and for this reason, can be narrow-minded. I often assume that members of my family act in a certain way for a very selfish reason and I have rationalized the idea that they are just difficult people in general. That being said, I have gotten in trouble many times for attributing different motivations for family members' actions. Although it feels like sometimes people can do or say mean things because they dislike you or are mad at you, often times, these people act out of hurt and the feeling that they need to defend themselves from what feels like attacks from others which can make a conflict situation worse. To help in these types of situations, I try to validate the other person's perspective and assure them that what I am saying to them is rooted in trying to help and understand the situation, rather than as a personal attack. I guess situations in which I have benefited from positive attributions have been simple things, like assuming that someone exercises regularly because they appear to be in good shape. People can take these types of positive attributions as compliments and as recognition of their actions. Another positive attribution that I assumed recently was when I saw a little girl who was very friendly to my daughter in a room where most little girls were 'clicky' and somewhat rude as their mothers had modeled for them. The girl's mother was friendly and sincere, and I assumed that the daughter's behavior was an extension of her mother's positive behavior.

Chapter Ten: Post One

I was genuinely surprised by what I found while researching this question. In searching for forgiveness on Google, 56,000,0000 results were found. This was the first term that I typed into the search engine and I thought that for sure it would yield the most results. It was the term that I could identify with the most, and I could easily rationalize why someone would try to seek out advice about how to forgive another person. The results produced by this term were many sites offering definitions for the term and many self-help and religious-affiliated sites. The second term, reconciliation, yielded only 52,300,000 results which I did not find surprising and most of these were definitions and stories from blogs, videos etc. What I did not expect, was that revenge would produce the most results at 264,000,000. This number is dramatically higher than the others, which I found to be disturbing. Why people would be posting so much more information about revenge, rather than about forgiveness is troubling and it makes me wonder if most peoples' gut reactions cause them to seek a resolution based on anger and aggression rather than compassion and self-healing principles. Most of the sites about revenge were involving definitions, videos, and a television show titled, "Revenge." Given that there are so many reasons people don't forgive one another, I guess that I can understand that forgiveness can be a difficult idea to reconcile; However, I just didn't think that revenge would be a more popular alternative.