The music for this week is a song by Kyle Lucas and his band Vonnegutt, I met him at his show on friday and am still running on a concert high of sorts from it so here it is...
Conflict Spiral...what is it? According to psychologydictionary.org, conflict spiral is "a trend of advancing friction and conflict between at least people or teams who go against each other's replies with even further aversive and more radical replies."
I think this is an idea we all can relate to. We all have had that instance where you're in the middle of an argument with someone and it just keeps escalating and getting more and more intense and soon (at least in my case) it turns into an all out war (where perhaps you...punch the person in the face...don't worry I'll explain that here in a minute, but first things first). Anyways like I was saying we all know what conflict spiral is, even if we don't/didn't know the technical term for it before now.
So my example of conflict spiral is maybe more intense than most peoples (mainly because it was a 4 year long conflict spiral). When I moved to Hawaii there was this girl named Brooke, her and I were alright at first and we were cordial to one another but then one day she started talking trash about my mother (not knowing that that was my mother) and I, being the 8th grader I was, started yelling at her and she started going back at me. This continued for years, every time we saw each other it seemed like it got more and more intense and more personal. The crazy thing about this was I had to deal with her on a daily basis...she was on the swim team, the club swim team, the water polo team and the club water polo team that I was on as well as in my honors classes throughout high school. When I say that EVERY DAY we fought and it was consistently escalating, I am not exaggerating. As members of the water polo team our coach had encouraged physical and aggressive reactions to when someone upset you (it made you a better water polo player) and so things started to get physically violent between the two of us. It started off as just extra kicking and elbowing during scrimmages (kicking and elbowing was expected in water polo) to one point other girls had to come seperate us because when our coach said 5 minutes without rules we ended up full on fighting in the water and kept basically rolling in the water (it's really hard to explain well).
Then came my last ever water polo practice, it was the summer that I moved from Hawaii to Texas (summer before my senior year of high school). At this point I was angry 24/7 and had a very short temper. I went to the club practice that day after having just left seeing my friend for the last time (she was in the hospital) and the coach wasn't there, really there was very few people there. There was Brooke, her older sister, her younger sister and the "assistant" coach (aka Robin). My friend called me just before I jumped into the water crying because the Dr.s were in her room and they were talking about her having surgery and she was freaking out. Since nobody was there I figured it didn't matter if I got in late or not. I was wrong. After getting off the phone with my friend (I am now about 15 minutes late) Brooke and her older sister start going off on me. Brooke was making comments about how she didn't have any respect for me and all this other crap and finally I just got out of the water, that's where Brooke messed up, she started to follow me while still talking crap. She got out of the pool and raised her hand towards me like she was about to hit me, so what did I do? I punched her square across her face and walked off.
So this conflict spiral started with her making some small comment about my mother and 4 years later ended up with me knocking her out. Now I am not a violent person, I had never (outside of a sporting event) put my hands on someone in that manner which is why that was such a shocking thing for me to do. But, because the conflict spiral just kept going and going and building and building I snapped.
If you want to see part of a water polo match from my high school see video below (we are the white team)
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Citation:
http://psychologydictionary.org/conflict-spiral/
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