Conflict

Today, I re-realized that I am not skilled in dealing with and managing conflict.  In fact, I would consider it one of my weaker (if not my weakest) skill.

The conflict I'm dealing with today isn't even that serious.  Someone asked me to do something that isn't possible given my situation.  I don't want to go into great deal given my fear of things ending up in the wrong hands.  I was being asked to do something, and it isn't going to happen.  I feel slightly bad at the circumstances, but I was also put into an unpleasant situation.

Either way, I psyched myself up to tell this person I wasn't able to do it.  I got a pep talk from my friend, and walked over to deliver the news in person since I got an email about it in the morning.  It stresses me out in a very serious way to have these kinds of conversations.  Well, to have these conversations with certain people.  The person in question is typically passive aggressive, and I've been visiting with many more loud and boisterous people recently.  I told her, and she didn't say a word back to me.

It takes me back, to the day that I told my former roommates I was leaving their house.  That was a considerably more stressful situation, with a similar reaction.  The girl roommate sat, looked at her computer, and only spoke one time, angrily, nastily.  I was upset for weeks at the things that she said to me, the way she treated me.  I chose to live there because of the friendship that we had, and it bothered me to find out how little I was valued as a person.  Honestly, that's a tiny percentage of the strife I felt in that house.

Today, this person stared at the computer and didn't look at me when I told her that I couldn't comply with her request.  I do feel bad, but I will not feel that bad.  The request is not unreasonable, and normally I would be happy to help, but my denial is also not unreasonable given the situation at hand.  The trouble that I have is in the delivery.  I am upset at this passive aggressive treatment.

The problem is that I, too, am sometimes passive aggressive, or at least I avoid conflict at every turn.  I would have preferred to email this response, but I felt unsure about documenting it.  I would have preferred a different ending with the roommates, but that also didn't happen.  It is hard for me to approach an issue and I want to improve in this.

At this point, my goal is to ask her politely what I've done to warrant this type of treatment.  Politely, of course, approaching it as something that I'd like to resolve professionally.  I have such an opportunity in this school to do things very well and go very far, and I don't want to have anything standing in my path as I work here.  It is a phenomenal school, with great support.  I'm incredibly grateful to Kim at this point, for the advice that he's imparted on me.

We figured out that I've some trauma associated with this active ignoring.  I'd like to heal myself of this with time.  One step at a time, I will.