I was once asked to help a family who constantly bickered with each other. The two adults and three children sniped at one another from breakfast till bedtime and they were all sick of it. Each person said they just wanted to live in peace. The problem was that each one wanted the other four to stop arguing first, before they would change their own behaviour.
Does that sound familiar? When conflicts arise, it’s typical for us humans to focus on what the other person does, rather than prioritising our inner world. This outward focus deceives us into putting our energy into something very difficult for us to change – i.e. other people. What’s worse, as we struggle to get the other person to agree with us, or do what we want, we end up being manipulated ourselves. When we lose our cool, we lose our rationality, and our heightened emotions dictate our actions – so in our struggle to control the other person, we lose our own control. Just like the family above, we get caught in a never-ending cycle, because neither party can change the other.
The way out of the cycle is to become un-manipulatable by focusing exclusively on our own responses. We can take responsibility both for calming our emotions and for our actions. After a difficult encounter, we might ask: Am I happy with what I said and did? Or could I have handled it better? Everything shifts when we stop thinking “it didn’t work” just because they didn’t do what we wanted. Their behaviour is no longer our concern; they don’t determine our success. Focussing on our inner world means we can consider ourselves successful for handling ourselves well, regardless of how the other person responded.
Stephanie Hills ©