One person is enough

When working with people on helping them to handle conflicts in their lives, be it in their private or working environment, the first step, and a very tough one, is to shift perspective from the victim to the proactive one. Because every single training always begins with stories and explanations about THEM doing something to US. They are being aggressive. They do not cooperate. They do not know how to communicate. They do not open up. They keep attacking and being provocative. They have started it. They manipulate. They did this and they did that. They are wrong. My boss is terrible. My wife does not understand. My kids are irresponsible. My parents are neurotic. It is impossible to communicate with these terrible people and it is impossible to solve any sort of conflicts with them.

Isn’t this a nice perception of life? Enabling us to be all the time on the right side. With a feeling that our life is really hard. Unfair. No justice. Is God on a vacation or what?

Now, let’s face a few pieces of reality here. The fact number one is that there will always be difficult communicators around us, interacting with us in a way we will not like all that much. The fact number two is that we are often difficult communicators too (if you are never ever a difficult communicator, but always a perfect one, please stop reading because you are wasting your time here. You see, this is all about us, the imperfect ones.)

Fact number three: we have a fundamental choice here, to choose between the two possibilities.

The first possibility

is to happily agree that it is all their fault, go for a cup of coffee or a bear with all the like-minded people we can possibly gather and start whining over those terrible, immature, neurotic earthlings, throw some diagnosis’s at them and…, well and continue throwing our own lives out through the window.

Because this is precisely what we do in cases like that. We define as the essence of our lives something that is out there, something that has power over us, over our feelings, over our state of beingness. We sell out our life and our power of choice and then go into the lovely little impotent role of a helpless infants: ”They are doing this to us and there’s nothing we can do.” Rather than focusing on our lives, our feelings, our choices, our values, our needs, we focus on causes out there and this way we only feed this empty illusionary structures that do not get us anywhere. Frankly, I do not believe that whining can ever help a bit.

But, hey, it is a perfectly legitimate choice, to be an eternal victim of evil communicators. I mean, why not, if it meets our needs… Sounds like a fun way to spend a couple of incarnations.

The second possibility:

Instead of crying over the bad weather when the rain starts, we can put on a waterproof jacket and trousers, perhaps an umbrella, and go out, out, out, and start walking. And if we get a bit wet…, SO WHAT! As my blogging mate Razz says, let’s harden the fuck up.

Perhaps we can start with a bit of understanding of the situation: nobody is after us, really. These people do not wake in the morning and start making evil plans on how to drive us nuts (they actually believe it is us who are difficult and, well, I am sure they have a point or two here). They are just trying to figure out how to live their lives with as little pain as possible and as much fulfilment, happiness and meaning as they can. They are not trying to make our life miserable. Their behaviour is, as Marshall Rosenberg would say, just a tragically distorted expression of their own unmet needs.

And now the question is what are we going to do about it? Perhaps take some responsibility and initiative and try, do, act, persist, move. Because, from my perspective at least, although it takes at least two individuals to have an interpersonal conflict, one person is enough to solve it. Perhaps not entirely, but to start, to try and to persist. First attempts will, of course, not bring about any relief, but we will just keep trying, and at a certain point this other person may feel less threatened, endangered, may perhaps start to feel some hope and choose to respond, bit by bit. But if we wait for other people to do the job, I guess our visas for this planet may well expire before this happens.

So, let’s never, never, never ever be victims of this life. Never whine, never hide. Let’s take it all fully, engage, interact. Let’s live the life we want to live, be the persons we want to be.

And yes, it will take more than one attempt to become perfect. And a lot of failures.

So what!