Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

Another lesson culled from my Introduction to Conflict Theories class that can be applied to life: conflict is not a cycle, rather it is a spiral. According to this theory, as applied to conflicts, we don’t retread the arguments (or battles or wars) in exactly the same way and to the same degree each time; rather, we keep ratcheting things up (or down, depending on the term in use). We, ever-so-gradually, ratchet down our impatience, up our intransigence, up our actions that aggravate the other. In other words, things get progressively worse, they are never the same.

Even if we seem to be having the same argument day after day, it is not the same, because your weariness in needing to have the argument day after day is increasing. A stereotypical experience can illustrate this: the dishes (or some other seemingly insignificant chore or basic order of family business). The first time that your spouse doesn’t do the dishes or put them in the dishwasher, it’s no big deal, there’s a request or a reminder and it’s forgotten. But the next time it happens, there’s the request or reminder again, maybe with just a dash of frustration. But if (do I mean to say “when”?) it happens again, the frustration starts to increase, and this comes out in the tone of voice used, maybe even the actual words, maybe you tune out the explanation, which means you are tuning out your beloved. How can you possibly ask someone to put his dishes in the dishwasher repeatedly without ratcheting up your annoyance? It’s not that this will bring on a civil war in the house, but you are not standing in place, you’re getting more aggravated.

Perhaps the understanding from this application of the theory is that if you don’t resolve what’s bugging you, things will only get worse. The “don’t go to bed angry” mantra really makes sense here, because if you have the entire night to mull over things, to interpret or dissect events, you’re probably going to read more into them then are there. And if you don’t take the time to talk things out, you’re not going to have the same argument over and over, you will be having an argument to the power of however many times you have had it. I guess this could be written as:

     Argument^X = D

where X equals the number of times you have had the argument, and as X increases so does D, where D is the disaffection factor.

Which spirals me back, in an obtuse way, to my post on “Sweating the Small Stuff”: nothing is really small if it annoys you. And nothing that bothers you stays small: it will simply simmer under the surface. And we all know what happens to things that simmer invisibly: they erupt quite visibly, seemingly from nowhere. And surprise attacks (for obvious reasons) are the hardest to prepare for and recover from, since there is such hurt in “not knowing where this is coming from.”

So, the lesson we can take from the theory is: To not enter into a spiral of bitterness we must acknowledge and address all the inanities of the other and (yes, I admit to it) ourselves.

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