Conflict resolution

I'm so proud of Eric. This morning he is being recognized at church as a leader. He's really gifted as a teacher and has such a great knowledge of the Bible. He really belongs in leadership. Would he know how proud of him that I am this morning? It's unlikely.

He left this morning as we were attempting to resolve some conflict from this morning and left over from last night. Conflict resolution is something that we've always been pretty good at, but not because of me. That's a strength that Eric brought into our marriage and I've learned from him and I'm still learning. Unfortunately (and I know my mom would agree), the thing that was demonstrated to me as a child by my parents was the silent treatment (from mom) and ignoring the problem (from dad). In some way, I'm glad that I didn't grow up with parents that would have frequent knock down, drag out fights. But in other ways, I wish that they demonstrated a more healthy way of resolving conflict. But enough about my parents. I can't blame them for this conflict or how we're handling it.

What happened was I let unresolved hard feelings fester inside all morning, then when it came down to it, I was so mad that I couldn't resolve anything very well. After some time, we got to talk about the issues. Which, it's worth mentioning that the issue that we're arguing about is never the real issue. There's almost always something underlying that made the issue at hand that much worse. In this instance, I was mad at Eric for not listening to me the last night. Then this morning, I'm sure that I woke up mad at him and didn't even know it. And as it always seems to go, we didn't resolve the "real" issue until he was ready to walk out the door.

In effort to send him off as the proud wife that I truly am, I had to force my emotions to catch up with my words more quickly than I usually do. I didn't do a very good job of that. I said, "I'm sorry and I love you. I don't want you to go thinking that I'm mad at you, cause I'm not." All said with my arms crossed and no emotion in my voice. Do you think he believed me? Of course not. What he said was, "It's about body language, you are saying you're sorry, but you sound like you are barking at me." Then he imitated me and it made us both laugh. As soon as I stretched out my arms to hug him for real, a peace came over us both. That's conflict resolution. Then I could really say, "I'm sorry and I love you and I'm proud of you." And this time he believed me.