BENGALURU: When telling a story, we want to start at the beginning. With people in relationships, we might start with, “Tell me how you met,” and hope there’s a meet-cute story behind it. At times, there’s the instant connection. At other times, there are stories of how it was all wrong or the timing wasn’t right even if they liked each other, or there are stories of a gradual joining, or accidental togetherness. The general starting point is easy enough to get to by just asking for that story to be told from the beginning.
When people are in conflict though, it is never easy to get to a starting point of where it all started going wrong, how it became this nasty. Imagine you meet them when they have been going at each other hammer and tongs for hours if not days, the fight escalating all the time, and there you are, asking
them what happened, how did all this start.
Chances are that there is no agreement on how and when it started. Even if there was a particular incident that seems like a triggering event, the seeds of the explosion were probably sown a long time ago. Scratch the surface of the fight a little, and you will likely hear things like, “I am never supported! It is always my fault!” Or other things like, “When will it ever be about me! Am I invisible?”
The conflict may seem to have started just now, but the readiness to fight started when each party in the relationship had consciously or otherwise began to stockpile negative experiences, be it assessments of each other, memories of unaddressed grievances, things that they let go at the moment while keeping a tally of how much they are letting pass without comment, and other such things.
Even if we are just by ourselves, we end up in conflicts with our own self – what we choose versus what was ideal, what we aspire for and what we get. So, why wouldn’t there be conflict when there are actually multiple people in the picture? There are constant causes for arguments, friction and conflicts between people.
We fight within ourselves and with each other often enough, but a fight can only become a war, a raging one at that, if there is a stockpile of weapons and armaments.
If we don’t really have a stockpile of regrets, resentments, wish lists, negative assessments, judgements, pigeonholing and what not, we might face the conflict just for itself. We may not get into cycles of violence, whether physical or otherwise, where it feels like the story is never-ending, the “who said/did what and when,” narration seems to go on forever.
If people truly want their conflicts to end, we need to ask if there is willingness to disarm, not just put down their weapons for the moment, but truly disarm. Now, there’s a challenge – how do we get anyone to disarm without everyone disarming? Countries don’t. Can individuals in loving relationships?