Everyone has already been in conflict situations and there are always good ways and bad
ways to handle them. When people are not able to communicate with each other,
the situation is usually destined to get worse. This is the story of an
interpersonal conflict where everything went wrong.
In fourth
grade, my childhood best friend and I used to write letters to each other.
Although we were neighbours and we also talked a lot, writing letters came to
be a special element in our friendship. It was like giving and receiving little
creative gifts every now and then.
But our
peaceful little world was shaken, when my friend lost one of the letters at
school and, as chance would have it, it was found by one of my classmates. This
classmate then read the piece of paper, recognized the names of other
classmates mentioned in it and handed it to our teacher. The teacher then
called me to her desk after school and confronted me with the content.
At this
point, I should probably specify what I was writing about in this unfortunate
letter. As these letters were not meant to reach other people’s eyes, my friend
and I just wrote about everything that came into our innocent 10-year-old
minds. In this case, we were corresponding about who we like and who we don’t .
My words were something along the lines of: “From my class, I like A and B the
most because they’re good friends. Everyone is very nice but I like C and D the
least.”
So to get
back to me standing in front of my teacher, she wasn’t very pleased. She
scolded me and demanded that I find a good way to apologize to C and D. Of
course, I was not prepared for that and as a first reaction I got mad at my
friend whose carelessness had gotten me into this situation. When I met her in
front of the school building, I shouted at her and then refused to talk to her
for weeks. In these weeks, the distance between us grew wider and we could
never go back to the closeness we shared before.
The day
after my teacher talked to me, I apologized to C and D who haven’t even heard
about this letter yet. I tried to explain to them why I was doing this, but
they completely misunderstood. From this day, they started to dislike me and
the general atmosphere in class became quite tense. It was so bad that I was
relieved when I could finally enter grammar school in year six. Until the
present day, C still doesn’t even say hi to me, when I see her around town.
In my
opinion this is a case of how interpersonal conflict completely got out of hand.
Strong emotions prevented everyone from actually talking about what was going
on. Personally, I think making me apologize could not have been further from
the right path. There is nothing wrong with not being equally fond of all of my
classmates. I can’t think of any person who likes everyone on the planet the
same way. However, I understand that the teacher couldn’t just ignore the
letter as the finder might spread rumours and make things even worse. All of
the people involved were young children, so I think the teacher should have taken
the role of an intermediator; she should have made us talk about the contents
of the letter and guide us with her experience, preventing the wall of emotions
from forming.
Or can you think of any other way that would have made the
aftermath of this incident less stressful for everyone?
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