Kayla Wallace Reflection Paper #1
Conflict Management and Negotiations
Reflection Paper 1
My boyfriend and I have been together for two and a half years. We are young
college students, so naturally, we have experienced a fair amount of conflict. According
to the Conflict Management Styles Assessment, I use both compromising and avoiding
styles of conflict management. After forcing my boyfriend to take the assessment, I
found out that he uses accommodating and competing for styles the most. These styles
are very evident in most of our bigger arguments. I typically tend to avoid bringing up
things that bother me for days, or even weeks. My avoidance usually leads to a yelling
match becuse I have so much built up emotion. Emotional flooding occurs when my
boyfriend yells back at me, and he usually gets stuck one aspect of my initial argument
and for a while so we argue back and forth. Eventually, he will “give up” and tell me that
I am 100% right, and try to end the argument. This is where differentiation occurs. We
begin to sort out our emotions and speak rationally, and at a reasonable volume.
The last argument that my boyfriend and I had was about him omitting the truth
when it came to his whereabouts. I had been at work and during my break, I asked him
what he was doing, but he did not respond until almost an hour later. I found out that he
was hanging out with friends of his that do not have respect for our relationship. I did not
say anything becuse it had already been a subject of disagreement that had not been
addressed. A week later, he did not respond to me again and even though he was in his
room I got extremely upset and brought up the issue from the week before. I told him
that I was upset becuse he omitted the truth as to what he was doing, but for at least
Kayla Wallace Reflection Paper #1
Conflict Management and Negotiations
twenty minutes he just kept telling me that I am not his mother and that he did not need
to tell me where he was. After I repeatedly tried to argue against it, he said “fine, don’t
trust me then, whatever” and turned away from me. After a few minutes of silence, I
finally told him that it isn’t that I need to know where he is at all times, but that I do not
like to be lied to or deceived and that it should be up to me to handle my own emotions.
Once I said my piece he told me that he now understands where I was coming from and
that although it would be hard for him, that he would try to be more transparent.
One definition of a frame is a cognitive structure based on previous experience,
which guides our interpretation of an interaction...
