Toronto Conflict Resolution Counselling
All people face conflict in their lives and relationships. No two people will ever be 100 percent in agreement with each other ALL of the time. This is just a simple fact of life. Even couples that have been together for 50 years or more, have dealt with conflict!
Since conflict is unavoidable, learning how to deal with it in a productive manner ensures a healthy relationship. If conflict is not addressed and is mismanaged, it can hurt and harm the relationship.
The purpose of conflict, when it is resolved in a positive manner, is to help individuals grow, change, and alter their perceptions about various issues. A secondary purpose of conflict is to help strengthen the bonds between two people.
By learning the skills needed to address conflict and resolve it, you can maintain a strong personal relationship with your loved one. In addition, the same tools for conflict resolution you use in your personal life can also be used in your professional life to help build and grow strong professional relationships.
Where Does Conflict Come From?
Conflict arises for different reasons. You might disagree with your loved one over what you want to eat for dinner. Your spouse could disagree with you about how they want to spend the weekend. In other words, conflict occurs when we disagree over our own individual values, perceptions, motivations, preferences, desires, ideas, and so on.
Sometimes conflict might seem trivial, like not agreeing about what you and your partner want to eat for dinner. Other times, conflict can trigger deeper and stronger emotions and feelings. This can result in need to feel a sense of security, safety, or a desire to feel respected and valued, or a need for a greater level of intimacy or closeness with your loved one.
When this level of conflict arises, you need to be in touch with your own feelings and emotions in order to express what is truly bothering you. Oftentimes that is not the case because we are not in touch with our feelings and emotions thanks to stress or other distractions in our daily lives.
This can make the smaller things, like how he does laundry or how she hangs up towels, turn into petty arguments, rather than getting to what is actually bothering one or both people in the relationship.
How Can Conflict Resolution Counselling Help?
Conflict resolution counselling can help you develop the skills and tools necessary to get to the heart of matters and resolve conflict, as well as:
- Help you recognizing recurring patterns of conflict.
- Provide you a safe place to speak and be heard.
- Understand how emotions are related to conflict and resolving it.
- Seek the underlying causes of recurring patterns.
- Develop strategies to resolve conflict and overcome recurring patterns.
- Create a new level of connection and intimacy between you and your loved one.
For help learning how to resolve conflict in a productive manner, please feel free to contact me, Ellen Starr directly at 416-488-3102 to schedule an initial conflict resolution counselling session in Toronto today!
