Conflict Resolution What prompts discord, and why do some people get along famously while others spend the bulk of their days arguing with everyone around them or at least with enough people to make it a problem? There are probably a million answers since everyone knows that people have been having conflicts since time immemorial.

Most of the time these can be resolved by the parties in question with relatively little effort other than an awareness of the problem on the part of the arguers themselves and a desire to come up with a resolution that enables them to feel okay about each other when it's all over and done with. Probably every person reading this can recall a conflict with another that was repaired with a small gesture, which could mean an admission of misunderstanding and a yearning to clear it up or maybe even an apology, which is always nice to get. Sometimes it's easier and a lot more efficient when you want to get over a situation to just say you are sorry, and as everyone knows, this can be true even if you are feeling anything but sorry.

Of course, there are situations that cannot be taken care of with a simple "I'm sorry," or a similitude of that remark on the part of one or even both of the people involved, and these times can require interposition from outside parties, which can range from something pretty small like just listening to the argument and expressing an outside opinion that is unbiased.

But what can be done when the conflict is more inflammatory and the parties involved are beyond the rational solutions mentioned above? For example, if someone is being bullied, there's not much chance that the person doing the bullying is going to engage in meaningful dialogue with the victim or even pay attention to someone from the outside who wants to assist, and the victim probably doesn’t feel like trying to reason with the bully because of fear and anger. Neither party to the dispute is a tabula rasa, ready to soak up wisdom from a mediator. And one or both parties may exhibit chronic antisocial behavior as defined in DSM-III-R.

Obviously the first thing that has to come to pass is someone, maybe a teacher if it ensues at school, needs to assert his or her authority and cause the bullying to cease so nobody gets hurt, physically or emotionally (though that emotional hurt has probably occurred already), and then there has to be some plan to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, creating a vicious cycle that only gets worse and harder and harder to mend.

This is where the practice of conflict resolution can be of immense assistance because it teaches people how to communicate and how to express their innermost feelings so the person being bullied feels like it's okay to stand up to the bully instead of feeling intimidated, and the bully gets an opportunity to practice how to turn negative behavior into something more laudatory and to learn how to listen as well, instead of always being aggressive.

It sounds like it's too simple, all of this verbalizing and listening and being reasonable, and for sure it doesn’t work every time there's a predicament, but studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of conflict resolution in a vast number of situations and with people of many different ages and backgrounds and problems.

Read the last paragraph aloud to identify inflated language. Then rewrite it so it's appropriate for my audience.