Conflict resolution, by definition, involves the mediation of disputes between two or more parties. Conflict resolution between two neurotypical parties involves working to understand one another and valuing the interaction, not enabling someone to be abusive.
Disputes of a normal sort involve people failing to communicate their needs effectively to one another; extreme disputes involved intense levels of emotional abuse, mental abuse, social abuse, financial abuse, or physical abuse with one party typically tending to assert a dominant stance over the other in such a way the second party is disenfranchised, dehumanized, or expected to bear an unlawful or socially unsustainable burden while having their own needs and fundamental human rights invalidated.
There are seven steps to successfully negotiating the sustainable resolution of virtually any social, political, or professional conflict:
- Understand the root cause of conflict as well as the forensic history of the dispute between parties
- Communicate effectively and efficiently with the opposition
- Brainstorm possible resolutions with a person or peer group that seeks to resolve conflict in a way that is both just and equitable for both parties
- Choose the best resolution with the express intention of creating a win-win situation for all parties involved in order to promote harmony
- Use a third-party mediator whenever necessary to lend a fair and unbiased opinion or to oversee contentious negotiations
- Explore alternatives related to future behavior that could be individually or collectively engaged in to prevent further conflicts from occurring
- Determine and employ successful coping steps that foster healthy ways for both parties, individually and separately, to more successfully manage stress and learn to observe and make mental note before leaping to respond to provocations, baiting, antagonistic behavior, or triggers
When one or more parties in the dispute have Cluster B personality disorders, disclosing any personal information or encouraging a victimized party to open up and share confidences with their Abuser is the polar opposite of correct strategy to be used by a therapist, kind soul striving to broker a peace, or a mediator.
When counseling or advising neurotypical people, it is safe to presume that they share the same core values related to a desire to find a solution to disputes between parties that actually promote harmony between parties.
Neurotypical people tend to value a harmonious social relationship with friends, family members, co-workers, and community members and to feel physical distress when and if they are involved in contentious relationships with other people in general.
Cluster B people have different neurotypical behaviors. Compulsively socially competitive, for them, life is about winning social interactions regardless of the tone, tenor, or subject of any conversation.
People who are what is known as vertical thinkers have very predictable thought patterns. Their biology and neuropsychology position them to constantly strive to dominate other people — physically, financially, socially, and — in the case of Religious Abusers — spiritually.
Prone to engaging in pack behavior, most Cluster B people tend to surround themselves with other people who also are socially competitive thinkers.
If they have an extreme personality disorder, they tend to strive to surround themselves with submissive romantic partners and those who they perceive will help them improve their own social prestige or status.
In the mind of a Cluster B person, in order to feel like a winner, they believe someone has to be a loser.
That’s the root cause of the reason why they tend to refer to emotionally sensitive people as whiners and cry babies — because they errantly project their own core nature onto their targeted victims, seeing in them what they errantly perceive to be a sore loser nature when and if they have targeted a horizontal thinker for use, abuse, or social persecution and ridicule.
Horizontal thinkers typically prefer collaborating socially to actually competing. Always on the lookout for win-win situations, they tend to infuriate toxic thinkers.
People who strive to form a lattice with other humans so all can rise are not the same type of thinkers as those who behave compulsively like social predators.
While a social predator will tend to scheme, gaslight, and bully in order to self-promote and fuel their own delusions of grandiosity, their preferred scapegoat targets — namely people with high levels of emotional sensitivity or emotional intelligence — are busy thinking about how to create a more humanitarian-friendly world.
Conflict resolution strategies between two horizontal thinkers include the safe presumption that both parties want to come to terms. The goal of marriage counseling, for neurotypical people, is to seek counseling and advice about how to continue a relationship in such a way that disputes are settled, future conflicts are avoided, and that both parties are left feeling valued, appreciated, and more emotionally as well as financially secure.
When one party is abusing the other, the conflict resolution dynamic shifts. The safest advice to give ANY social or emotional abuse victim is to point them in the direction of reading Narcissistic Abuse recovery literature, to learn how to go Gray Rock, and to end social, fiscal, psychological, and emotional enmeshment with their Abuser or Abusers — QUICK.
If you are in a position to give advice to an abuse victim, resist the urge to reverse project the gaslighting presumption that all human beings have a social or emotional conscience.
If you place a Cluster B person on a brain scan and expose them to social sensory stimuli, their brains simply lack the ability to process complex emotions in any way other than something external.
Because Cluster B people tend to perceive others as something separate from — rather than akin to — self, there’s never any sense of truly feel-good, empathy rich, social bonding stuff.
Depending on their specific disorder or set of comorbid affectations, people with personality disorders tend to have a completely different biological response to social competition as well as when observing external social stimuli.
For instance, Sociopaths tend to have a seriously depleted empathy reaction to other people’s pain, needs, or circumstantial wishes. Seldom needing many people to actually care about or like them, they tend to prefer alone time to being forced to socialize.
Psychopaths, on the other hand — meaning people with Anti-Social Personality Disorder who are prone to enjoying abusing others — tend to be more into devising elaborate plans and attention-seeking schemes to harm, coerce, or control the emotional psychology of other people.
When they abuse, they tend to feel most alive, as their biochemical nature floods their system with adrenaline and pleasurable emotions similar to those People Pleasers feel when and if they are successful at helping a friend, family member, or stranger have their needs met or they make someone smile.
The more malignant the Narcissist or Narcissistic Sociopath, the more prone they are to strive to socially destroy and dominate rivals. Those with Machiavellian natures who develop what is known as Dark Triad (or Dark Tetrad) personality types lie without remorse, situationally abuse, and compulsively strive to blame their victims in order to further brutalize and socially traumatize their abuse targets after things like workplace bullying or domestic violence incidents.
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