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Dealing with High-Conflict People: Evaluate Your Own Personality, with Bill Eddy, Lawyer, Therapist and Author, 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life
People often ask me what’s the difference between a high conflict person and everybody else. Let’s say reasonable people. And the key really seems to boil down to this word and that’s self-awareness. High conflict people don’t reflect on themselves. They lack social self-awareness. They don’t check themselves and then alter their behavior. They keep doing the same thing that doesn’t work over and over. If you are concerned you’re a high-conflict person or just want to be as healthy and happy as possible use your own self-awareness. Self-awareness is the key to not becoming a high conflict person and to managing and having healthy relationships.
So there’s some key questions to ask yourself to help yourself be self-aware and become perhaps more self-aware. And first of all is am I preoccupied with blaming others? Do I have a target of blame? Am I always thinking it’s my brother’s fault or my neighbor’s fault or my wife’s fault? Am I perhaps not taking responsibility for my part? What is my part here in the problem? What’s my part in the solution? And if you’re dealing with a high conflict person you might say well it’s totally coming from them. Maybe that’s accurate. But the solution often comes with your participation so you need to do something. Maybe try talking and dealing with the person differently or choose to move away from that person and just not engage with them. But we always have our part that we can do now and going forward. Also, am I managing my emotions? Am I blaming others and getting all excited and angry and emotional about it or am I stepping back and saying wait a minute. Also, all or nothing thinking. Am I slipping into that? Is there actually a middle ground solution here?
And is my behavior becoming extreme? Am I aiming for moderate behavior? The goal in many ways is flexible thinking, managed emotions, moderate behavior and checking myself rather than being preoccupied with other people’s behavior. That will help you. And I’ll tell you, after writing this book, The Five Types of People, I’m practicing this more and more and realizing oops, sometimes I’m going a little farther than I meant to. So we all need to check ourselves.