What’s fueling your conflict?

by Jacqui Brauman

What’s fueling your conflict?

by Jacqui Brauman

by Jacqui Brauman

Knowing what is fueling your conflict can help to prevent prolonging it unnecessarily.

The most common disputes for women with families that we see through my firm are:

  • separations, 
  • will disputes, 
  • housing disputes, and 
  • then otherwise it’s things around consumer items. 

But it’s certainly disputes where families are involved, where there’s a whole lot more emotion, and they are often heart-wrenching for everyone.

Often leave families are torn to pieces, which is also difficult to see. 

The sort of things that might be fueling conflict is often fear and anger

It really does take some honesty to look at your own emotions and go, “Okay, why am I potentially prolonging this?” 

But also having a bit of an understanding of what emotions the other party is going through (not that you necessarily have to care about their emotions or fix anything for them) can give you more of an understanding and ability to address some of the emotions directly might have them ease.

Having sufficient support for your emotional needs, can help be helpful as well. Your lawyer is not qualified to help you emotionally. So having a psychologist or a counsellor, or some kind of coach on the side who can work through some of these emotions that might be stopping you from being able to make a rational decision that can end things quicker and cheaper.

If we dive in a little bit deeper to fear to start with … 

We get quite anxious about the unknown, and that is really also what Legally Wise Women is here to help with. I help with the fear of uncertainty that you have, by giving you at least a little bit of understanding about what the processes will be, what to expect when you engage with the legal industry, and those sorts of things.

But then you’re also going to have fear around your uncertainty of your financial situation moving forward. You’re potentially going to have fear of how it’s going to work moving forward with the children, or housing.

So again, if you can understand what you’re fearful about, you can actually get some advice around those things. For example, there’s plenty of female financial planners around who help women going through separations. 

Just knowing what your options are and what situation you might come out with on the other side can be really calming to help remove some of the fear, so that you’re not making decisions from a fearful place, or refusing to make decisions because you’re too afraid.

The other primary emotion is anger, tied up with resentment, and potentially hatred …

It’s tricky, because you’re hurt, and the other person might be hurt as well. How do you make sure you’re not acting out of the desire to hurt the other person or to retaliate. Hopefully that doesn’t define your decision making. 

These feelings could subconsciously make you prolong the dispute, whereas you could be getting on with your life and it could cost you a lot less if you can resolve it quicker.

The other thing around anger is that it often makes us act in a way that we regret later, and if you really want to be integrous and stick to what is important to you. 

You can’t let hatred be your primary driving decision making place where you’re making decisions from. 

It’s important to have an understanding about what is fueling your conflict.

The earlier you settle, quite often the better the result. 

Alternative dispute processes can be really healing. Rather than bringing up all these hurts over years and years and years, which often happens in litigation, leave those behind you, turn and look forward. Have an early stage mediation.

lawyer website

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Top