Confused, furious, offended, and besieged are adjectives that best describe my feelings when I was in conflict with Jessica, my boyfriend’s sister. I met Jessica about three years ago, the same time I started dating my boyfriend. We both started off on the wrong foot. After conducting my case study for our assignment, I realized there was very little chance of us hitting it off in the beginning, because we both met with negative pre-conceived notions that were fed to us by other outside parties. Our first impressions of one another were distorted through our own lenses, because we adopted the perceptions of others, which set us up to fail almost immediately. Even though our conflict was resolved a year ago, I found the need to fill …show more content…

Looking back, we realized we could have instead “recognized our assumptions for what they were--mere guesses subject to modification or disproof (pg 55).”
Unfortunately, we continued to believe the assumptions we made were right. This caused an increase of avoiding styles and behaviors that led to the conflict escalating. As time went on we avoided each other more and more. It became very awkward during my boyfriend’s family functions. I felt as though I was trapped, however, because I loved being with my boyfriend and the rest of his family, I did not let the conflict with Jessica get in the way of the time I spent with them. My initial goal of wanting to have a relationship with her switched from relational to face saving/identity goal (Wilmot & Hocker pg 73). I was hurt by the way she was treating me so I decided to make myself feel better and not make an effort to speak with her. I asked myself “how may my self—identity be protected or repaired in this particular conflict (pg 73)? I decided to mirror her styles, avoided her and pretended I did not care. Because she did not make an effort to speak with me, I found her to be intimidating and was not going to risk the embarrassment by speaking with her, for her to possibly blow me off in front of other people. We