Interpersonal Conflict

Interpersonal Project

My friends and I play poker on a regular basis. One of my friends, let’s call him Tim, constantly plays bad hands and often catches lucky breaks. Tim and I have been friends since middle school, but one night we got into a very big argument which almost became physical.

In one particular hand, Tim made what was in my opinion a horribly bad call. Ask most poker players and they will tell you that they would have folded in this situation. Nonetheless, he got incredibly lucky and ended up knocking me out of the tournament. Having lost my money, I was extremely upset and I very angrily asked him why he called my raises. He gave a weak shrug, a half-smirk, and said something along the lines of “I thought I had you beat.” To me this came off as very sarcastic, and I took it offensively and started shouting at him. We exchanged verbal blows and the argument was fast becoming physical before our friends restrained us.

In this conflict, there was a great deal of missteps in communication, or “the process of creating and sharing meaning through the use of symbols” (Dobkin and Pace, 7), by both Tim and I, and the whole ordeal could have easily been avoided if either of us had used slightly better judgment. To begin with, I was the initiator, or “one who begins or advances the communication process by generating a message” (12), of communication and had I not said anything in the first place, this conflict would be nonexistent. Had I simply walked away and “cooled off” before speaking to Tim, I would have not been so offensive and the conversation would not have escalated to such dramatic extremes.

I also made a few errors as an interpreter, or “one who perceives and attempts to understand a message” (12). I may have misinterpreted Tim’s nonverbal communication, or “messages expressed through symbols other than words” (14). I registered his smirk and the inflection in his voice as symbols, or “words, images, gestures, and expressions that we use to represent our thoughts” (9), of sarcasm and arrogance. This infuriated me, but I may have exaggerated his actions. The smirk may have just been a suppressed smile because he was happy to have gotten so lucky, and it is possible that I just imagined that sarcasm in his voice. Had I...

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..., I wouldn’t have been so offensive in my reaction. Also, once I starting verbally assaulting Tim, he was very quick to do the same to me, which isn’t the best way to avoid a fight. Even though I was mostly at fault for this dispute, Tim could have done a few things differently to avoid this quarrel as well.

Major conflicts can arise from any situation, even over a simple hand of poker. Tim and I didn’t make the best decisions in our communication process, and we ended up at each other’s throats. Be that as it may, we eventually apologized to each other, and are still good friends. We still play poker together, although now we are a little more courteous if we win or lose a hand to each other. Even so, we should have used better judgment in this situation. There were a great deal of things each of us could have done in order to avoid this outburst of aggression, and yet we let our anger spill out and we ended up with the worst-case scenario.

Works Cited

Dobkins, Bethami A., and Roger C. Pace. Communication in a Changing World. New

York: McGraw Hill, 2003.