Reflective Essay About Relationship Breakdown

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The relationship breakdown between me and my closest friend, Marcy (a pseudonym). Best friends. This breakdown occurred a little more than a month ago. Lots of issues were going on for both of us, tensions were high and had been for about a month. I felt like she’d been distant, or bored. In an attempt to rekindle the friendship, we'd hung out and afterward, I messaged about how grateful I was having her as a friend since we were so close. The following day we'd met for lunch and she explained she felt it was in her best interests if we took a break being friends, and I did not respond appropriately and retorted a strong and hurtful message. One that was mean and attacked parts of her I knew would make her upset. I was hurt and I wanted her …show more content…

We did not work together to meet any sort of benign roles. The power distribution between Marcy and I was near equal, we both shared being stubborn and usually did not let the other influence us too greatly, and for the bulk of our camaraderie what we wanted was mutual. The discussion began with the source as assertive but quickly escalated to aggressive from the receiver. The climate was certainly defensive due to my response being hostile and changing the entire purpose of the message. The feedback given was the response that attacked her character and personal faults and blaming those characteristics as her inability to keep up with our friendship through a trying time. I had not listened to the message in its entirety and only heard that she wanted to foment a break from being friends because of choices I was making, and out of feeling hurt and the majority of reasons given by her and to her came off …show more content…

The communication components Listen & Respond, and Verbal were the largest source of creating the breakdown. Although I would say that my response was the largest issue in the breakdown, Marcy had not done a perfect job communicating either and interpreted my message as hate instead of hurt. After receiving my response, she refused to resolve any misunderstandings from my point of view and accepted my words as the entire message, not hearing in between them or considering the weight of what she had just told me and how that impacted me. We both used a confrontational conflict management style and we were without fault and passed the blame to the other person, not considering their emotions and external factors happening simultaneously. In the future, this situation can be avoided by not attacking the other person, using effective listening skills, and perception checking. Had both of us considered what the other was feeling and going through the discussion could have taken an incredibly different, and more positive turn, which may have resulted in an easier and less painful

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