This friend was particularly precious to me. We’d enjoyed 7 years of a growing, beautiful and ever-deepening friendship. We talked almost daily, sharing just about all our challenges, and gladnesses, with loud cheering for each other with each little triumph.

I couldn’t wait for our long lunches and coffee-dates, where we would ‘solve world peace’ and have the most profound insights and ideas spark off each other’s shares.

Precious, inspiring and full of heart.

One day, there was an unfortunate misunderstanding. A rather public one. I put my foot in it, so to speak, on a public forum, and the more I tried to set it right, the worse I seemed to make it. I felt more and more frazzled and unable to do the right thing.

She has a very strong, direct, assertive way of dealing with a problem. And at the time, I was more likely to run away at the first sign of friction, unhappiness or conflict. To make it worse, she was particularly stressed due to financial matters and had a very short fuse.

All my efforts to patch things up had absolutely zero effect. I was completely unable to handle any anger or the thought of her being upset with me. I avoided a direct conversation. I can clearly remember how my fingers literally trembled from anxiety when she sent me a text message that sounded irritable and angry.

I was petrified of conflict, of anyone being angry with me, and wanted to smooth things over and go back to ‘normal’ as soon as possible.

Alas. That’s not where she was at.

She wanted to confront this thing head-on, voice her anger and dissatisfaction and express her emotion.

Me?

I was off in lala-land, desperately wanting to reverse the clock, and without a single idea of how to handle this.

The Result

It went on for a couple of very unpleasant weeks. Probably around 2, even though it felt like a lifetime because it was so painful and scary for me. “Why couldn’t we just put this behind us,” I thought, “and carry on again like just 2 weeks before???”

In the end, the friendship came to a very unpleasant, puzzling end. I mulled over this for months. Years, actually. “What went wrong? Why couldn’t we fix it? We both make a living in personal development – why could we not get past this particular challenge? What the heck…”

Read the full article here, You can also read about a workshop where you will :

• explore and work with your own fear of conflict
• and learn the practical steps to have such difficult conversations with courage