ABSTRACT
Nearly every book that gives people advice on how to manage their personal or professional conflicts urges them not to take the conflicts personally. The very ubiquity of the advice is itself evidence that this dysfunctional emotional reaction is widespread. Oftentimes the advice is rather superficial, amounting mainly to “quit it,” leaving the impression that the dysfunction is also superficial and can be changed as easily as one might reformat a job resume. This simplicity misses a key point, namely that consistent emotional reactions arise from stable personality traits, which may in turn be related to one’s upbringing and perhaps even one’s genetic inheritance. People who ordinarily take conflict personally are reflecting and projecting their whole life experiences onto the episode. We believe that these emotional reactions can be controlled by selfdiscipline in the moment, and perhaps can be more permanently changed by some sort of counseling intervention or deep introspection, combined with a commitment to change. But people who take conflict personally do so for reasons, emotional or autobiographical, and these need to be addressed if a person is to make progress in this respect. The first step in amelioration is knowledge, and the purpose of this chapter is to explore what is known about personalization of conflict. Given the focus of this book, we will concentrate on how personalization relates to aggression.
