Think about how your own conflicts escalate. What factors contribute to escalation? How do you contribute to escalation? Do you just hate it or is it ever fun?
So. Escalation. Here's how it happens for me: sometimes, very infrequently, it does involve the contender-defender model, because sometimes I won't realise that the other person have an issue with me so I just sort of noodle along doing whatever and the other person reacts and reacts--this can also happen the other way around because I'm really bad at communicating when I have a problem, so other people annoy me but don't know they're doing it, and I get more and more standoffish and finally explode messily all over everything.
But usually it's more of a conflict spiral, frankly. And right now I'm incredibly frustrated because Friend A behaved in X fashion while not telling me what I was doing wrong, so, offended, I responded with tactic B, which result in A getting irritated at me and perceiving me as kind of an ass and engaging in action C, which got me going with action D, and blah blah blah we both pretty much hate each other right now. And while I recognise that this conflict could probably be cleared up by just communicating, I'm still feeling polarised and annoyed (and now EVERYTHING HE DOES annoys me, please see: hostile goals) and it's really just extremely frustrating.
And not very fun.
Sometimes, though, with other people, I definitely enjoy being provoking--but this is more likely to happen if I'm not very emotionally invested in the conflict, or at least a lot less emotionally invested than the other person. Which kind of makes me a bad person, but it's true.
I am a terrible person... Kudos to you Soujin, because sometimes I think it can be fun to escalade conflict. Well at least more fun than solving my own conficts. I find it so difficult to remove myself from the situation and do what I know is right. I just like to antagonize my roommate when she makes me mad. I know it's terrible and I should really just sit down and talk about it with her. But I am bad at being a mediator in my own conflicts; helping others, no problem (well it's easier at least), helping myself no way. Usually it goes back and forth in a spiral model... except when I was younger I would try and make my parents mad, but they always kept thier cool. guess I need to learn to do that, and to stop antagonizing my roommate!
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