Pre- and Post-Conflict Virtues

Life and human relationships are so challenging to navigate that it seems inevitable that everyone will eventually experience disagreement, conflict and have their feelings hurt (or hurt someone else's feelings). And fairly regularly. For this reason people spend a lot of their time and energy focusing on developing skills for avoiding or minimizing conflict, e.g., exhibiting patience, being non-judgmental, accepting, non-blaming, etc.  Since these emotional skills are used prior to arriving at disagreement, hurting someone else's feelings, etc., let's call these pre-conflict virtues. These skills are intended to avoid conflict and hurting people's feelings in the first place. And people rightly focus on cultivating these skills because they are incredibly valuable and will no doubt minimize the number of times we'll hurt other people's feelings.  While I'm in no way discounting the value of these pre-conflict virtues, still it seems inevitable that genuine disagreement will occur; and some of these disagreements will result in someone being disrespected, feelings being hurt, etc. Because of this, it seems that being a good and happy person also requires, what I'll call, post-conflict virtues.  The most common examples of post-conflict values are things like leniency, forgiveness, mercy, reconciliation, etc. 

Both the pre- and post-conflict virtues require emotional intelligence and maturity, however, it seems that the post-conflict virtues are in shorter supply than the pre-conflict virtues these days. But why? There may be many explanations, but one mundane reason seems to be that exhibiting one of the post-conflict virtues requires one additional, emotionally challenging act from people.  It's a platitude that humans have a tendency to be self-righteous, indignant fuckers who tend to think that exhibiting the pre-conflict emotional skills should be enough. That is, many likely think that: when I conduct myself in such a manner that I make my best effort in the first place to avoid a conflict with someone else, hurting their feelings, etc., then I've done everything one can do to maintain a friendly, respectful comportment with someone else. But this attitude is really the product of self-deception because we can always take one further step to forgive, or reconcile with, the person whose feelings have been hurt.

A renewed focus on the post-conflict virtues seems more salient than ever in our world where cutting off people is easier than ever, e.g., un-friending people from social media spats, etc.  In addition, some recent research suggests that family (i.e., parent-child) estrangements are as common as divorce these days. And these sort of estrangements tend to have very real long-term negative affects for the relevant people.  Not all relationships are worth saving, e.g., abusive (either physical or emotional). But the negative affects of estrangement seem to be worth weighing against the challenges we face at making a sincere, thoughtful effort at exercising the post-conflict virtues.