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9 Rules to Resolving Conflict With Friends

When you have a problem with a friend, there are some things you should do to resolve it — and some you shouldn’t.

Wendy Miller
8 min readJun 27, 2020

Last year, I lost what I thought was my best friend. Until that point, we’d been very close. I won’t get deep into the details of what happened because I truly don’t know her perspective. But there are a few things I know.

I know she blindsided me with a screaming fit to “explain” something she thought I’d done. I know she screamed and yelled irrationally and wouldn’t listen to anything I tried to say. I know her behavior made me so uncomfortable that I had to block her from contacting me because I truly began to worry about my safety and that of my family.

And I know that even after she’d surely had time to calm down, she never tried to apologize.

From her perspective, she may have felt completely justified. I don’t know. I’ll never know because of how she handled it from the start.

But from that experience, I did learn some rules to resolving a conflict with a friend — if resolution is your goal.

Choose the right time to reach out and bring it up

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Wendy Miller
Wendy Miller

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