How to have a difficult conversation if you hate confrontation

When faced with a confrontation, the INFP will be flexible, accommodating and open-minded. But they tend to repress their own needs if they believe it will keep the peace or maintain harmonious relationships – preferring to simply let things go. Pretty much everyone would agree that confrontation is uncomfortable, embarrassing, messy and confusing. Receive weekly posts to enhance your personal growth and professional development. You look paralyzed, but under the surface you’re extremely agitated. You’re heated, keyed up, overly emotional, and unable to sit still.

A guide to difficult conversations for people who hate confrontation

An awareness of the tendency to suppress feelings in order to preserve a relationship may eventually help a person find his or her voice. Distance can refer to either physical or emotional how to deal with someone who avoids conflict distance, depending on your personal boundaries and what will help you stay healthy and emotionally safe. Setting time limits on interactions may help manage the relationship.

How stress affects conflict resolution

A lot of times this can go back to childhood and how we witness our parents handle conflict. If you’re used to sweeping conflict under the rug, interpersonal conflict resolution https://ecosoberhouse.com/ can feel deeply threatening. You might try to build your skills and confidence by opening up conversations about relatively small matters with those you trust the most.

Conflict resolution, stress, and emotions

Conflict avoidance, therefore, often leads to a larger confrontation down the road. Once you become more used to it, facing your problems head-on won’t bring you as much anxiety. Some people find that meditation helps them get into a place where they can be “comfortable with the uncomfortable.”

• In fact, such behavior can create some of the same problems in personal and work relationships as conflict avoidance.
• When your fear brain (amygdala) is lit up, the rational, calm thinking part of your brain (your prefrontal cortex) can’t come on line.
• You might know that you need to tell your bestie that no, it’s not OK to cancel your plans for the fourth time in a row with no explanation.
• If you’re afraid of conflict, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Practice Communication Skills

When you can recognize conflicting needs and are willing to examine them with compassion and understanding, it can lead to creative problem solving, team building, and stronger relationships. By suppressing our external conflict and becoming internally conflicted, we are promoting the inevitable dilemma. The dilemma is that our internal conflict, which is now building, may lead us full circle back into unleashing our own need for conflict. Declare your intention to clean up the difficulties that your withholding has caused. Ask them if it’s OK with them for you to give them some examples.

• You can avoid many confrontations and resolve arguments and disagreements by communicating in a humorous way.
• However, some people avoid conflict at all costs — even when the conflict is necessary.
• It is also probable that a person may have been raised by a parent who had trouble with confrontation, accountability, and self-awareness.
• Cohen’s “aha” moment came when he realized that what was standing in the way of a successful resolution was $9,000.

• Tessina suggests people who avoid confrontation may be very hard workers (as a result of being inherent people-pleasers).
• Managing the relationship can include re-directing the conversation to lighter topics, distractions, or common goals such as a shared activity.
• When approaching the person with whom you are in conflict, you might acknowledge the discomfort you feel before explaining why you believe it is important to talk things through.
• Unfortunately, this personality type may be unable to manage a confrontation.
• Avoiding stress might seem like a great way to become less stressed, but this isn’t necessarily the case.
• Learning to manage conflict is extremely important in every area of life.

Most often, the reason for ongoing unresolved conflict in a relationship is because the high-conflict personality lacks the emotional maturity to engage in consistent relationship repair after a rupture. “The negative side effects of conflict avoidance are often high turnover, a dysfunctional working environment, strained communication, loss of productivity and impaired teamwork,” Hearn said. The depth, height, and reach of your very existence is limited by your day-after-day, week-after-week, year-after-year attempts to avoid feelings that are, ultimately, unavoidable,” writes McKay. “Cultivating an overall feeling of numbness can serve the same purpose. And some people turn to the excitement of gambling, risky behavior, video games, or Internet porn as a way of replacing or covering painful feelings they want to avoid,” writes McKay. Enneagram Fours, the Individualists of the Enneagram, react to confrontation from a place of authenticity.

Enneagram 5: Maintain strict personal boundaries

“A lot of people anticipate that talking about how they feel is going to be a confrontation,” psychologist Jennice Vilhauer told the New York Times. To hear some tell it, we are experiencing an epidemic of conflict avoidance, finding new ways to walk away from conflict rather than engaging in interpersonal conflict resolution. Ghosting, for example—ending a relationship by disappearing—has become common. Numerous tech companies are being criticized for laying off people via email rather than in person.

Why it’s not helpful

The other broad category of coping is called “active coping” or “approach coping.” This type of coping addresses a problem directly as a means to alleviate stress. “It can be difficult to voice honest opinions for fear of being seen as difficult and less desirable than someone who may have avoided the conflict altogether,” Ezelle explains. The easiest way to avoid getting rejected is avoiding saying anything, you figure, so you tend to keep it to yourself. You may need to give yourself some extra pep talks before you say you reaaally want to order pizza for your birthday, knowing it’s not your girlfriend’s favorite.