What Makes You So Afraid of Conflict?

She held up a pair of shoes and asked us to imagine that those shoes belonged to our mother or father. Then she asked us to imagine them on their feet as they are walking towards us. “How do you feel right now? What do you notice in your body?” she asked.

This was a talk on intergenerational trauma by Dr Diane Poole Heller. As I imagined this scenario I found myself getting anxious. I found it such a simple and interesting exercise I later asked my partner the same questions. His response was a feeling of fear, of walking on eggshells.

Our bodies seem nothing short of a miracle of cosmic proportions to me, the more I learn, the more I marvel at this vehicle for my earthy ride that I once referred to as a meat suit. Now I see that it is something beyond sophisticated, a kind of intelligence I can’t even explain.

My body can tell me things my mind can’t compute. That one little exercise about how my body reacts to the sensation of feeling like I have a parent walking towards me tells me a lot about why I have always feared conflict.

I’m often taken back to the standard parting comment from my parents in childhood “be good”. Being good was what was important in society in that era. It is something I’m so conscious of, that I’ve deliberately made my parting shot to my own kids “love you, have fun”.

And while this is a personal reflection, I think it does connect into what’s happening right now in the world around me. Out of interest in what was happening in the US election I watched a short clip of Joe Biden saying that after the election was called it was time to “put the rhetoric of the election behind us and (I’ll paraphrase) reconnect with each other”.

Too little too late given that the crumbling seat of power in Western civilisation appears to be descending into polarised anarchy, exactly the kind of conflict we do want to avoid. This seems yet another example of the kind of rot that sets in as discussed in You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside.

To call the political trash talk rhetoric is to severely downplay the role it has played in political polarisation, realising too late the violence that has been incited and the extreme importance of leading by example. 

Though, as I said four years ago in The Role of Clinton or Trump in an Evolved World? political game playing is not for those who want authenticity, it’s not for those who want to understand the world through the eyes of another and it’s not for those who want to truly be part of a world more evolved than this one today.

My view then was, whether it was Clinton or Trump was irrelevant, neither represented an evolved world, both represented a step in nature’s death dance of an era. And so four years on, this death dance is still playing out, but certainly further along the track, hopefully the crescendo.

This is the kind of violent conflict that arises, I believe, because we are taught that disagreement and difference is a bad thing, there is a right and a wrong, instead of their being many personal truths. And so, I think, instead of us being able to confront and explore our personal differences one to one, we become this angry, seething, polarized mass unable to engage in meaningful conversation.

Before I dive into this fear of conflict a bit more on a personal level, I want to really query whether conflict is something I should be afraid of? While the aforementioned escalations make it something more than just undesirable, taking it back to conflict between two people, the words of Abraham Hicks are ringing in my ears about contrast:

“Contrast is anything you don’t like, doesn’t feel good, or causes you to be in a negative mood. Identifying contrast is a useful tool to get clarity on what you don’t want.”

Now while there is always the possibility for conflict that is truly life and death, most conflict I face in my life really is not – and yet my body reacts to it as though it is. For example:

·        A friend says something that triggers a negative response within in me,

·        My partner does something (or doesn’t do something) that triggers a negative response within me,

·        Our kids’ school says something (or omits to say something) that triggers a response within me, it’s an everyday occurrence.

This stuff is all too real, part of my everyday reality, part of yours too I imagine. Like the friend who unintentionally stepped on an emotional landmine in conversation about my daughter’s camp, that I talked about in How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think.

Like the parenting conflict with my partner I mentioned in What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. And like the lack of explanation at our contactless, drive through pick up system at the kids’ school when all the traffic is backed up and there seems no obvious reason as to why we have been sitting waiting going nowhere for ages.

None of these things were a threat to my survival, but they felt like that from the way my body reacted. I recently had a conversation with some friends about getting triggered, posing the question about whether it was a bad thing or not? I’m of the opinion that it is actually great, because it points me to an opportunity to grow out of old patterns and heal old wounds.

In the moment, though, it does not feel good, far from it. When I’m triggered, the chemicals in my brain want conflict; the pull within me is strong. Just as strong as the opposite feeling of being confronted by someone who is triggered when I’m not, and then I want to get away from conflict; unless I’m also triggered and then the lure is back.

My psyche says “I’m not the powerless little child any more, here I am in the ring, bring it on!” which really is more like an angry teenager than what I’d expect from my adult self.

So what is going on? It’s basically my sympathetic nervous system recognising an old threat pattern and triggering my flight-or-fight response. In childhood, like every child, I was dependent upon my parents for survival. I couldn’t get away from the perceived threat, so my body developed defence patterns.

The most well known patterns are flight, fight and freeze, but psychologists are now recognising more complex variations beyond these. All of which are differing ways we learned to adapt to the stresses and threats in our environments.

By threats, I’m taking more here to the emotional threats of withdrawal of love, of facing shame or guilt for not doing as I was told, or breaking a rule, or being bad in some way. When someone triggers me, my nervous system reacts the way it did when I was a child (and the same can be said for anyone who hasn’t done personal work into unpacking all this, including most of these so called leaders).

So while I know people are generally doing the best they can in any given situation, I’ll admit I - at least momentarily - forget that when I get triggered. There is a narrative in my head about what “they are doing to me” and how it is unfair and I won’t tolerate it.

Of course, I now know this is an old voice that I’m hearing, the powerless child version of myself. Whereas, as an adult, I do have different choices:

“We have to start to re-own pain and befriend it, to consciously practice moving towards it instead of away from it. There was a time we felt we could not eradicate an actual threat so we moved our sights to the secondary threat...pain itself. By association we started to see the pain itself as the threat to our life. In reality, pain is not a threat to us at all, it is a feedback mechanism.” Teal Swan

So essentially, although the scenario has changed, my body still reacts to the same old pain, my wiring fires based on the old well worn patterns.

This year has been an interesting journey in particular, as my partner and I have come into conscious awareness of our mutually unhealthy patterns as recounted in How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns.

Now in the moment when one of us is triggered, none of this is fun, but this awareness is helping us to break the chain of pain. Instead of being pulled in, it’s more likely now that one of us will walk away, ready to revisit when the other is not so triggered.

Instead of feeling like our relationship has a fatal flaw because we get into conflict, we now see conflict is not the problem; it’s all our old associations with conflict that are the problem. And this is really the point at which we are able to choose to fully grow into our adult potential.

We can stay locked in our childhood patterns forever, as essentially the human race has done for generations, but it’s a game that has no winners. Instead we have each chosen to embark on a journey of unravelling and being deliberate about making different choices, building new pathways in our brain and nervous system.

What makes me afraid of conflict is really seeing what not doing this work does on a large scale. When we embrace the personal conflicts between us as important indicators about who we each are, we can do the personal work needed to mature into conscious awareness and fulfil our true potential. Now that is the world I want to live in, what about you?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How Relaxed About Your Own Differences Are You?, Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress, Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master, What Can Your Anger Teach You About Your Gifts? and What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.