What does the word “confrontation” evoke for you? Do you cower or charge? When you’re in it, does your voice creak, does it roar? What do you feel, do you freeze and collapse, go into a rage, or something else? How you confront matters because it reflects your boundaries with others. No boundaries? People walk over you while you brood and complain. Unclear boundaries? You snap and people don’t want to be around you. That’s not to mention how you feel about yourself. Boundaries guide how peaceful or stressed you feel and indirectly your wealth emotionally and materially and they come up when a threat’s involved. To better understand, let’s paint a picture. Every stick has two ends. Come to know the ends and you’ll understand the center.
The Avoidant End
If you’re avoidant, like I was growing up, you retreat when you perceive a threat, like a yelling parent or an approaching bully. Even a neutral remark can trigger your fear response that causes you to run and hide. It’s not you that love peace, it’s that you have no other options
As an avoidant you don’t set boundaries. You either hide from a potential confrontation or get chewed up. As a child, my parents quarrelled so I hid in my room. In middleschool, I had no friends, so every bully reminded me of that. I felt like a gold fish in an aquarium of piranhas.
The cost of being an avoidant is a sense of helplessness and the longterm cost is loss of self-respect, and the burden of carrying all the shame, grief and guilt of all that’s gone unspoken. For every conflict, the avoidant lives it twice or more: once when it happens and again when it’s dished out on someone weaker than them, or when it’s pent up and repeated in one’s head. It’s exhausting. It’s the result of never having learned to set boundaries.
What about the bullies then, surely they must have it easier, no?
The Confrontational End
If you’re confrontational, your triggers might be identical to those of an avoidant, though where silence may mean safety for an avoidant, it sets off your alarms. The key difference is, when you perceive a threat you run a different program – you lunge claws out rather than freeze and collapse. Life experience has taught you it’s safer to strike first than risk being caught off-guard. You’ve been caught by surprise and it is not worth risking again.
Like avoidants, fear is the driver but where they freeze and collapse, you get angry and explode. Like a goldfish that learned this survival strategy very early, instead of getting faster at escaping your scales hardened up from all the battles. Your teeth filed down to knives and you turned into the one thing you ironically wanted to avoid – a piranha. Where avoidants employ quiet and space to avoid conflicts, you got good at stirring it, masking aggression in sarcastic comments or emotionally charged statements like “I’m just sharing my truth!”
What’s the cost of being a piranha? You’re always alert, easily triggered, drawn to conflict. Others can’t spend much time around you because it’s like traversing a mine field when it’s only a matter of time until they trigger something. Where avoidants carry shame and guilt, confrontationals carry anger, that despite how much rage is pent out it’s never fully released.
The Fear Driver
Avoidants and Confrontationals operate from the same fear but oppositely. Where one implodes the other explodes. The experience of fear implies a need of safety. Where says “I fight to feel safe” the other “I hide to feel safe.” Over time, they lead to destructive habits.
As an avoidant I lost years of my life to video games, the one place I felt safe and accepted. Later, I used alcohol to numb the fear of talking to people. Abuse and addiction have their purpose for avoidants and confrotationals as they’re a means to get something that couldn’t be obtained else how.
In a nutshell, fear drives you to respond. If you react by running away or preemptively attacking you never address the threat, you only get better at doing more of the same thing while accumulating the burden. The alternative? To rise above the fog and learn about your boundaries. That’s what the next article is about. The question though – are you willing to leave what’s familiar for something new?