Conflict Avoidance: What It Is, Causes, & How to Overcome It

What Is Conflict Avoidance?

Conflict avoidance can be specific or general. Some people struggle more with general avoidance of almost everything in their life, while most people have specific areas of life where they experience a greater amount of avoidance in an attempt to decrease pain and suffering. Unfortunately, the problem with avoiding conflict is that problems tend to resurface at some point, even when avoided, at times, for years.

Approach-Avoidance Conflict Vs Fear of Negative Evaluation

Approach-avoidance conflict is a theory that states people avoid conflict when they are afraid of both outcomes. In contrast, the fear of negative evaluation theory states that we may have internal biases about events we perceive to be fearful, causing us to avoid them. This latter type of avoidance is believed to be a hallmark of social anxiety.¹

Signs of Conflict Avoidance

Avoidant behaviors can look different depending on the person and situation. There are signs of avoidance and it is often important to tune into the underlying emotions behind avoidance, usually hurt, shame or fear, in order to understand them better.

Below are common signs of conflict avoidance:

• Stonewalling: Someone might engage in stonewalling behavior; such as refusing to communicate or cooperate as a strategy of avoidance.
• Deflecting: Deflecting is when someone changes the subject or attempts to place the focus of attention elsewhere in order to avoid the issue.
• Isolation: Someone might isolate themselves in order to avoid something they don’t want to face.
• Escapism: A person might throw themselves into an activity, relationship or situation in order to avoid something they don’t want to acknowledge.
• Emotional suppression or repression: People might suppress (voluntarily) or repress (subconsciously) emotions they do not want to acknowledge.
• Dissociation: Dissociation is an extreme form of emotional escapism, in which a person might actually “check out” in the presence of conflict and not really be mentally present for a period of time.

Conflict Avoidance in Relationships

Conflict avoidance will often manifest in the way someone moves through relationships with others. Conflict avoidance can also show-up in the way someone connects with themselves. People who tend to be more avoidant may have a harder time identifying their own emotional experiences, for example. Avoidance can make it difficult for partners to resolve conflict, because avoidance often serves as a way of delaying or denying the existence of problems that need to be addressed in order for change and progress to happen.

Below are common signs of conflict avoidance in relationships:

• Passive-aggressive behavior
• Withdrawing
• Commitment issues
• Unusually high or unusually low levels of anxiety
• Distancing
• Dismissiveness
• Pessimism
• Minimizing the importance of the relationship or the problems in the relationship

What Causes Conflict Avoidance?

Conflict avoidance is usually triggered by deeper underlying fear for a person. Trauma can be the cause of conflict avoidance, but this is not always the case. Sometimes simple things can trigger the urge to avoid, or the accumulation of many small things can result in greater avoidance. People can also learn conflict avoidance from watching the way their caregivers navigate conflict and modeling that behavior. People with higher levels of insight are able to navigate their conflict avoidance more successfully because they are able to engage in self-awareness around these tendencies and sometimes respond in a healthier way, in addition to being aware of their triggers.

Possible causes of conflict avoidance include:

• Fears of rejection: Someone may avoid in order to prevent themselves from being hurt or rejected (e.g. I’ll reject them before they reject me).
• People-pleasing tendencies: Someone may struggle with assertiveness and may not know how to communicate their needs and boundaries with other people.
• Low self-awareness: Someone may not have a strong connection with themselves and find it difficult to know what they want in life or how they feel about things.
• Fear of emotions: Some people may have deep fears around emotions and will avoid any situation which might trigger an emotional response of any kind.
• Growing-up in a conflict averse or conflict heavy environment: Children who grew-up in environments where there was an absence of conflict or excessive or even dangerous levels of conflict may also be more likely to avoid conflict themselves. If you’ve never seen conflict resolved in a healthy way, it’s hard to learn how to do that as an adult.

Impacts of Conflict Avoidance

The consequences of conflict avoidance, while at times delayed, can be great. Conflict avoidance can affect many different areas of life and general functioning. Research has even found that individuals with higher levels of avoidance experience higher levels of general psychological distress.² Conflict avoidance can also impact an individual’s performance in important areas of life outside relationships, such as at work and in achieving overarching life goals.

Impacts of conflict avoidance may include:

• Resentment in relationships: When problems go unaddressed, this can lead to higher levels of resentment in relationships.
• Depression: Sometimes, chronic avoidance can lead to depression.
• Anxiety: Conflict avoidance can manifest in anxiety and even panic attacks if left unaddressed.
• Low self-esteem: People who avoid conflict may also end up not feeling great about themselves and their ability to solve difficult problems.
• Not living up to potential: Sometimes people who avoid conflict feel that they don’t live up to their potential in life and may miss out on opportunities for growth because of avoiding difficult situations.

How to Overcome Conflict Avoidance

The first step in overcoming conflict avoidance is recognizing that this is something you struggle with. This first step is often the most difficult because people who are high in conflict avoidance are also less likely to want to address this issue. Engaging in distress tolerance, or the ability to accept and experience difficult emotions, is also a useful first step in increasing one’s ability to accept conflict when it arises, rather than avoid it. Direct behavioral training, like learning assertiveness and communication strategies, is also a useful step in decreasing conflict avoidance.

Here are 8 tips for dealing with conflict avoidance:

1. Stay Calm & Respectful

It is important to work on regulating your nervous system even during times of high stress. Breathing techniques and mindful mantras are two strategies that might help someone stay calm during conflict.

2. Identify Your Triggers

Knowing your triggers can help reduce conflict avoidance. If someone has more insight into the things that are likely to cause them distress, they can take preventative measures to address these problems before they start rather than avoid them after they have already happened.

3. Practice at Home

Sometimes it helps people to practice navigating conflict at home through having internal dialogues, journaling or watching examples of other people navigating conflict in healthy ways and then practicing those strategies themselves.

4. Increase Emotional Awareness

By learning to increase emotional awareness, you will become more connected to yourself and others in an authentic way and feel less afraid of emotions when they arise. You’ll also learn improved ways for expressing emotions. Engaging in distress tolerance training of difficult emotions as well as becoming more comfortable naming and sitting with emotions when they arise will also likely help decrease conflict avoidance.

5. Work Through Trauma

Sometimes conflict avoidance can be tied to trauma, especially associated with family of origin and other important early relationships. By healing trauma and learning new and healthier ways of navigating relationships, you might begin to notice a decrease in conflict avoidant behaviors.

6. Communication & Assertiveness Training

By learning how to more effectively communicate your emotions and boundaries in a non-triggered state, you will likely feel more prepared to face conflict directly, rather than avoiding it. It also helps to become more comfortable with not doing what others want or saying things you know people might not want to hear.

7. Increase the Mind-Body Connection

By becoming more centered in your body, you often begin to feel more connected to yourself in a deeper way and are less likely to dissociate or escape in the presence of emotional pain or discomfort. Dissociation is one common subconscious strategy used to avoid pain that is physical or emotional. If you begin to be more sensitive to physical discomfort; able to acknowledge and change it, you may begin to feel more empowered to change situations that feel scary or make you feel helpless. Practicing mindfulness, engaging in exercise and breathwork are common ways people increase their mind-body connection.

8. Engage in Values Clarification

Knowing yourself, what you want in life, and knowing your values is a helpful way to decrease conflict avoidance. Sometimes people might avoid conflict because they don’t actually know what they want or where they stand on a particular issue. By engaging actively in naming and clarifying your underlying values, you may feel more confident to address conflict when it arises.

When to Seek Professional Help

If conflict avoidance is causing problems in relationships, at home or at work and other important areas of life it may be helpful to seek professional help to address this issue. Chronic depression, anxiety and low self-esteem can also be side effects of unacknowledged conflict avoidance. You can find the right therapist through online therapy options.