Conflict

I have been allowing myself to be ruled by fear.  I have known this on a very basic level, and I know many, many traumatizing events from my past have led me to this place of fear.  I hesitate to call them “events,” since I would be hard-pressed to pull up just one situation to memory and describe it as a hard-and-fast, start-and-stop occurrence as I would think of an event.  It’s more an uncomfortable, unpleasant churning miasma of discord.  As a result of these deeply rooted traumas, I tend to shrink away from conflict on such a massive scale as to anticipate it and change course to avoid it.  There may never have even been a conflict at all; I just will never give the situation enough space to play out to have to find out.  This evasion exists on all levels of my life.  Work, family, friendships, relationships, even just random encounters on a plane or walking down the street.  If I feel a rebuke coming, I duck, cover, dodge, weave, run away.  And if all else fails and I find myself actually faced with a conflict I cannot prevent, I will soothe and placate and take blame for any number of things that don’t even make sense.  I will bolster the other person or people, assuring them how right I believe they are.  Anything and everything to de-escalate immediately and never actually resolve the conflict.  Live to run away another day.

With some of my latest self-healing work, I’m realizing it all boils down to a lack of trust.  I do not trust myself to speak my truth confidently and with conviction.  I do not trust that my truth will ever be well received.  And most of all, I do not trust other people to still love me or, in the case of work or other less intimate relationships, to want to continue to interact with me.  And then I’ll be alone again.  I’ve been largely on my own for almost a decade now, holding most everyone I do trust on some level at arm’s length, never forming a romantic attachment of any relevance, doing a large amount of my own work or even accepting subpar work that I then need to clean up myself rather than risking an encounter that will turn ugly and cause me to lose the people I do have working for me.

But here’s a reality I am slowly coming to learn.  Without conflict, I am not testing the bounds of the relationships I have around me.  I am robbing myself the opportunity to weed out those whose time or attention or loyalty is conditional, whose space in my life could well be jeopardizing attachments that would better benefit me.  I am robbing those around me the opportunity to have a healthy discourse with me that may very well lead to a healthier or more productive connection.

So moving forward, I am going to challenge myself to have the tough conversations when needed.  They may cause momentary discomfort.  I need to trust myself that I am strong enough now to say what needs to be said to assert my needs.  And then I must simply allow the outcome to happen as it will.  Avoiding conflict is really only one more of the many ways I delude myself into thinking I have control over things that are out of my power to control.  And as with many of the fears I’ve been working on revealing and overcoming, once I face them down, they lose their power over me, and I regain the only empowerment that is not all illusion.