How Conflict Avoidance Can Flip Your Moral Compass Upside Down

Today is the last chance to register for Healing Attachment Wounds in Relationship with me and Harvard psychiatrist Jeffrey Rediger. We start tomorrow, so sign up now if you want to join us or have access to the recording.

Register for Healing Attachment Wounds In Relationship here.

In case you can’t make it or are still on the fence, let’s talk a little more about how severe attachment wounding can lead to a kind of conflict avoidance that makes it hard to be in integrity- with yourself and with your loved ones.

As I wrote about in Is Conflict Avoidance Making You Violate Your Integrity?, having a strong moral compass means being honest with yourself- and others- about who you are, what you care about, what you believe, and what you’re willing to do to put action behind your stated values. But the truth is that being honest means sometimes upsetting people when you don’t cooperate with the agendas they might have for you. The old adage “You can’t please everyone” couldn’t be more true. This is why politicians can seem so two-faced- because you can’t please everyone if you take any strong stand or political position. But some power-hungry people will talk in circles to try to win votes, even if it means flat out lying.

Some people with severe attachment trauma are sort of like politicians in their personal lives too. They chameleon themselves into whoever or whatever they think the person in front of them wants them to be. And then moments later, they might contradict the very thing they just asserted in order to please someone new, effectively lying in order to avoid confrontation or expressions of disagreement or displeasure.

While being a pleasing, accommodating, generous, compliant person might make you likable and win you friends, it’s also a practically guaranteed set up to betray the very people that you love and who want to be able to trust you. As I pointed out in the last blog post about conflict avoidance and integrity,, if you haven’t been honest about what’s okay and not okay from the get go, it’s not fair to blame the other person or passive aggressively punish them for making a request you’ve said yes to when you weren’t really a yes.

Let me give you more examples of how conflict avoidance can push you out of integrity with yourself and others, just to help motivate you to do the deep somatic work, nervous system regulation, and trauma healing necessary to handle healthy confrontation so you can hold yourself and others in integrity.

Trouble With Truth-Telling

Let’s say you screw up and make a small mistake. Someone has asked you to get milk from the grocery store next time you’re there, but you come home without the milk. The truth is that you forgot. But you don’t want to rock the boat or deal with someone’s upset, so you fudge the truth and tell the other person they never asked for milk. Only there’s a text proving that they did ask for the milk, and you did say you’d get it. And now, instead of just a small mistake that would likely be easily forgiven, you’re now in hot water because you’re gaslighting the person to try to cover up your honest mistake.

Or let’s say you have a new lover, and your co-parenting ex, who you get along well with, finds an unfamiliar clothing item at your house and asks you if you’ve met someone new. You don’t want to rock the boat, so you lie and say the sweater belongs to a mutual friend. Then you try to recruit your friend to corroborate your lie, only your friend refuses to do so. When your ex finds out you lied, you’re in the dog house, not because you don’t have a right to take a new lover, but because your lie to avoid any potential boat rocking has breached trust with someone who trusted you to tell the truth.

Overcommitting

Someone asks you if you want to do x, y, or z, and you say yes because you want to please this person or avoid upsetting them, even though you’re really a maybe or even a no. Then when it comes time to follow through on your commitment, you back out or follow through with a chip on your shoulder. Or you lie to make up an excuse to get you out of what you’ve said you’ll do. Either way, you’ve now betrayed the person you wanted to avoid upsetting, adding insult to injury. Usually, your “no” initially is far preferred over your acting out or betraying trust once you’ve dishonestly said yes, when you weren’t a committed yes. The integrous thing to do is to take a pause when someone asks you to do something. “I’m not sure yet. I’m a maybe until I get more clear” is a perfectly valid response.

Putting Boundaries In Place

Someone asks you to put a boundary in place to protect the safety and trust of a relationship, and because you want to please that person, you agree to the boundary request, while secretly resenting it and finding it controlling. The boundary you’ve agreed to requires you to confront someone else, who might not like the boundary. So your conflict-avoidant part kicks up and simply avoids naming the boundary. Then the person who requested the boundary busts you and legitimately gets upset. Now you’re out of integrity, since you said yes, when you weren’t really willing to confront the person about the boundary needs.

Negotiating Agreements

Let’s say someone who shares your home makes a request. He wants you to take on more financial responsibility for home care costs- so he can scale back to part time and pay less of the cost of living, since he pays far more of the expenses than you do. You want to please him and avoid upsetting him, so you agree to go back to work, even though you’ve been out of the workplace for years and you dread the idea of getting a job. But then you procrastinate and six months go by without you so much as updating your resume. Truth is, you weren’t really a yes when you agreed to start job hunting, and now he’s legitimately pissed that you tricked him into believing you were going to bear some of the financial responsibility, when really, you don’t want to go back to work and just lacked the courage to confront him with your truth.

Out Of Integrity With Yourself

You promise yourself- and your partner- that you’re going to finally quit your soul-sucking job by a certain date, so you can be more attentive to your family and find a more relationship-friendly job. You really mean it when you tell your partner you’re quitting. But doing so means confronting your boss, who relies on you heavily and might get upset if you’re leaving. Your partner keeps waiting and waiting for you to tell your boss, but you’re procrastinating because you’re scared of your boss’s potential meltdown. The quit date comes and goes, and now you’re out of integrity with yourself and your partner. Conflict avoidance: 1. Integrity: 0.

Being A Chameleon

Mutating yourself into becoming who you think the people in front of you want you to be might have been a helpful, protective adaptation at one point in your life. The problem is that if you’re chameleoning yourself to become who others want you to be, you’re sacrificing intimacy and being known. You’re sabotaging being seen for who you really are. You become like Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride. When Richard Gere, the journalist writing a story about her, asks her many fiances how she likes her eggs, they all say some version of, “Over easy, like me.” Or “Scrambled, like me.” Or “Soft boiled, like me.” When he asks her how she likes her eggs, she actually has no idea, so he cooks up a bunch of eggs and makes her choose. While you might get some rewards from chameleoning yourself into who you think others want you to be, doing so avoids conflict, but it also avoids intimacy. It prevents you from getting known. It avoids letting someone else see and accept or reject who you really are.

Failure To Hold Your Own Boundaries

One previously happily married client confessed that he had cheated on his wife with someone he had no interest in sexually or romantically- because he froze and couldn’t handle letting her down when she came onto him sexually. She had been a friend at work, someone he confided in and trusted. Then when she’d invited him to come over to work on a project at her house- and then met him naked at the door- his conflict avoidance and fear of humiliating her with a rejection- caused him to break his monogamy agreement without even meaning to. His wife left him because of it, and he felt such shame and regret, but also confusion. He didn’t really understand why he’d lost his no in the bewilderment of the moment. But in therapy, he remembered that his mother used to play dead whenever he did something she didn’t like. He became so terrified of killing her by disappointing her that he lost his ability to hold to his integrity when at risk of disappointing someone.

Failure To Protect Someone Else’s Boundaries

One conflict-avoidant friend confessed to me that she’d just had sex with a new partner- without telling him first that she has an STD and without using a condom. She knew she should initiate that conversation before things got heated, but the idea of having such an uncomfortable conversation left her silent- until it was too late and he’d already been exposed. She then had to have an even harder conversation- to alert him of his exposure and restore some integrity by suggesting he get tested.

Procrastination

One couple in couple’s therapy fought frequently about the man’s workaholism. His wife felt like he was neglecting the family in order to please his boss, who would spring work on weekends on him- with little notice and without consent from his wife. One Saturday, the couple was hosting a party for 30 people, and the guy got out of bed, showered, and started putting on his work clothes. His wife was shocked. Where was he going? Why was he putting on work clothes on a Saturday, when they were hosting a party? Turns out his boss had asked him to work on Saturday four days earlier. He knew his wife would be furious that he’d said yes to working on a Saturday when they were hosting a party, but instead of bucking up and telling her the truth, his conflict avoidance caused him to put off telling her and procrastinate- until he couldn’t hide it from her anymore. She understandably blew up, and he high tailed it out the door, leaving her to throw the party on her own.

Horses Vs. Camels

A newly married man told his new wife’s daughter he would get a dog with her, even though his wife had made it clear that her work made it impossible for her to accept the responsibility of a dog. He promised his wife- and his stepdaughter, that he would accept all the responsibility for dog care. Two months later, only six months after the wedding, after having voiced no protests and with zero warning, he filed for divorce, leaving his wife and stepdaughter in a bind. If she made him take the dog with him, she would devastate her child, who was very attached to the puppy already. If she kept the dog, she was going to have serious problems finding care for the dog when she had to travel for work. They wound up keeping the dog, but they called the man “Camel” after hearing that you’re better off traversing a desert on a horse than on a camel. Horses show signs of exhaustion and give you warning if they’re petering out, so you can get the horse to an oasis for water, shade, and rest. Camels just drop and die with no warning that they’re not feeling well- and then you’re stranded. People who take on conflict avoidance as a strategy in relationships, who don’t protest when they’re upset and don’t initiate confrontation when they’re unhappy, they behave like camels. They tolerate…tolerate…tolerate…then leave with no warning. Then you’re blind-sided and in shock.

Because of all this, it can be extremely challenging for those who try to get close with conflict-avoidant individuals with a history of extreme attachment trauma. How do you protect your own boundaries and insist upon accountability when your own boundaries are crossed because someone is so conflict-avoidant? How do you extend empathy to someone who’s been hurt this way- without neurotic tolerance and enabling behavior? How can you trust someone who demonstrates repetitively untrustworthy behavior? 

The answers to this question are the topic of a weekend Zoom workshop my partner Jeffrey Rediger and I are teaching- Healing Attachment Wounds In Relationship. 

Learn more and register here.

Those with any attachment style are welcome to join, but it’s specifically for those with secure or anxious attachment, who are struggling to have intimate relationships with people with avoidant or disorganized attachment styles. If you’re not sure of your style, you can take this quiz here. There are ways to earn secure attachment, but the process of getting there is quite a Herculean effort for both parties and requires a lot of endurance and patience- with extremely masterful boundaries. The rewards can be great, though, assuming you’re able to protect yourself in the process, while being the secure enough attachment for someone else- who never got that priceless gift in childhood.

What Causes This Kind Of Conflict Avoidance in Adulthood?

Conflict avoidance is nearly always a trauma symptom. These folks avoid conflict because conflict wasn’t safe in childhood. Humans, by design, are imperfect. We mess up. We make mistakes. We have ruptures in relationships, and if we’re lucky, our parents model for us healthy repair. If children were abused when they made mistakes, or if they were held to an unrealistically high standard of perfectionism in childhood, they will likely take on conflict avoidance as a coping strategy in adulthood.

This is not a conscious choice, usually. It’s automatic. They may even dissociate the minute they sense someone even the least bit upset. Then the dissociation can cause memory loss, so they might not even remember a three hour conversation you had about something hurtful they might have done because of the conflict avoidance. They may get so good at dissociating in the face of any conflict that they fly out at the drop of a hat, which makes it very difficult when it comes to accountability. Conflict-avoidant people can be extremely slippery when it comes time to hold them accountable for wrongdoing. They may deny wrongdoing instead of owning up to their mistakes. They may attack you and blame you for what they themselves are doing. They may do all of the above, in the classic “DARVO” move (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender.)

As part of conflict avoidance, they may also intellectualize and become hyper rational when an emotional response and empathy are needed. It’s part of the dissociation reaction- to go into the head as a way of getting out of the body. But it can feel extremely hurtful to others, when they need a hug and an apology, rather than rationalizing their behavior.

Many conflict-avoidant people also spiritualize their conflict avoidance. Trauma survivors are often also spiritual seekers, and they may get indoctrinated by spiritual teachers who cause them to double down on their conflict avoidance. When spiritual leaders suggest that anger, fear, jealousy, or even grief are unseemly emotions stemming from the ego, they anchor in conflict avoidance even more. When religions or spiritual teachings hammer in the need to transcend feelings, anesthetize feelings, or stuff down emotions, they make those with conflict-avoidant tendencies even more conflict-avoidant. When they teach naive compassion or premature forgiveness- instead of accountability for perpetrators of abuse- they groom those with severe attachment trauma to tolerate even the most egregious, or even criminal, boundary violations.

Conflict-avoidant people may even get a hit of grandiosity off thinking they’re so zen, so enlightened, and so capable of dispassionate equanimity that they appear to be unruffled by even the most extreme abuse. They tell themselves that they’re so masterful at unconditional love and so capacious in their martyrdom that they’re practically Jesus. It’s not easy to come down off that kind of spiritual high horse.

When I crowdsourced this topic on Facebook and asked my community to share their collective wisdom, Lalita Mohini wrote, “I see this ‘don’t rock the boat’ pattern with many of my clients. When we follow the trail back to where this adaptation began as a coping mechanism, it always leads to childhood emotional neglect. They often mention a strict parental style where you dare not break the rules, and it wasn’t safe to make mistakes. Big emotions were forbidden to be expressed, and you constantly had to please your parents in order to feel loved. It results in a disconnection from the authentic self, well into adulthood, resulting in exhibiting the kinds of behaviors you mention.”

The big challenge comes when you’re trying to be close to someone like this.

This is part of what we’ll be discussing in the upcoming Zoom workshop I’m co-teaching with Harvard psychiatrist Jeffrey Rediger- Healing Attachment Wounds In Relationship. Please consider joining us if you’re trying to support someone with severe attachment wounding. We start tomorrow, September 

Learn more & register here