Does the idea of conflict make you want to run for the hills?

Maybe you keep the peace even when you’re upset. Or you avoid the conversation altogether. Maybe the second someone is disappointed with you, your focus shifts to making them feel better. Or maybe the first sign of conflict has you shutting down completely. Your mind goes blank, you stop talking, and all you want is for the conversation to end.

While these all look different and may even seem harmless, these are all patterns of avoiding conflict. 

And conflict avoidance isn’t harmless. Over time, conflict avoidance can leave you feeling resentful, emotionally exhausted, or taken advantage of – and it also affects those around you.

The good news is that you don’t have to fear conflict forever. EMDR can help you reprogram how your body and brain react to difficult situations and give you the tools to navigate healthier relationships.

No dramatic personality changes required.

Why Conflict Feels So Unsafe

Before we address your conflict avoidance, I need you to understand where it started. Because you didn’t just come into the world afraid to disagree with others. 

It was learned.

Conflict avoidance is a communication style. At some point when you were young, your beautiful, magical brain learned conflict wasn’t safe, and it clung to that. 

That doesn’t mean your adult self would look back on your childhood and say, “Yeah, that was dangerous.” But the world looked a lot different to your brain back then.

You learned it was a threat to love and connection

Maybe you were a kid, and your parent had a particularly loud voice. So, Mom being angry felt enormous. Your brain didn’t have the perspective to think, “She’s frustrated with me right now, but our relationship is okay.”

No, it was a baby caveman walking around.

It may have registered something much more basic like…Mom is mad at me. What if she doesn’t love me anymore? What happens to me if I lose that connection? I will die without an adult to keep me safe. 

So you adjusted.

Or you learned it was a physical threat

For other people, the danger was much more literal. You may have grown up in a home where disagreement meant screaming, punishment, intimidation, violence, or another consequence you genuinely needed to protect yourself from.

So you reacted.

Either way, your brain learned something about what happens when conflict enters the room. Avoid it, smooth it over, or freeze and shut down. It worked then, and your brain hung on to that into adulthood. 

Nowadays you have more agency. You have more power. But your beautiful, magical brain didn’t get the memo, so it never updated how you respond to conflict.

What Conflict Avoidance Looks Like

There’s no one specific way to avoid conflict. Because it’s a response to feeling unsafe, the brain does one of three things – flight, fawn, or freeze. (The fourth trauma response – fight – doesn’t typically show up in conflict avoidance the way we’re discussing it here.) 

If this were a Cosmo quiz, I’d be telling you to get a pencil out to see which conflict avoidance behavior style is yours. 

The Fawner – You Try to Keep the Peace

Fawning is about seeking safety through connection and compliance. Instead of risking someone being angry, disappointed, or disconnected from you, you work to smooth things out as quickly as possible.

You’re the peacekeeper in your family and friend group.

You may say you agree even when you don’t. You start caretaking the other person’s emotions. You pay close attention to their mood so you can adjust yourself around it. You tell yourself that what you want isn’t worth standing up for.

From the outside, it may look like you’re easygoing or accommodating. Inside, your brain may be working overtime to make sure everyone else’s needs are met.

The Freeze Champ – You Completely Shut Down

Just like in freeze tag, the first sign of conflict may trigger your freeze response.

You’re not necessarily trying to make the other person happy. You’re trying to disappear from the situation altogether.

When conflict appears, you may feel numb, detached, unable to think, or physically frozen. The words you had five minutes ago are suddenly nowhere to be found. You zone out, stop responding, or feel like your brain is officially offline.

If we could hand you Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak at that moment, you’d happily put it on and disappear.

That shutdown is different from fawning because the motivation isn’t primarily connection. It’s disconnection. Your nervous system is essentially saying, “I don’t know what to do here, so I’m getting out.” And because physically leaving might not be an option, you’re making sure you flee mentally.

The Fleer – You run away  

Flight is when your brain consistently tries to find the fastest path to get away from conflict. 

You may feel an overwhelming urge to leave the room, end the conversation, or somehow teleport yourself somewhere else entirely. And if you can’t physically get away, you may escape in other ways like changing the subject, dodging the conversation, or avoiding the person altogether.

Think of that friend who doesn’t text back instead of saying they can’t, or simply don’t want to, do something.

Flight can also show up before the conflict even happens. You may keep yourself so busy that there’s never enough time or space for a difficult conversation to start. Work, errands, random Netflix shows to binge – anything that lets you stay in motion instead of addressing the discomfort.

With flight, your brain is very much on. It’s actively plotting your escape route, even if it’s unconsciously doing so. Your nervous system takes over. There are more feelings of panic and worry as your brain is going, “How the heck do I get out of this?”

And these responses can overlap. If you already know you tend to freeze during conflict, you may start avoiding difficult conversations altogether (or walking away) because you know how uncomfortable it’s going to feel once you’re in one. If you’re a fleer and you can’t physically get away from a conflict, you may start peacekeeping and agreeing to whatever just to end the uncomfortable conversation and make your getaway. If you know you push down your own feelings for others, you may start avoiding difficult conversations.

What Conflict Avoidance Costs You

Avoiding conflict may feel like the easiest option in the moment, but over time it can start affecting your relationships in ways you don’t actually want.

If you tend to fawn, you may become the person who always gives in, keeps everyone happy, or takes care of everyone else’s feelings first. That can leave you feeling resentful, taken advantage of, or like no one really knows what you want. 

And it’s not always consciously done.

Expert peacekeepers do so from the start of a relationship, so sometimes the other person doesn’t even realize they’re steamrolling you. You’ve gotten so good at making everything seem fine that people don’t know what you may really want.

If you tend to freeze or shut down, the relationship can get stuck in a different way. 

Hard conversations never really get finished because the second things get uncomfortable, you disconnect, go quiet, or leave. Friends or family may start feeling like they can’t bring anything difficult to you. So you both start avoiding the hard conversations.

Healthy relationships require being able to disagree, stay emotionally connected, and move through the conversation safely. If you’re always appeasing or disappearing, the relationships in your life can only go so deep. Over time, you may lose touch with what you want, what you need, and how to show up as yourself. And in turn, other people can feel the disconnection, so they adjust, leaving your relationships constantly unfulfilling, exhausting, or stressful for everyone involved.

And then after all that, the other shoe drops. Because avoiding conflict doesn’t make it disappear. It just leaves it sitting there until you run into it again.

EMDR Can Help With Conflict Avoidance

That’s the part EMDR can help change. 

EMDR lets us look at when your brain first learned that conflict was something to avoid and help it recognize that you have more safety, more agency, and more and more strategies now. 

Then we work on giving you tools to recognize what you want out of situations and communicate your way through conflicts. We work with real-life conflicts you’ve faced or are facing, so you can put the tools into practice in a safe place before taking them into your everyday life. 

This can happen in ongoing EMDR or an EMDR Intensive. I often lean toward an EMDR intensive for conflict avoidance because the same strategies that help you avoid discomfort in relationships often play out in the therapy room by helping you avoid discomfort there too, even when your goal is to move past it. A longer session gives us more time to get in, stay in, and actually work through it.

If you’re ready to change how conflict makes you feel, reach out and let’s talk.

But know, I won’t promise you unicorns. The goal isn’t to make you suddenly love conflict or feel nothing. The goal is to make conflict something you can handle without automatically losing your voice, shutting down, or taking responsibility for everyone else’s feelings.

Because conflict is going to happen. That’s just life. You can’t change that. But you can change how you respond to it, and how it affects your relationship with others.

Remember, you’ve got this! You already took the first step and found this article. And now, as always, I’ve got you.