Approach-Avoidance Conflict SpringerLink

For example, one person in the relationship may become jealous when another starts spending a lot of their time going out with co-workers instead of coming home after work. Leaving conflicts unresolved leads to pent-up frustration and a greater sense of loneliness that can build up over time. Similarly, if you’re more comforted by smells, you can keep an essential oil on hand to take a quick whiff of when you’re feeling anxious. Conflict resolution is about standing up for yourself and communicating when you feel angry or frustrated.

• If you view the conflict as having little importance to you, it may be better to ignore it.
• Your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and frustrations have been ignored to protect your relationship with others, but at what expense?
• Conflict resolution is about standing up for yourself and communicating when you feel angry or frustrated.
• In business, the ability to resolve disputes can make the difference between success and failure.

If you are not emotionally invested in the conflict, you may be able to reframe your perspective and see the situation in a different way, therefore resolving the issue. In all these cases, avoiding doesn’t really require an investment of time, emotion, or communication skill, so there is not much at stake to lose. However, while it may be easy to tolerate a problem when you’re not personally invested in it or view it as temporary, when faced with a situation like Amal and Vaughn’s, avoidance may just make the problem worse.

2: Conflict Management Styles

By contrast, one study of over 2,000 people aged 33 to 84 found that those who intentionally resolved daily conflicts reported that their stress diminished. They also experienced fewer negative emotions than others in the study, and their positive emotions remained stable for longer periods of time. When you refuse to deal with a conflict, you are employing the avoiding conflict management style. It’s not always an effective strategy, but in certain situations you may feel you have no choice. Aside from our work life, avoiding conflict can manifest in our romantic relationships, friendships, and even family dynamics.

While avoidance sometimes seems like the best way to deal with conflict, in the long run it ends up harming our intimacy. Conflict avoidance is a type of people-pleasing behavior that typically arises from a deep rooted fear of upsetting others. To state the obvious, we aren’t happier when we come out of conflict worse off, feeling like we haven’t been heard or have been misunderstood.

Toward Interpersonal Conflict Resolution

These two systems, termed promotion and prevention, each serve different survival-relevant concerns. The promotion system is conceived of as orienting the individual toward obtaining nurturance and is thought to underlie higher-level concerns with accomplishment and achievement. In contrast, the prevention system is considered to orient the individual toward obtaining safety and is thought to underlie higher-level concerns with self-protection and fulfillment of responsibilities. The occasional accommodation can be useful in maintaining a relationship. For example, Amal may say, “It’s OK that you gave Sasha some extra money. Sasha did have to spend more on gas this week since the prices went up.” However, being a team player can slip into being a pushover, which people generally do not appreciate.

Learning to manage conflict is extremely important in every area of life. When handled well, disagreement and conflict can lead to positive change. According to many conflict management specialists, most people prefer to avoid clashing when possible. There are negative consequences to avoiding conflict, however.

Working with a conflict avoidant person

Ghosting, for example—ending a relationship by disappearing—has become common. Numerous tech companies are being criticized for laying off people via email rather than in person. Many people experience the pain of estrangement from family members, which can arise without warning or explanation. And whether you view the recently how to deal with someone who avoids conflict documented phenomenon of “quiet quitting” as destructive slacking or healthy boundary setting, it can manifest as avoidance of hard conversations and negotiations about workload. “A lot of people anticipate that talking about how they feel is going to be a confrontation,” psychologist Jennice Vilhauer told the New York Times.

Rather, unless we’ve been trained, we tend to handle conflict habitually, in the default ways we’ve been conditioned through observing others (e.g., family, culture). The desire to avoid conflict in a relationship is common, but for very different reasons. First, involvement with a partner who is unable to perspective-take makes it nearly impossible to work out difficulties constructively. Understandably, a person may wish to avoid these nightmare fights by side-stepping the power struggles.