I used to hate conflict. Fear it, even. Just the thought of having to have a serious conversation with someone would make my skin crawl and make me want to sink into a hole on the ground.
Confrontations were particularly scary for me. My people pleasing conditioning definitely played a role in how it affected me. After all, I had learned at home that confrontations would always, without an exception, end up in a big fight. But the more I walk my healing journey, the more I understand how wrong my perception of conflict, and confrontations, was.
Let’s be real here: unless you’re alone on a desert island, you will sooner or later inevitably encounter conflict with someone in your life. This, however, does not mean that it needs to end up in a fight or even that it has to blow up into a huge thing. Conflict can be as simple as disagreeing with someone on a particular subject.
One thing I used to do whenever conflict arose, was take things personally. I would feel personally attacked if someone spoke to me in more of an aggressive way, for example, because I was used to my father belittling me in the same tone at home. Sometimes I felt like the person I was having a disagreement with was “out to get me”. This was undoubtedly my very own “victim mentality” (also something I had learned at home) speaking. Until I started working on myself, it persisted. And then, without me even being aware of it, I stopped thinking that way. This goes to show how unpredictably stealth healing can be!
The last few weeks I have been experiencing ongoing problems with one particular person at work. Unfortunately, this person is above me and I can’t simply not not interact with them. But last week, I had kind of a revelation, it was as if a curtain had been pulled away and I finally saw what had been in front of me all along. See, I’m the kind of person that will question my own feelings, going as far as gaslighting myself in order to not see what is in front of me: that sometimes people just aren’t good. And there is one very important thing that pretty much shifted my whole opinion regarding this particular conflict with this person: triggers.
I thought, and was to a certain degree correct, that I was being triggered by this person. However, what had been happening was that I was the one doing the triggering! Their reaction to my triggering them, was what was triggering me into not being able to keep my cool whenever we tried talking to each other to solve things that had come up. Does it make sense or did I lose you?
Without going into specific details, and because I want to respect their privacy, this person is a male, in his late 50ies, with a need to be the one calling the shots (or at least look like it). But there is one key thing that has been making our conflict hard to solve: he cannot handle a woman speaking her mind and standing her ground. He wants women around him to be quiet and do what he says without complaining and, while this may work for some, it isn’t me and my job requires me to speak up on certain things and make decisions that he would maybe do differently, but can’t be done the way he wants.
Now, at first, my instinct was simply to think he was an asshole and out to get me, that he had something against me. But my view has changed. Although misogyny surely plays a (very big) role, I have noticed that it goes deeper than that. Somewhere during his life, this person has experienced some kind of trauma, which made him see the roles of women and men very black and white and, when someone like me (who challenges his views) comes along, he doesn’t know how to handle it and his attachment style gets triggered.
Him becoming loud and, at times, even aggressive, in turn, triggered my own traumas and activated my own protesting behaviors, which in turn triggered him even more, turning every attempt to resolve the issues into a vicious cycle. Being aware of this had an enormous impact on how I saw things!
While beforehand I took things personally and truly believed this person must have something against me, I now see that it, in fact, has nothing to do with me and everything to do with things he hasn’t dealt with. Trauma he has experienced and never worked on healing. I know nothing about his family life, but I know his father is around the age of mine, which would explain how he (re)acts when we have a conflict.
Being aware of this has also dramatically changed the way I handle the situation at hand. It made me trust more in myself and my knowledge surrounding my job. Instead of doubting myself, I now can see when I’m trying to gaslight myself regarding this particular situation. This would never, in a million years, have been possible, if I hadn’t started healing! I would still be in a victim mentality, thinking I was being personally attacked and letting it affect me. Don’t get me wrong, I still feel very strongly about the situation at hand, still get frustrated and still annoy the crap out of my coworkers whenever something happens, but I don’t let it affect me and that makes a huge difference not only in my wellbeing, but also in the way I handle it going forward.
I am sharing this with you, because I find it is important to see that even someone who has been healing, who has been working on themselves, who is much further along than someone who may be starting their journey now, never stops learning. Healing isn’t going to happen from one day to another. There is no magic pill to make it all go away. No, you have to work on it, day in and day out. There is no taking breaks from healing, no “I’m not in the mood today”, no, it’s an ongoing process, a never-ending road you will walk until the end of your life.
But possibly the most important thing to remember: you will see progress when you least expect it and that, my friends, is why you should keep working on yourself! Because in those moments when, when you least expect it, you see how far you’ve come, you will know it is worth it!