How to Deal with a Conflict Avoidant Spouse: 5 Ways

Harvard Business School Online’s Business Insights Blog provides the career insights you need to achieve your goals and gain confidence in your business skills. Encourage others who how to deal with someone who avoids conflict are in conflict to deal directly with the person they are in conflict with. Avoiding the conflict and venting to others tends to escalate the conflict and fuels the rumor mill.

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steps for better conflict resolution

You might think your relationship isn’t as good as you would like it to be. Moreover, when an individual has been hurt in relationships when they felt a problem, they may start to act like there are no problems. Instead, they will attempt to act like everything is okay all the time because they want to please the other person.

The conflict avoidant person will make themselves uncomfortable in order to not make anyone else upset or uncomfortable. As you can see conflict avoidance negatively affects multiple areas of your relationship, but it can also affect your personal health. When people bottle up their feelings, it can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression. Suppressed emotions can also lead to physical problems like heart disease and high blood pressure. It’s possible to overcome conflict avoidance and learn to handle confrontation in a productive, healthy way.

Why You Need to Stop Avoiding Conflict (and What to Do Instead)

Spinelli highly recommends therapy for people who tend to avoid conflict because it can help you understand why you avoid conflict and practice conflict-management techniques. Have you ever wanted to keep the peace and not upset someone? This may be what your mate is trying to do when they practice conflict avoidance in relationships. It could take a lot of talking and getting them to understand that they can say what they feel. How can conflict avoidance manifest in a relationship?

• Putting firm boundaries in place is also a good way to handle difficult relationships with friends and in social settings.
• So, take a step back and let them deal with the after-effects of their addictive behavior.
• The benefits are that you and the other party value your relationship and make sacrifices to reach a mutually beneficial resolution.

What can change are your strategies and understanding of their personality limitations. Most often, the reason for ongoing unresolved conflict in a relationship is because the high-conflict personality lacks the emotional maturity to engage in consistent relationship repair after a rupture. The third conflict resolution strategy is accommodation, in which you acquiesce to the other party’s needs. Use accommodating in instances where the relationship matters more than your goal. In workplace conflicts—where your goals are typically important and you care about maintaining a lasting relationship with colleagues—avoidance can be detrimental.

Don’t end the sentence with “We need to talk.”

For example, if you pitch an idea for a future project in a meeting, and one of your colleagues says they believe it will have a negative impact, you could resolve the conflict by rescinding your original thought. You can also use it when standing up for yourself and in instances where you feel unsafe. In those cases, asserting yourself and reaching safety is more critical than your relationships with others. Alternatively, you can think of these axis labels as the “importance of my goal” and the “importance of this relationship.” If your assertiveness is high, you aim to achieve your own goal. If your cooperativeness is high, you strive to help the other person reach theirs to maintain the relationship.