I have always been perceived as outspoken, moody and sometimes even confrontational. I can feel it in people’s tone the moment I flag something suspicious, which I normally do when it’s nothing but a faint smell, not an outright stench.
It has always made things incredibly tricky for me, as most people tend to prefer a more reactive approach.
I know very well the fear of looking dumb just because you raised an alarm just to be a false one, or to be so at the ready that you end up extinguishing a flame before anyone could notice the fire, just the mess you did in order to put it out.
It’s an incredibly unrewarding feeling, so being proactive is seen as simply trying too hard. In an area of highly competitive egos, bringing unwanted attention to oneself is a risk not worth taken.
It’s easier to justify spending time on things when they are a full blown-out crisis and be the hero that solves them, than to do something about it when there is still time to stop them.
But maintaining peace requires you not only to not avoid conflict, but to embrace it as soon as it rears its head.
Sadly, it has become outright impossible to act with precaution, as people are obsessed with not being perceived as negative, even if it is in order to find solutions. It has turned us all into radical optimists, more worried about appearances than clarity, true narcissists that rather detach that sustain a period of misunderstanding.
I have met my fair share of avoidants in my 40 years of life. A lot of them came from my own family. But outside of them I can still count way too many to not be consistently on the look out for those same traits that we now call red flags.
The first one is usually the self-serving attitude: you will notice how easy it is for them to do things that benefit them directly, while being physically unable to put half the attention on things that won’t. Even if in both instances, the action itself doesn’t require much of an effort in the first place. You can see it in the way they’ll count their thank yous and their sorries as if each of them cost them a bit of their soul.
“We have to be selfish some times”
This attitude seems fairly innocuous, until you realise that this incapability, to them, also applies to things that will benefit themselves and others equally, and even more so if they have to do it without some recognition that would tilt the scales in their favour.
They just can’t do it either.
Sometimes we call it weaponised incompetence, the most common example is to always clean poorly so someone else has to finish it for you.
But that only happens as the outcome of them having slowly tested and established how much they can get away with within a relationship (of any type) before they are called out for their behaviour.
For them, life becomes a system of rewards and punishments, replacing any internal concept of wrong vs right, a moral compass.
They see a rope, they pull it
Those initial tests are the only time when they will willingly forfeit their pride for the sake of knowing what the limits are. Again, as it benefits them directly, putting away their feeling of superiority becomes as easy as breathing, a performance.
More so in bigger groups, where they first need to assess how much people will prioritise peace over any type of conflict.
And that brings us to the second trait.
Treat conflict as the problem, not as the consequence of actions
It is gut-wrenching to realise that age wasn’t the cure for immaturity. Wherever I go, people keep thinking that the conflict starts when someone says they’ve been offended, or even, that something is wrong in their view.
The conflict really starts the moment someone blocks those feelings for ANY reason whatsoever, confusing intentions with outcomes.
If there was no intention to offend, what is the problem with discussing it?
If the outcome nonetheless was someone being offended, what is the issue in checking the reason behind it?
If they sincerely stood up for peace, wouldn’t they be more willing to reach an understanding, as minimal as the issue might be, than to dissolve the offence into an impossibility that doesn’t require dwelling?
So many ifs for all their buts, as that’s normally the word proceeding any of their responses. Some might minimise, refuse to understand or even try to turn the tables, fillibustering their heart out until problem solving becomes more trouble than it’s worth.
But silence is usually their best option
Going by the law of minimum effort, it’s always best to delay. Because that’s what they will resort to, if you let them. Any way to disrupt, ignore or simply buy time is preferable to being exposed to accountability. It gives them time to find a solid excuse for their behaviour, shape the narrative or put enough distance from the matter so responsibility blurs in everyone’s mind. All for the sake of skipping any agreement on a truth that would put even an inch of blame on them.
I used to have enough empathy for egotistical people – and the residue is still there – to understand how most of the time, accepting any blame with its consequences takes a huge toll on our self-esteem. But it turns out that the reason is the lack of practice. The cost of accepting your imperfection is nothing when compare to the cost of never accepting who you truly are.
They must be really hiding something when a 10 minutes talk to clear the air becomes such a resounding obstacle in their psyche.
They don’t fear someone solving a problem, they fear the unravelling that comes with being exposed as the ones that wouldn’t. Because they really don’t care.
So the same way they see selflessness, equality and fairness as a weakness, they also become allergic to anyone that takes conflict and the uncertainty of its repercussions, head on.
In my case, they got me used to a tactic I now call erase and rewind. That comeback with a smile that implies that a few days, then a couple weeks or even a few months of silence should be the final solution to any problem, because bringing it back has you creating conflict all over again, with the added extra of sounding petty when they are acting nice.
For them is such a little effort, against paying the price of dealing with their lack of empathy and compassion.
So the need to avoid conflict has to permeate anyone around, or it won’t work. They can’t allow for anyone to raise concerns or problems, even to others, as they risk having to sit through it, when their turn comes, eventually.
So a new reality is established, one in which long conversations about any given feeling are frowned upon, getting to deep on a topic is a waste of time, talking about politics is a futile effort because you can’t change the world and keeping it light is the norm in order to live…
A peaceful life, at any given cost
So that’s how they behave socially. Because if they find a group of people more worried about maintaining peace than fairness, they’ve struck gold. And to be fair, can you blame someone for using a cheat code everyone participates in?
Well, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Because in order to do so, you have to surrender the concept of a sustainable world, adopt a parasite mentality and embrace hypocrisy as a commodity while refusing to waive your right to complaint when things don’t work out. Because as the saying goes, in order for evil to thrive, a lot of self-confessed good people have to standby and do NOTHING.
But peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the reward for fully resolving it
So narcissists thrives the moment we confuse silence with peace.
Speaking up with war.
And we are already there. We have been for a long while, we saw it happening in real life, it keeps happening everyday, governments always at the front, validating for the masses that same individualism that will make you rich. Mixed with the othering of anyone that dares to break ranks, speak up and jeopardise the silence that benefits them.
I now see it everywhere, even on people performing progressiveness while fully subscribed to this way of life in their own social circles. With their love ones, with their families. They are speaking up for injustice as a global concept, while failing to understand that if we don’t stand by it within our local communities, the battle is already lost.
Who profits in a world where we don’t solve our problems, but instead we just pay to be distracted from its source?
It’s all part of the new wave of capitalism that started on the 70s, once the memory of war had fully coalesced into a romanticised victory.
It became contagious to anyone with blind ambition and it has now been recycled for the masses into the dot com bubble, the life coach gurus and the anything tech startups, the closest for me to understand and follow.
It was then translate it into therapy talk to be consumed on social media, again, recycled as a solution to our aching through 60s clips that can validate our ego. In those moments of clarity when we realise silence has neither kept the peace, nor allow us to learn anything of value, we have someone telling us that you just didn’t practice enough self-care, you didn’t drop enough people, you didn’t live for yourself. We replace the possibility of a temporary battle with the reality of a permanent Cold War. It stopped us from learning to communicate effectively, to build bridges instead of burning them.
Things just didn’t work out, but did you try to make them work, or did you just hope they would?
Whether something can be solved or not, that’s never a reason to not talk about it. Actually, the more reason to find out which way the coin will land, so effective actions can be thought and taken before we have to agree to disagree.
Because avoidants are not only running away from an uncomfortable argument, they do so from those opportunities to learn to communicate, to solve, to listen, to deescalate, to soothe, to reach out, to give closure, to understand, to grow as a collective. Ironically, it will just eat up on their personality, shaping that feeling of initial intelligence and superiority into self-doubt and incapacity on the realisation that the world left them behind, not for their imperfections, but for their true lack of progress in their own maturity, their own self. No amount of getting away with anything will conquer that lack of self-development.
Give a man a fish
The reason why I started writing this, wasn’t to have a go at all those examples of selfish people I have in my memory bank. It is a first attempt to try to reach those who are helping with their own silence to maintain a false sense of tranquility, stunning any real sense of growth on themselves and others and all to run away from those relationships once the illusion of happiness disappears.
I honestly prefer to apparently waste my time failing to resolve a conflict with someone that might eventually leave my life, than to be utterly unprepared to deal with the people that truly want to stay and build one with me. I don’t mind being the source of conflict, but I would dread being the one creating distance and tension when the conflict first appears.
We should always choose to point out a fixable problem, than to turn one into an unsolvable rift.
You will never learn in a week what you postponed for a lifetime.
But is that a reason not to start? Because in reality, avoidance is the only thing you end up becoming a master of. Learning is realising, and making people realise, that if they really want to master anything, they have to sit through the awkwardness, the embarrassment, the shame of failing for most of its journey.
If you don’t learn to love, you will be hating it for a lifetime.
I often think of the people I’ve met with undoubtedly good intentions – most – that continuously struggle to trust, care, love and embrace the journey without turning it into a competition, a tug of war on who performs it best.
If you are prepared to fight for peace by keeping up appearances, alchemising hate into a fake smile that makes negativity awkward, how will the people you truly love know the one you offer them is truly genuine? They won’t.
Because we have been convinced that there is no benefit on thriving on that struggle, to make it worth your time, even when the direct benefit to you is not fully apparent upfront.
To realise that not just helping, but actively seeking to deal with conflict as soon as it shows, even as a bystander, is of equal mutual benefit to all parties. That trying your best to be a good person rarely feels as such, but is what makes you one. That there’s not a person, sentence or future time that will somehow effortlessly bring it out of you.
It’s how you ensure you are prepared to defend whatever treasures you find in this world, if you are lucky enough to get any and preserve its essence for what it does to the world, not just to you.
It is teaching yourself and others how to fish sustainably in a world that wants you comfortable paying for what they bottom trawled out of our beautiful oceans.
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