Confronting Confrontation Aversion

You know those people who seem able to approach anyone and confront them calmly and respectfully about any potentially prickly subject and come away unruffled, still centered and confident in themselves, as if all they'd done was walk up to a bank teller and make a deposit?

They're not normal.

We envy them. We admire them. We watch them suspensefully in movies. Forget combat -- confronting someone, armed with nothing more than our vulnerable, personal take on the truth, is way scarier (partly because we civilians can actually relate to it).

When a guy on screen lifts his chin and strides into that particularly stomach-twisting situation, like a courtroom or a hostile boardroom, we women swoon. Don Draper, we love you.

In real life, it's less plausible, more baffling, mildly suspicious, even. How do they do that? They must be out-of-touch with their feelings, or in denial, or... maybe he's a robot. (Should we test that theory? Has he ever injured a human being or, through inaction, allowed a human being to come to harm?)

Calmly confrontating someone is not something we naturally know how to do. We have to learn, and we can't learn the easy way -- books, lectures, watching instructive videos -- we have to learn-by-doing.

One obstacle to the learning-by-doing is fear. Most of the likely outcomes of a confrontation are experiences we fear: someone disagreeing, disapproving, getting angry, yelling, attacking, or -- perhaps worst of all -- dismissing us and refusing to give our concern any validation. These are really unpleasant experiences; just writing them out makes my stomach turn. Our nervous systems can't help but shrink when faced with a task that will potentially provoke them. We'd rather choose the path of least resistance. Strongly.

Another obstacle to the learning-by-doing is low self-esteem, also known as, "Who am I to say?" We don't feel like we have the right to speak up. In a primal sense, we feel weaker and decide to just submit to the alpha. It's another form of self-abandonment. When combined with fear, it's practically unquestionable. We accept inferiority. Cheerfully.

The final obstacle, and one that's very difficult to overcome, is the deeply embedded belief most of us were raised/programmed with that says "Good people don't confront."

We learned it intellectually, by being told not to challenge our parents, teachers or anyone else who outranked us.

We learned it experientially, by being punished or suffering other negatively reinforcing consequences (such as others not liking us) when we did it anyway.

And we learned it subconsciously, by example. This was most insidious.

The adults in our lives avoided confrontation, or handled it badly. Living examples of adults calmly confronting someone, not using anger or intimidation to manipulate, and not falling apart, venting or grumbling/griping about it later were not abundant, maybe not even existent (except on TV, and the characters were so one-dimensional or the acting was so lousy that it didn't count).

Learning by example. It would have been a beautiful way to learn it effortlessly, to integrate it early as a natural way of being. Alas.

So deep, deep down, carved into the bedrock of our being, is a belief that good people don't confront others. It's not true, especially now that we're grown up and therefore equally as entitled to assert ourselves as every other human being on the planet, but that's neither here nor there. The untruth of the belief is not the problem. The fact that it's written in stone, is.

What do we do?

First, learn-by-doing. Choose the path of most resistance. Practice asserting yourself. Take every opportunity. Feel the fear and do it anyway. It's simple behavioral discipline. And reward yourself for each attempt, no matter how the interaction turns out. Seriously, if you ask your boss for a raise, even if they say no, reward yourself with a massage or a great meal or something. It will help retrain your nervous system so next time will be less painful.

Second, change the belief.

• Carve an edit into the bedrock. Change it to say, Good people confront sometimes. This is true. Absolutely, positively true. And, it doesn't suggest you have to.
  
• Test it. Look for examples of it being true. Who do you know and admire who occasionally confronts others? What other people do you now, people whom you don't want to emulate, who avoid confrontation like the plague? (Yes, there will be mixed examples, but for now, for the purposes of reprogramming your subconscious, just focus on these.)
  
• Actively imagine examples when confronting is the right thing to do. When would "good" people confront? And when would "bad" people avoid it?
  
• Watch cinematic examples, like To Kill a Mockingbird, A Few Good Men, The Insider or Erin Brokovich.
  
• If you're so inclined, write it somewhere visible. Remind yourself of it regularly, in all different moods and circumstances.

All of these will help undermine the old version and help you adapt to a new way of being that involves feeling safer and more engaged in life and having less fear of other people. Seriously, they're just people, too.

Parents: Do your kids a favor. Calmly confront, speak your truth, keep your cool, and avoid the conspiratorial debrief with your kids afterward. Wait til your spouse gets home and the kids are asleep before letting the facade crumble.