I remember being a little girl sitting in my bedroom listening to my parents in the throes of conflict outside my door. There was screaming and hollering, profanity, and loud door slams. Many nights I sat on the corner of my bed with my hands over my ears anxiously waiting and hoping for silence.
Conflict
Conflict has a technical definition but really, more often than not, it’s something that we assign a definition to based upon our own experience of it.
5 Reasons you Might Avoid Conflict in your Marriage
God has shaped each one of us and given us each a unique and different personality. Some of these personality types actually enjoy conflict—I am not one of those. Others are best friends with still, calm peace and avoid conflict like the plague—this is the man I married. And yet others are indifferent and could take it or leave it. The point is, we all have a natural bend to how we respond to conflict, and regardless of what it is, it is what we need to learn to work with. We will either need to dial it back or be brave enough to move forward in it.
Why—because conflict, believe it or not, is important to have in marriage. The goal, however, is to learn to have it well.
Another reason you may have learned to avoid conflict is because you’ve seen it go wrong. Perhaps you’ve been that little child sitting on your bed with hands over your ears too, or perhaps you never had the opportunity to witness it at all and therefore any time it comes up, you feel helpless.
Then there’s those of you who are just simply slow processors. What this may mean is that being involved in conflict includes too much pressure and it demands you to be quick on your feet, when the reality is you need time to go slow and process. Conflict for a slow processor may mean that you never get a voice and instead end up hours later thinking of all the things you could have or desired to say but didn’t. Slow processors need space for conflict.
You also might be an emotional stuffer, which is someone who just doesn’t like to feel, experience, or deal with hard things. Perhaps you were raised in conflict and you developed a hatred of it so you learned to just keep yourself from experiencing anything difficult by shoving it all down. Or there’s the possibility that you never saw conflict at all and therefore you feel as if you have no skills on how to handle it so you must keep it hidden.
Lastly, you might hate conflict because you’ve been a victim and conflict means something violent and abusive where you aren’t allowed to have a choice or you lack the ability to defend yourself.
At the end of the day, if you’re someone who avoids conflict, you’ll also be someone that removes the opportunity for growth in your marriage, especially if you never learn how to have it well. Conflict in marriage should mean that there’s an opportunity for resolution, communication, and room for each spouse to have a voice.
If you want to learn more on how to have conflict well, check out Episode 18 of our 4 part series on the Expedition Marriage podcast, How to L.O.V.E your Way Through Conflict.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Expedition Marriage
Featured Image by Tumisu from Pixabay
