The roots of conflict avoidance can be vast, but I think the best place to start is with how our bodies respond to high emotion.
We all have someone in our lives (and maybe it’s you!) who LOVES debating, provoking, getting reactions out of other people, and sparring about this or that controversial idea. Arguing can light a fire of excitement in some people, or at least a whole lot of curiosity and interest. Those who thrive on conflict or passionate debate are often less sensitive to negative emotion, have higher impulsivity, or have a pleasant or gratifying feeling inside of themselves in response to it. Or, in a less healthy form, patterns of negative emotion have created a repetitive pathway where a person seeks to recreate what they know, even if it causes harm or leaves them feeling guilty.
If you're someone who shies away from conflict, your nervous system likely escalates in an uncomfortable, even intolerable way when you sense tension or anger in others or yourself.
How we respond to conflict is a complex web of personality traits, emotional sensitivity, societal conditioning, current relationship dynamics, and past history/trauma. It isn't necessary to parse out all the reasons or know for sure the exact sources of why conflict can be hard, but sometimes acknowledging that there are varying responses to high affect and even mild disagreement can help us see what we would need to work on if we wanted to expand our ability to tolerate conflict.
We can't change our essential temperaments or anything that has happened to us in the past. Nor can we change other people in our lives and how they respond to conflict. But we can build capacity in our nervous systems to feel intense emotion and investigate the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be angry or for someone to be frustrated with us.
Personality & emotional sensitivity: If you identify as highly sensitive or empathic, you probably pick up on other people's emotional states easily and may have trouble distinguishing between your own feelings and those of others. While some people are highly insulated — not easily affected by other people's feelings, requests, pressure, etc. — others have less insulation, and can feel blown about by what other people want, need, feel and expect. "Insulation" is a psychological concept that simply describes what the boundary is like between an individual and the people and world around them. It's not good or bad, but there is a Goldilocks effect of sorts: too much insulation and you can feel disconnected from the people you care about (and generate frustration in them for being hard to reach); too little, and it can be hard to hold onto a sense of self. If your inner emotional state is dictated by how others around you feel, it leaves you at a disadvantage in relationships, and can lead to resentment, emptiness and feeling lost. At the same time, emotional sensitivity is a gift, and can help you feel close to people and be a good partner and friend. The key is developing enough insultation to allow others to have an impact on you while still retaining some personal discretion, power and individuality.
Current relationships: If you find yourself avoiding conflict with specific people in your life, you may have discovered through experience that it’s unproductive or discouraging to engage in tough conversations with them. There may be certain topics that feel “off limits” because you are pretty sure you know the reaction you’ll get if you bring them up. Or you may have a partner, parent or friend who is unable to look at themselves without becoming defensive, attacking or shutdown. Your desire to avoid conflict may have less to do with your own capacity, personality or trauma, and instead could be rooted in a real limitation you’ve detected in this other person — or a difficult, recurrent dynamic that exists between the two of you and may need repair.
Social & societal conditioning: People socialized as women are often encouraged to prioritize the well being of others over themselves (this of course does not apply exclusively to women/AFAB folks; family and cultural factors can have an impact as well, and systems of oppression complicate the picture further). But if you are someone who got this message to one extent or another, you may default to a caretaking position. You may see yourself or be seen in your family as a peacemaker, a mediator, or a perpetual problem-solver. You may feel compelled to focus on how other people perceive you and spend a lot of time trying to be palatable, likable and/or easy to be around. People-pleasing is a way of keeping yourself safe, but it comes at a cost. Those of us trained to be caretakers, "good girls," or "the kid who's always fine" can lose sight of what we want, need and value. It's an exhausting and ultimately unsatisfying way to live life, experiencing ourselves through the lens of others, and scanning the environment for negative emotion in an effort to soothe it. If this has been your conditioning, conflict is hard to bear, and it may take time to develop new ideas about what it means to be yourself in the world.
Past experiences & trauma: Many people fear anger because they have seen how destructive it can be. While it's not the feeling of anger itself that is the problem, the truth is that many people do violent and hurtful things with their anger. If you lived in a home where explosive, out-of-control, or otherwise hostile behavior was commonplace, it makes sense that you'd tie this to anger and want to stay away from that feeling. And many children get the idea that their own anger is also not ok: if adults consistently respond with defensiveness, cold withdrawal, or reactive clap-backs when a child is angry, the child learns to turn that anger inward or suppress it.
The point is that many people have complicated, difficult relationships with other people's anger and their own. And the goal isn't to blow past all of that and jump into conflict anyway. It's acknowledging the reasons, and sorting out what may be true and possible in the here-and-now: in specific relationships and contexts, with specific people.