Why Avoiding Conflict Is More Stressful Than Saying What You Feel, Even for Highly Sensitive People

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to find the courage to say what you think, even if others won’t like it.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People. A podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie. A way to question and reduce stressful thoughts, and you guessed it. I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover why highly sensitive people often want to avoid conflict at all costs. The effect of this avoidance on relationships and self-esteem and how to find the courage to say what you feel more often. This is an addition of Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom.

I had a cool little inner freedom win this morning. In the mornings we have a neighbor drop off their dog and. If we just, they put it inside our chain link fence area in our yard, and the two dogs play together and we then take both walk dogs for a walk in the morning. And it’s good for both of them and all of that.

It’s a little more difficult to walk two dogs, especially since one is strong and is a puppy, or at least 1-year-old. Today I got up a little later and I decided to walk them after, walk my, our dog after breakfast, and I was thinking or hoping that the other dog wasn’t there, so I didn’t have to, wrestle with two dogs down the street.

And my partner told me, yeah, the dog’s still in the yard. And like my frustration was. Like, I don’t wanna walk both dogs, I just wanna do this quickly and then and then go to work. So what I, what my win was, my little inner freedom win was somehow I felt the freedom to just express that. And I was like, if I had wanted two dogs, I would’ve gotten two dogs.

It was just a voice of frustration coming out of me. And what I noticed is, as I said that. I felt this wave of freedom I felt I bought this wave of oh, I got that out. Not having to hide it and be nice about it and pretend like I’m all fine with it. And it just felt so good. It didn’t require any action.

It was just this expression. So this is the kind of thing that can cause conflict. This is a very minor. Example of this, but I wanted to bring it up because it showed me how good it feels to say what I actually feel. And as highly sensitive people, we often avoid conflict at all costs. And that’s because we’re wired to feel things more strongly than others.

This is just our nature this ability to amplify. The experience allows us to pick up on small things that others don’t notice. This is why we notice when things are off, we notice danger when it’s approaching. We notice how people are feeling. We notice all kinds of things because we have this built-in amplification system in our nervous system.

Now, conflict, depending on the level of it, is often a highly charged experience. And because we amplify everything so much. That experience of conflict can tend to flood our nervous systems as highly sensitive people. And so as a result, we prefer to avoid conflict in order to stay balanced. It’s actually very intelligent to try to avoid conflict in a way because we’re just trying to avoid that experience of being completely flooded and overwhelmed by the conflict situation.

But the problem is we can’t always control when conflict erupts can’t control when other people argue. You can’t always control when someone’s arguing with you. You can’t always control when you need to say something that someone else isn’t going to like. And so it’s great in, in theory in general to be able to avoid conflict, to want to avoid conflict, and it’s intelligent to do that.

But if we can’t avoid conflict, then we need to look at that and see if there’s any ways of being able to handle that kind of situation as highly sensitive people. First of all, let’s look at the effect of avoiding conflict, that it can have an effect on relationships and on our self-esteem. Our go-to defense, of course, is to avoid conflict and we notice the first signs of it and we pay attention to those things.

And we then either leave the situation or try to direct everyone’s attention or our own attention to something else to avoid it. So that is our, tends to be our go-to approach to conflict. How to avoid it, how to notice it earlier and avoid it. And again, this is not a bad thing. It’s kinda like when you’re playing chess.

We may see the potential for a a conflict right on the chess board before it arises, and that’s looking a few steps ahead. And that’s a good chess strategy. And as highly sensitive people, we are motivated to avoid conflicts, and that’s a great thing. But another defense that we often use is to suppress our own needs and our own wants.

In order to avoid conflict. And so we even may justify this as oh, I don’t wanna be selfish, don’t want to be seen as selfish or don’t wanna put ourselves too far in front and risk disapproval or again, conflict for that. But the effect is we start to censor ourselves. And so if in that situation with the dogs this morning, I.

I would’ve swallowed it, which is probably not an uncommon thing, certainly for me to do. Then I would’ve started to feel disconnection. I would’ve started to feel like inner frustration. I would’ve felt my energy level going down, and I would’ve probably started to resent not only my situation, but maybe my partner or the neighbor for always putting the.

Dogs there, like I would’ve started to go into a powerless kind of situation. This is what happens when we censor ourselves. It’s not that censoring is always a bad thing, it’s just that if I always have to censor it, that’s my only coping mechanism, then it can, it has some negative effects. This also disconnects our outer world from our inner world, and when there’s a lack of alignment from the inside to the out.

Then it gives a lack of self-esteem and a lack of confidence if I’m connected, even if it’s a little messy. But I’m connected. Like I said, if I wanted two dogs, I would’ve gotten two dogs. Like it’s just this, but I’m saying something honestly of where I’m at on the inside. It’s not enlightened or brilliant or anything, but it’s just honest.

And when I bring that out, there’s an alignment from the inside to the out and it actually can lead to discussion and maybe even solutions and all that. But regardless of whether it does, it leads to a connection with myself and my outer world. And that is huge on the level of stress. There’s nothing more stressful than having this separation between inner and outer and not knowing how to connect the two.

So how do you find the courage to say what you feel more often? It does take courage. It’s not easy and it’s always a judgment call. Sometimes it really is better not to say something, like somebody was holding me at gunpoint. I might be thinking three or four times before saying something that’s on my mind, and that’s also intelligence.

So there’s no blanket rules here, but. What we tend to do as highly sensitive people is to not say something or to focus on avoiding when Sometimes the easier, more stress-free path, strangely enough, is to hit it, to go head on and to actually address the issue directly. Many times the value in speaking your truth.

It actually outweighs the overwhelm that the conflict or potential conflict can bring. And this is really important to see because we tend to believe that any conflict is gonna be overwhelming. It’s gonna be too much and we’re not gonna be able to handle it. But what happens many times is the energy you feel of speaking your truth.

Honestly, that brings energy into the system and it. Overpowers or outweighs the overwhelm that may be also coming up when somebody is disagreeing or there’s some kind of conflict breaking out. Also, if I do say what I feel, then at least I’ve gotten it out and like I said, there’s a relief in that.

There’s a feeling of goodness in that. And if I do get overwhelmed in some kind of conflict that happens as a result, then I still can take time to recover from that. But at least it’s out. At least I’ve said it. At least I haven’t gotten it off my chest. And that is actually huge. So this is one thing to keep in mind.

Another is that even saying what you feel is a skill and with all skills, you have to start small and you have to just do incremental growth. If you go to the. To the weight room and you start lifting weights. You don’t start with the heaviest weight, that’s like too much, but you start with the lightest weight, or not the lightest, but you know a weight that is just right for you and start working on that.

And then as that becomes, that muscle becomes stronger, then you can add on another weight, and then you can add on more and more like that. So building a habit of saying what you think more often is. Something that is worth cultivating. And you can just start with little things like that little dog thing seems so small, but for me, that’s a win because it’s me just being a hundred percent honest and exposed, vulnerable in a way.

And that’s the beginnings of building even more strength. And as I look over the years of how this has played out for me, I’ve taken more and more risks in saying things. That might be controversial, say, with my partner or might lead to disagreement. Over time, I’ve gained more and more courage with that.

And so that’s how strength continues to grow. So underneath this is there it’s easy to say, do go ahead and do this. And it’s helpful to start small and build as you go. But underneath all of it is. Always some kind of belief, some kind of fear. And if I don’t challenge those fears, if I don’t actually challenge what I think and look at both sides, I can end up just stuck in that fear because I believe it.

Like I, I may just think I don’t wanna rock the boat. Like it’s not a, it’s not gonna be safe. It’s not safe. And so if I take my time and allow myself to first of all express those feelings, like it’s not safe to say what I feel, hold that part of me, that emotional part of me that’s believing that, listen to it and challenge it to just be sure that it really has all the picture, the big picture.

Maybe it just has some small point of view and you can invite it to. Challenge its own belief. And what happens is when that stuck part starts to see the effect of believing, this is not safe, and then all the suppression that happens and all the resentment that happens, it may start to loosen its attachment.

And if you can imagine that challenge, that belief challenge, that emotional part of you to think. Who would you be if you weren’t thinking it wasn’t safe and explore? What would it look like? Who would you be without that weight of that thought? This is called doing the work of Byron Katie, and it’s something that I’ve been doing for many years, about 18 years, I think, at this point.

And it allows you to get in touch with the underworld the part of you that is believing things almost unconsciously that. Are, that’s making you feel extra stressed in dealing with any kind of conflict. So as you gently challenge yourself and find opposites of how it could be safe, actually maybe even safer to share what you think than to keep on hiding it as you work through this little by little situation, by situation.

You may start to find that courage really starts to grow. That’s been my experience. You start seeing yourself more and more as an equal, and it’s like you suddenly start having permission to show up in a situation. And finally, I wanna mention that it takes some alone time. It takes some stillness to figure these things out, to figure out, first of all what you want and.

I find that reviewing situations after the fact and doing the work on them this can reveal many options that I didn’t see at the time and can help reconnect me to my own truths and the more I listen to myself, which is really what I think of the work of Byron Katie, as just a way to listen to yourself, but in a very structured way.

As I listen to myself more and more clearly, I start to hear myself. I get in a habit of listening, and I actually become better at being able to listen to myself in the moment. And this is how courage grows and speaking your truth. So the feeling I’m left with today is that connectedness deepens with honesty.

If you hide what you feel. Then you feel more alone and if you hide what you feel resentment can build, but connectedness grows and deepens when you show up when you’re honest as much as possible. In this episode, we looked at why highly sensitive people often want to avoid conflict at all costs, and that’s because our nervous system is wired to amplify.

The experience of stress and emotion so that we can pick up on things that are subtle. And so conflict is a big thing and it can easily overwhelm us, and we want to avoid that. We also looked at the effect of this avoidance on relationships and on self-esteem, and we found that. Resentment comes into the picture and low self-esteem comes into the picture if we’re constantly avoiding saying what we actually think and feel.

And then we looked at how to find the courage to say what you feel more often. And this takes inner work. There’s no way around it. It takes courage, but it comes from small, incremental steps of practice. And looking to the moments when you got triggered by conflict or when you were unable to say what you felt and looking at what you were thinking and believing and questioning those thoughts so that you could, you can find new options and get more in touch with how you actually do feel.

So thank you for listening. It’s great to explore this with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Self-Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience.