The Shadow Side of Conflict: When We Canβt Handle Our Own Emotions
Conflict is something we avoid, fear, or blame onto others. But underneath our reactions, whether we withdraw and people-please or lash out and dominate, there’s often a deeper truth we don’t want to face.
We are struggling to hold the intensity of our own human emotions. This is the shadow side of conflict.
We aren’t just reacting to the situation at hand, we’re often reacting to the deep discomfort of the shame, grief, fear, or rage that lives inside of us. When those emotions feel too big to manage, we instinctively seek control.
The people-pleaser attempts to maintain peace by abandoning themselves, subtly manipulating the situation to avoid disharmony.
The one who lashes out pushes the discomfort outward, causing conflict to avoid the vulnerability of looking inward.
Interestingly, these two patterns often find each other in intimate relationships. The people-pleaser and the one who lashes out are two sides of the same coin, both avoiding their inner emotional world, just in opposite ways. One shrinks, the other expands. One internalizes, the other externalizes. But they attract each other like magnets, unconsciously recreating familiar emotional landscapes in hopes of healing what was never resolved.
Both responses stem from an inability to sit with the raw pain of what we’re feeling, and the stories we’ve come to believe about what those feelings mean about us.
When we’re unable to meet our own emotions with compassion and awareness, we unconsciously act out the pain. We blame, we hide, we perform, we shut down, we explode, we work hard to perfect, all in service of protecting ourselves from feeling too much.
But here’s the deeper truth.
Conflict isn’t inherently bad. It’s neutral, it’s simply information. It becomes destructive only when it’s hijacked by our unprocessed emotions and unmet needs.
The real work, then, is not in avoiding conflict or even managing it perfectly. The work is in learning how to be with ourselves, to develop the emotional capacity to hold our own intensity without needing to offload it onto others or suppress it inside ourselves.
This is emotional maturity.
This is self-responsibility.
This is the deeper invitation conflict offers us, if we’re willing to answer it.
So the next time you find yourself avoiding hard conversations or exploding over something small, pause. Ask yourself:
What am I feeling that I don’t want to feel?
What story am I believing about this feeling?
Can I stay with myself instead of trying to control someone else?
You don’t have to get it perfect.
You just have to be willing to be honest with yourself.
That’s where transformation begins.
