Are You Afraid of Confrontation?

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For some of us, confrontation is a swear word. You just don’t use it. Confrontation is scary because it might mean that someone will get mad, someone might not like me, or maybe there will be a big blow-up. We think that confrontation is mean. Confrontation is blaming someone. Confrontation is even considered sometimes to be emotional abuse.

But in an intimate relationship, confrontation is often necessary to facilitate solutions to everyday problems or to address long-term patterns of interaction. Why? Because we cannot be known if we do not tell people who we are.

And what happens when we are afraid of confrontation is that we don’t tell people who we are in certain important interactional dynamics. They will never know what bothers us, which means they do not know where they stop and we begin. Or worse, we do not know where we stop and they begin. If there is no “me” in a relationship, it is not a relationship at all—because there aren’t really two people in it. There’s just one person—and it isn’t you.

And here’s the bottom line when it comes to confrontation in an intimate relationship: Your partner cannot love what they do not know. And they cannot know the hidden parts of you if you don’t tell them.

So often, in intimate relationships, we long to be loved in the ways that, to us, feel most loving. But rather than simply asking for what we want—which we fear would mean some kind of confrontation—we just keep it to ourselves and hope that our partner will “get it.” So, we remain unsatisfied, and maybe even a little resentful, which may build over time to become big resentment. Ultimately, these relationships might even end up splitting because the distance between them is just too wide.

That’s how important confrontation is.

That said, confrontation is just another form of communication when it is used correctly. Confrontation is not meant to be aggressive, blaming, or abusive in any way. It is not meant to be mean, heartless, interruptive, or to abruptly attack your partner. It is not meant to be unintentional. Nor does it mean that you have to have a fight, or make someone see it your way. Rather, this form of communication is simply meant to convey a clear message to your partner that there is a problem to be solved, a need that is going unmet, a desire that is unfulfilled, or a pattern of behavior that can no longer be accepted.

Note the word clear. We cannot be clear with our communication if we are not sure what we really want to say. That requires conscious intention to communicate something important.

Healthy confrontation may require some advance thinking. It will also mean that you must be willing to stick only to the topic at hand, rather than taking a trip down the proverbial rabbit hole to include a long list of infractions from years of holding in or hiding your wounds from your partner. But it also means that you are unwilling to be taken down your partner’s rabbit hole. That means that if the subject seems to be going off course, you can bring the focus back to the issue at hand.

In your advance thinking, you may need to get very clear about what exactly the problem is for you. In other words, you are not going into a confrontation with all kinds of psychoanalyses of what is going on with your partner. Rather, you are going into it with a clear idea about how what is going on affects you. What is hurting you? What is limiting you? What seems to be making you feel small or inadequate because of your partner’s behavior or words?

But we must also be willing, when we decide to confront, to face the possibility that our perception of the problem might need to be revised. And, in that case, we must be willing to consider it from another point of view. But the benefit of that consideration is that we can begin to look at what created the misperception. For example, is it possible that this particular perception is based on how I was treated as a child? Am I just assuming that it is how I’m being treated now, even if I’m not? That new understanding can have a profound impact on our individual and coupled growth.

However, that does not mean that we should get dissuaded by gaslighting—where we are told that our ideas are “crazy,” “too sensitive,” “overdramatic,” or “hysterical.” If you leave a confrontation feeling that you have not been heard and that you now doubt your own intuitions or discernments, then that, in and of itself, becomes another problem to be added to the original problem.

In this case, you may need to decide if this treatment is a pattern or a one-time thing. If a one-time thing, it may require another confrontation—which, again, is meant to convey how that problem is affecting you. But if it is a pattern, you might want to seek couples therapy and consider other options, including ending the relationship.

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One of the benefits of learning how to confront appropriately is that it creates the potential to solve problems as they come up instead of holding them in and then either blowing up later or repressing your feelings, building more and more resentment and distance from your partner.

One of the real benefits of an intimate relationship is that it can facilitate growth for both individuals and the couple. But that potential is diminished and even eradicated when either partner is unwilling to confront when necessary. Again, we cannot be known when we are hiding parts of ourselves from our partners. And our partners cannot be expected to love those parts of us that they do not even know.