Why do I avoid difficult conversations

We went for a walk as people open up differently when they're moving. No eye contact to manage, no sitting across from each other. Just two people talking while the world goes past.

He started listing things that were bothering him. Porn, doom scrolling, staying up way too late, sending every difficult patient at work to the clinic owner instead of handling it himself. He laid it all out like a shopping list of habits he wanted to fix one by one.

I listened for about twenty minutes without saying much.

Then I asked about something that had come up almost casually earlier. His wife had been bleeding during her pregnancy. There was a national team training camp the same weekend. He waited as long as he possibly could to confirm he wasn't needed at home. Then he went to camp.

Not because he didn't care. He told me he was torn apart by it. But he couldn't figure out how to say no to either side. I put it back to him plainly: saying "I need this weekend, I recharge there, being at home is hard right now and I need this for my own head" feels like calling your wife difficult even though that's not what you mean. And he couldn't tell the team his wife comes first because he was afraid they wouldn't call him back as assistant coach. So he waited until the situation gave him permission to go. He picked the option that came with a bus ticket and a schedule and didn't require him to say a difficult sentence to anyone.

That's when the rest of the list started making sense.

When avoidance doesn't look like avoidance

The doom scrolling wasn't about the content. It was about filling the gap before a feeling could fully form. The staying up late wasn't insomnia. It was avoiding the quiet where nothing stands between you and your own thoughts. Sending difficult patients to the owner was the most obvious one. He'd built a career where confrontation was someone else's job.

Each behaviour looked different on the surface. Different context, different trigger, different time of day. But they were all the same move. The moment any situation got close to someone being upset with him, he found a way to not be in the room.

Scrolling is leaving the room. Staying up late is leaving the room. Going to camp when your wife is bleeding is leaving the room.

He said something during our conversation that I keep thinking about. "They don't have to love me, I just don't want to be annoying."

That's not someone chasing approval. That's someone avoiding disapproval. Those feel like they should be the same thing, but they run your life in completely different ways.

Chasing approval versus avoiding disapproval

Chasing approval makes you perform. You work harder, show up louder, try to be more. There's at least some energy in it.

Avoiding disapproval makes you disappear. You go quiet, you defer, you find ways to not be the reason the mood shifts. Over time you stop taking up space not because you don't want to but because you've trained yourself out of it.

The strategies look opposite from the outside. One person is always doing more, the other is always doing less. But the same fear is running both of them. Not "will they like me" but "will they be disappointed in me, and what happens to me when they are."

I wrote about the performing version in Easy to Approve Of. Difficult to Inhabit. The cost of learning to read every room except the one you're alone in. My client on the walk was running the quieter version of the same thing. Same driver, different direction.

Where the pattern usually starts

I asked him about his childhood and he didn't have to think long. A household where keeping the peace was the highest priority. Not because anyone was violent or cruel. Just that the cost of upsetting someone felt enormous to him as a kid. He learned early that the safest move was to be invisible in moments of tension. Don't say the thing. Don't be the reason the mood shifts. Don't give anyone a reason to be disappointed in you.

That programme got installed thirty years ago and it's still running. The players change, wife instead of parents, colleagues instead of classmates, but the software is identical. Detect potential disappointment, find the exit, leave the room before anyone's face changes.

A lot of people who call themselves non-confrontational or easy-going or "I just don't like drama" are running something similar. The language sounds like a personality trait. But personality traits don't make your heart rate spike when you think about sending a text that might upset someone. That's a pattern, and it started somewhere specific.

I wrote about how these inherited strategies work in The Sloth on the Books. The patterns we absorb from the people who raised us don't feel learned. By the time you're old enough to examine them, they feel like who you are.

What changes when you can see it happening

When I described all of this back to him using his own examples, he went still for a moment. Then he started talking about things I hadn't brought up. Situations from years ago. Work decisions. Family dynamics. Connecting dots I didn't even know existed.

That's what I keep seeing in these conversations. I don't need to have all the information. I just need to name the pattern clearly enough that the person can run it against their own history. They always have more evidence than I do. They've just never had a frame to put it in.

He said afterwards that at least ten people he knows should do this. I think what he meant was that at least ten people he knows are running some version of the same thing and none of them can see it, because from the inside it just looks like who they are.

The thing I told him to try was simple. Not to start having difficult conversations. Not to force himself into confrontation. Just to notice, over the next week, the moment when a situation asks him to say something uncomfortable and he feels the pull to leave the room instead. Don't fight it. Don't change it. Just see it happening.

Before we talked he wasn't choosing to avoid. He was doing what his system has always done automatically. Now he has a chance to watch it happen in real time. Watching it, over enough instances, is what eventually makes the automatic thing feel like a choice. Once it feels like a choice, you can start making a different one.

If this sounds like the territory you're in, and you want to look at it with another person, this is how I work.