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David McElroy

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Conflict pushes inner buttons to make me feel like child in trouble

By David McElroy · July 5, 2019

I hate conflict and I’ll do almost anything to avoid it.

I hate the way conflict feels while it’s going on, but what upsets me even more is the way it makes me feel afterward. Something in my body associates conflict with the way I felt as a child when my father would get angry with me and scream with a kind of rage that scared me.

When he was yelling, I never knew if would suddenly decide to spank me with his belt or to punish me in some other way. I never knew if his anger would cause him to stop speaking to me for a couple of weeks, which happened sometimes over absurdly tiny things. And I was in constant fear that he would start pushing or shoving me, something which rarely happened, but which always made me fear he was going to finally hurt me.

So when conflict happens today, my body goes on alert. I become aggressive in my response to the conflict. If someone is going to verbally push me, I’m going to push back — as hard as I can.

And when it’s over, I feel like a child in trouble. I’m depressed. I feel as though I’ve been a “bad boy.”

I had a brief conflict today on the phone with someone I work with. It’s not something that will matter in the long term. The details of the problem don’t matter. I don’t think I caused the problem; I’m sure he thinks he did nothing wrong, too.

It wasn’t a pleasant interaction, but it’s no different from tiny conflicts that happen between people in work situations every day. He pushed me on something and I pushed back. He didn’t like it and complained, so I pushed back again. And then it was over.

But it wasn’t over for me.

That was six hours ago, but my body is still in fight-or-flight mode. I feel tense. I feel anger, fear, guilt, shame. It’s a bizarre mix of emotions, but my body feels exactly the way I felt when I faced my father when I was in trouble.

I’m currently reading “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. We had traditionally believed that the long-term effects of abuse or trauma of any sort were all in the mind, but his research shows that such trauma causes changes in our biology. The damage stays in our bodies.

This is why people who have dealt with all sorts of trauma keep having the equivalent of flashbacks — sometimes vivid memories and sometimes simply body states such as the way I feel during conflict. It’s possible to heal this damage, but he says we have to retrain our bodies to react to the current circumstances of our lives — instead of continuing to be pulled back to a past which is long dead.

When we’re young, it’s hard for us to understand the things we need to fix in ourselves. We have no frame of reference for what’s healthy and what’s not. Whatever we’ve experienced feels normal to us, so it takes a long time to realize which things we need to fix and which things are perfectly normal.

I’ve been working for a long time — increasingly over the last 10 or 15 years — on figuring out enough about myself and my past to know what needs to change. It sometimes seems as though the process will never end, but when I look at where I started, I remember how far I’ve come.

Over the years of my adult life, I’ve dealt with conflict by avoiding it if I possibly could. When conflict was inevitable, I felt like a caged animal who was under attack. Even the mildest attack felt like extreme danger to me, so I have lashed out in aggressive ways when I felt attacked. Not physically, of course, but just verbally. And I was quite capable of hurting someone verbally when I felt attacked.

Inside, I’ve felt like the attacked child I was decades ago. Outside, I looked like a capable adult who was in complete control. So the effect was that of a scared and attacked child who had the verbal tools of a mature and confident man. That has resulted in me verbally pushing back hard against even the mildest attack — because every minor attack felt very serious to me.

I’ve learned one positive workaround, at least in one part of my life. If I love someone, I have to have a way to deal with such potential conflict. I learned very early in my life that I can’t allow myself to have that sort of conflict with someone I love. So in every relationship I’ve had that mattered to me, I’ve developed tools and strategies to defuse conflicts before they can turn into something ugly.

I simply can’t allow myself to have that sort of conflict with the person whose love I need and count upon.

The strategies have varied from one relationship to another, depending on the woman’s personality and depth of emotional understanding. But if she hasn’t been willing to understand and help deal with conflict in healthy ways, the relationship couldn’t work.

I still remember the moment when I learned that I could consciously take control of such a conflict. I was in my mid 20s and it was in a very important early relationship. I have no idea what the issue was, but something came up that made me feel attacked and I could tell she felt attacked, too. I knew we were about to have a big fight, something which had never happened with us.

It was as though time slowed down in that moment. I remember exactly where we were and what I saw around me. I remember thinking, “I can either let this turn into a fight or I can defuse it right now, depending on what I say.”

I wanted to lash out in anger about something. Instead, I interrupted the conflict and pointed out that we needed to change how we were handling this. We each climbed down from the angry place onto which we had climbed for battle — and then we worked it out as adults.

For the rest of the time we were together, we did exactly the same thing. We agreed that we would deal with conflicts before they turned into fights — and we never had what other people would consider an argument.

I haven’t learned to transfer that pattern to other relationships, probably because it works only when I trust someone completely. If I love someone and trust her — and if I feel the same love and trust from her — I can deal with conflict peacefully if she’s emotionally mature enough to do the same.

When I do have verbal confrontations with people — such as the minor one I had earlier today — I want nothing so much as to run away from everybody. I just want to be alone (or with someone I trust) in order to deal with the terrible way I’m feeling inside. Right now, there’s no one in my life who I can love and trust in that way, so I just have to withdraw and deal with the feelings alone — or maybe write about them, as is the case tonight.

I don’t know whether I’ll ever be completely over the trauma of childhood. I suspect that a lot of people are suffering from the effects of hidden childhood trauma and just haven’t admitted it to themselves yet. I’m sometimes frustrated that I haven’t healed all the damage, but I should be grateful that I’ve already spent so many years moving down the road toward healing.

I’ll never like conflict. I’ll probably always feel anxious about it. But I have to face it head-on — and learn how to handle it well — because there will always be people who clash with me about something.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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