Avoiding Conflict: A Common Cause of Anxiety & Depression
I hate being angry. It’s my least favorite feeling to have. Whenever it shows up, I find myself getting hot, my shoulders get tense, and my hands get sweaty. I run through imaginary arguments in my head where I get to scream at someone, shouting exactly what I want to say, without any social filter at all. It makes my heart race, my jaw hurts from all the clenching, and my appetite plummets. It’s also harder to fall asleep when I’m all fired up. If you’re a human on this planet, you know what I’m talking about. Being angry sucks and most of us are really good at avoiding conflict because of it.
Why Are We Avoiding Conflict
Anger can be one of the most uncomfortable feelings for us to experience. It can feel dangerous, scary, and a little out of control. If you’ve ever been in situations with people who don’t handle their anger well and have a tendency of hurling it at unsuspecting bystanders (I.e. narcissists, domestic violence, or even road rage), it probably makes you worry a little about becoming that person. If you’ve been on the receiving end of physical abuse or aggression by others who don’t handle their anger well, it makes sense that you would be scared of your own anger. In my experience, most people who have been physically hurt, scared, or intimidated by others have no desire to inflict those feelings on anyone else. So they stuff anger deep down and start avoiding conflict as much as possible in an effort to keep themselves and others as safe as possible.
The Cost of Avoiding Conflict
But this “stuffing it down” has a cost - anxiety and depression. Any time we have a natural healthy emotional response (such as healthy anger), and we try to lock it down, it usually converts to something else. That’s right, it doesn’t just magically go away - it becomes another feeling altogether. So annoying. If you’re looking for therapy in Orlando to help with anxiety or depression, we can help you determine if suppressed or repressed anger may be feeding into your symptoms. Many of our clients finish therapy, no longer avoiding conflict, and feeling more confident in their ability to turn conflict into healthy communication.
Avoid Aggression, Not Anger
Before talking about how suppressing anger and avoiding conflict coverts to anxiety and depression, it’s important to discuss the difference between anger and aggression. Anger is a FEELING, that’s all it is. It feels pretty similar (physically) for most people, all around the globe, regardless of age, race, or culture. If you are looking at someone who’s angry, you might notice their face is tense and they look a little red or sweaty, and their body is tense. Anger is not dangerous or harmful.
In this way, anger is different from aggression. Aggression is a BEHAVIOR and is clearly visible to others. When someone who is FEELING angry begins ACTING aggressively, that’s usually when people around them start to get nervous. Fun fact, you can feel angry and not become aggressive. This is an important distinction because most people who are afraid of feeling angry, are actually afraid of acting aggressively. This is one of the top two reasons people report suppressing feelings of anger - to avoid hurting and scaring people.
Healthy Anger Takes Practice
This leads us to the other top reason - it’s super uncomfortable physically. If you’re not used to tolerating feelings of anger in your body, they can be a little intense. It may feel like you are about to lose control of yourself or as if the feeling is just going to keep escalating and never come back down. If you’re interested in learning stabilization skills to bring your body back down, we can help with this. Otherwise, it just takes a little getting used to the sensations of allowing this feeling to run through your body, while mindfully watching it unfold. It is possible to let the anger flow through you all while being in complete control of your actions.
Here are a few signs you might be avoiding conflict:
You avoid getting angry
You try to just forgive as quickly as possible and let things go without really ever holding people accountable
Your mind naturally starts rattling off a list of reasons why someone mistreated you (i.e. “She was just drunk.” “He had a rough childhood.)”
When someone does something hurtful, you either have a panic attack or feel extremely exhausted
You struggle with chronic depression
You have physical ailments in the same areas that anger shows up in the body: chronic neck, back, or shoulder tension or TMJ
So let’s talk about how anger converts to anxiety and depression. Anger (like all uncomfortable, healthy emotions) is a natural and healthy reaction to various types of situations. Anger specifically is intended to mobilize you to do a few things: to stand up for yourself when you’re being mistreated, to assert your boundaries, or to express your needs that aren’t being met. Without healthy anger, we are a species of doormats. In other words, we need it.
There are a few unintended side effects of avoiding conflict.
The physiological energy (all that “stuff” that makes you get hot, tense, etc) doesn’t get released in the same way. Instead, it gets stuck in the body. What does excess energy in the body feel like? Restlessness plus tension equals anxiety.
Once the body is registering sensations of anxiety (from the “leftover” suppressed energy of anger), the mind will then begin to generate anxious thoughts to “match” the body. If the body feels anxious, the mind is prone to worry or race, which only reinforces feelings of nervousness.
By NOT allowing the experience of anger, you lose access to all the functions of anger. This means, without the feeling, you don’t feel equipped to stand up for yourself, communicate your needs, or assert your boundaries. When we don’t have access to those things, we tend to feel weak, scared, and at the mercy of those around us to treat us kindly and safely. Imagine going into battle without any weapons and just hoping all goes well. This tends to make us feel more anxious as well because we stay a little on guard.
When we don’t have access to the healthy functions of anger (standing up for yourself or healthy communication) we tend to have a LOT of needs that go unmet. Imagine losing your voice, being unable to write, or sign, or use any other form of communication to let someone know what’s going on with you. Now imagine that you’re hungry or that someone is standing on your foot. You would likely just sit there in pain or discomfort hoping someone would guess. If no one notices or guesses, you’d just go on hurting or uncomfortable. Eventually, your mind will work to accept this in an effort to adapt. This adaptation usually comes in the form of giving up “Oh well, I guess it doesn’t matter if I eat or not. What does it matter if I starve anyway?” This is where we start to see depression forming. If you aren’t able to speak up, you will likely accept being mistreated and many (if not all) of your needs will go quietly unmet. If you put anyone in that situation for a period of time, depression is the likely result.
Sometimes, you’ve lost access to healthy anger for so long that you no longer even register it coming up before it’s gone. In these cases, we usually see clients who experience other mental health symptoms such as dissociation or somatization instead of anger. Dissociation is an umbrella term that describes the process of going emotionally and/or physically numb, detaching from the current surroundings or situation, and generally “going away” until the discomfort or situation has passed. Somatization is when the body converts an emotion into a physical symptom such as clients who experience tics, psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES), or paralysis instead of feeling anger. These are obviously the most extreme side effects and are most often associated with significant trauma or prolonged developmental trauma.
It’s important to know that suppressing anger is not necessarily a conscious choice. In the therapy world, it’s often known as “repressed” anger simply because you don’t choose to do it, it happens automatically. This is typically the case for a few reasons. Mostly commonly, a part of your brain called the amygdala will automatically shut down anger if you have experienced any of the following:
You’ve been hurt or mistreated by the person who was primarily responsible for taking care of you
You’ve been physically unable to defend yourself (such as when you are being mistreated by someone larger, or more physically capable than yourself)
Defending yourself would have only made things worse by eliciting more harm
A primary caretaker would emotionally shut you out with the “silent treatment” anytime you expressed frustration at being mistreated or treated unfairly
If you’ve been avoiding conflict and suppressing healthy anger for a long time, it can be challenging to regain access to it - it’s not always as simple as just deciding it’s okay to get angry. If you have a hard time accessing healthy anger, struggle to stand up for yourself, or have a hard time engaging in healthy communication, we can help. We offer therapy in Orlando that can help you regain access to healthy anger, learn to cope with the uncomfortable physical sensations of anger, and learn to harness the healthy power of anger to feel more capable in life.
We can help.
If you or someone you love is struggling with suppressing anger, please reach out. We offer anxiety treatment and depression treatment with CBT Therapists in Orlando and online throughout the state of Florida. Call today or send us your info and we’ll reach out for a free consultation to see if one of our therapists would be a good fit.
