You Scored
The Peacekeeper
You care greatly about your relationship and are motivated to do anything possible to protect it from harm. You seek peace and prioritize maintaining harmony in your relationship. However, at times, you may appease and avoid confrontation at any cost because it makes you uncomfortable when your partner is upset or disappointed.
What You Fear
Your primary fear is that things will spiral out of control and lead to a fight. It's important for you to assert your boundaries, get comfortable with moments of conflict, and learn to express your true feelings and needs, even if it means disrupting the peace temporarily.
Mistaken Belief
“Conflict is destructive. If I don’t keep the peace, we won’t be okay and I won’t be okay.”
How You Show Up on the Outside
You tend to avoid self expression in an effort to manage your partner’s reaction, rather than sharing your own inner experience. You may protect yourself by smoothing things over, remaining quiet, giving in, agreeing, apologizing, going away, or minimizing your true feelings. You will freeze or flee if attempts to keep the peace aren’t working. Despite your efforts to contain conflict, you may have occasional outbursts of frustration if you’ve kept too much bottled up for too long.
Your intention is to avoid a fight, protect the relationship from damage, and prevent yourself from experiencing distress. You just want your partner to get that it doesn’t feel safe to talk about this, and for everything to be okay. But the downside is that your partner is unlikely to know what’s really bothering you and what they could do to address it. This can lead to misunderstandings, unresolved conflict, and disconnection over time.
What’s Going on Inside
You may feel anxious and unsettled and struggle to feel safe until the threat of conflict passes because it is so uncomfortable in your body.
Your nervous system may be in sympathetic arousal, which means your body is mobilized for survival and self protection, incentivizing you to prevent confrontation. Alternatively, conflict with your partner may trigger a dorsal vagal state, which can lead to feelings of dissociation and disconnection from oneself.
Even if you’re working hard to maintain calm, there is an underlying anxious activation in your body that your partner can detect through neuroception (the subconscious ability to detect threat), which makes it difficult to have an effective conversation. This state of alarm in your body may be outside of your conscious awareness.
At the surface you may feel frustrated, annoyed, irritated, offended, or angry though you take great pains not to show it. You may even feel numb, detached, or foggy. On a deeper level you may also be feeling frightened, overwhelmed, desperate, and out of control. Deep down you may also have a fear of rejection or abandonment that gets inflamed by these interactions.
Your greatest fear is that things will escalate and get worse or spiral out of control. It doesn’t feel safe to remain engaged in conflict and you may worry that the argument will damage the relationship.
Tips for Growth
Rather than avoiding conflict, learn to recover from a freeze or flee state, clarify your true feelings and needs, and express them to your partner.
Pause and get regulated if needed, but then commit to coming back to your partner to address the issue so you don’t avoid the issue altogether.
Recognize that disagreements between partners are natural and that you’re capable of tolerating conflict.
Give yourself permission to disappoint your partner and work on expanding your tolerance for the discomfort you’ll initially feel.
Discuss with your partner in advance how challenging conflict is for you and make a plan to slow down and create a sense of safety when tension arises to help you stay engaged.
Take small risks by using the assertiveness formula (when you___, I feel ____, because ___) to communicate clearly and build emotional resilience.
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