What I Love About Confrontation
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I strongly believe that avoiding confrontation does not create more peace in your life.
From what I’ve seen, avoiding confrontation builds resentment, cultivates unhappiness, and ultimately disturbs your peace.
It’s possible (likely?) that avoiding confrontation is born out of people-pleasing behaviors, which I’ve talked about before as dishonest in nature.
People-pleasing means you behave with an intent to constantly make others happy or in hopes that they’ll “like you,” often abandoning your own true desires and needs in the process.
Some mistake an enneagram type 8 (my type) - the challenger - as someone who “enjoys arguing.”
I don’t enjoy confrontation. And I certainly do not enjoy arguing or debating.
Why do I say that I LOVE confrontation then?
Because confrontation is honesty playing out in real life.
Confrontation is a chance to explain your experience and emotions, communicate your boundaries and clarify how they have been broken, and describe how maybe you made a mistake in not being clear enough in identifying and communicating them before.
And, clearly the need for it to be a confrontation means that it’s uncomfortable, and likely only observed by one party involved. Otherwise, it would be a simple conversation.