How about this scenario?
Alex and Judy (from yesterday) are non-confrontational. They are brewers, not spewers. But Susan and Joe are fighters. There is a lot of anger and yelling in their house. Joe’s blasting attempt to confront Susan with his disappointment is met with angry accusation and slammed doors. “Well if you hadn’t ____, I could have done something! What do you expect when you come at me like that?!”
When someone says “I LOVE CONFLICT,” what it often means is that they rush into disagreement powerfully in order to win… in order to NOT deal with their OWN fears and failures. Anger is a mask for something else.
Are Alex and Judy any better off than Susan and Joe? As far as attachment is concerned, is confrontational anger fundamentally different than passive hiding and pretending peace? Both have deeply developed ways of hiding their deeper emotions.
And yet, we often think that conflict is bad and needs to be avoided, while “not fighting” is better. Sometimes the opposite is true. If two people are fighting, they are showing that they CARE about the relationship. They are protesting the fact that they feel disconnected, even if they have no idea that’s what’s really true. When you see that intensity, you have two people who WANT to be connected, and haven’t figured out how. They are running in circles around a pattern they don’t see, but they are intense because they want it to work. If you DON’T want a relationship to work, you don’t get intense. You get indifferent.
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