Character Development: Conflict Avoidance to Confrontation

Upon observing some (highly) conflict-avoidant people in recent months, I realized a few things, the most important of which is the toll that it takes on a person when they simply cannot confront others for fear of conflict. 

There's an emotional toll: the anger is bottled up inside, grows, and is let out in ways it shouldn't be (most of the time at targets that had nothing to do with the original issue). This alone is unhealthy for your mind and mood - bottled up emotions can and will emerge in the most unexpected ways.

There's a psychological toll: there's this internalized idea that "I can't do anything right - I can't even stand up for myself", which leads to self-loathing, and there's the other, external-facing idea that probably goes something like: "People are rotten, and they're terrible, and I'm doomed to share a world with these careless, destructive, ill-mannered people."

 

Now, I'm not sure if there's something there to be said about one's perception of their self-worth - some link, perhaps, between how much they value themselves and how willing they are to then fight for themselves. I'm just going off of my observations after spending some time with an extremely conflict-avoidant person in the past few months. But isn't it interesting how we do (or don't) portray conflict avoidance and a fear of confrontation in literature?

In my experience, it has almost always been a case of: 

1. The character is a little scared to confront others, but with a dash of courage (possibly a result of a well-placed speech from a friend), they manage to overcome the fear they've had all their life and successfully confront another. Happiness all around!
2. The character just... isn't scared of confrontation at all. They don't need to get over it, because it's not an actual thing that stops them from succeeding against their foes. (Even if the author tried to make it seem like it was).
   

And yet, that's not necessarily the case for truly conflict-avoidance people who are frightened of confrontation. To be fair, I think there are differing degrees of intensity, and it just so happens that the person I've been observing is a pretty extreme case. Maybe authors find it easier to write about a less intense case (and maybe readers enjoy that more, too - who knows?). 

But it leaves much to be desired in the way of characters whose development in that area is honest and realistic. Someone with conflict-avoidance and a fear of confrontation will avoid conflict at all cost, to their own detriment (and to the detriment of those around them). They will do this for years. They will do this for decades. They will confront others a few times within those years, and possibly fail each one of those times, further trampling on their confidence. 

How to portray a character like that? How to give them development? Success? Vindication?

With great difficulty. And a lot of time. 

Fiction grants us an escape, so it's nice to see a character succeed where we know we'd fail. Overcome fears we could never find the courage to leave behind us. 

But for the sake of argument: 

How do we write a truly conflict avoidant character, and how would their story go?

Imagine you're playing a video game. It's a game about a student who gets bullied. The game provides you with choices every time something happens to your character - but instead of providing you with choices that allow you to confront and overcome the bullies, you are only ever provided with options to walk away, stay quiet, or hide. You are never given the choice to speak up for yourself, or to fight back. Confrontation is not even an option, even when the bully's behavior escalates.

But every single time, your character's Rage bar fills up a little more. It spills out in ways you can't control - the options are all bad. Your little sister breaks a little toy in your room - a toy that really doesn't mean all that much to you anymore - but you yell at her nevertheless. Your laptop doesn't work the way you want it to for whatever reason - so you slam it against the floor in a fit of rage. 

Because those are your only options. That's all you can do. Avoid confrontation, then suffer, and force others to bear the brunt of your anger with you. 

Your character doesn't want to do that. But it's not about want; that's simply how their fear of confrontation and their conflict avoidance manifest. 

 

But maybe there's a secret - a way you can play the game that does, little by little, provide you with the courage, the experience, the strength and stability to overcome the debilitating fear of conflict which has allowed others to trample all over you: A set of choices which, though small, add up over time and through various experiences (a lot of time and experiences) to help your character gain a sliver of confidence - just enough - that they can stand up to the bully. But they need to do it at the right time, and they need to not mess it up, because God, it's terrifying, and my heart is pounding, and I'm sweating, and they look so furious, and what if they hit me, and what if this makes things worse - worse - worse-- 

Yeah. That's another thing to take into consideration. Thoughts are all over the place in the moment. They aren't even focusing on saying what needs to be said, so often it'll come out all wrong and they'll get tongue-tied and feel even worse because they feel stupid. It's a really vicious condition, this intense conflict avoidance. 

In the game, this whirlwind would present itself as a clutter of choices, coming in and out of focus, threads of thought that disappear altogether - a choice that once was there no longer being offered - and you have to do the best with that mess of a clusters and somehow, somehow, still overcome. 

I think that's what's missing in a lot of portrayals of character development in stories that focus on overcoming conflict avoidance or a fear of confrontation. It's terrifying for some, and their thoughts are not so clear and easy - the situation can overtake them, and distracts them entirely. 

Make your character say something 'stupid'. Get them a little tongue-tied. Make them lose their train of thought - and lose confrontations. And then - even with all of that noise their brain is making - find a way to make them win.

That hard-earned win is much more realistic. Sure, it's frustrating to see a character struggle in such a way - certainly, it's faster and a lot easier to avoid this kind of development altogether - and it might even be nice to imagine a world where you're not crippled by your conflict avoidance. But I'm a firm believer that literature is one of the main ways in which we learn how to handle issues in real life, and taking the easy way out as a writer may leave those with more intense conflict avoidance lost; they don't have the same foundation to work with as characters who only need a tiny push to succeed over their foes. 

All of this being said, as a writer you have to pick your battles. Unless this is critical to your character's development and to the story itself, perhaps it's not the metaphorical hill you want to die on. And that's OK, too.