People are afraid of conflict because they perceive it as a personal threat.
Work disagreements = “one of us is an idiot.”
Disagreements in a couple = “one of us doesn’t love the other.”
Disagreements between friends = “we don’t know how to compromise.”
Meanwhile, conflict is inevitable in any interaction between people where there is growth. There is no conflict between a buyer and a seller in a newspaper stand — because one has the function of paying 5$, and the other has the function of handing over a Playboy magazine, and so it goes until death do them part.
But if you are doing business (including someone else’s), you encounter new tasks, and therefore there is a chance of disagreements. If you start a family, you will also have to solve increasingly deep and varied situations — from deciding who pays for dinner at a restaurant to deciding at what age to start saving for a child’s education. If you’re friends, you also create stronger bonds, and you might have to think about what to do if a friend starts drinking too much, and whether you should say something about it.
If you expect that you are opposing another person, then of course you will be afraid of conflict — because it’s either to punch someone or get punched, and most people don’t enjoy those processes. But in reality, most conflicts are games that need to be transformed from competitive into cooperative ones. In a work conflict, you’re not trying to figure out which of you is an idiot — you’re trying to build a process that allows both you and the other person to get a salary increase and career growth. In a family conflict, you’re not trying to humiliate the person you love, but trying together to figure out how to make your family more reliable. And in friendship, it’s the same story.
Even a defense lawyer and a prosecutor, in the end, are not trying to defeat each other, but are trying to do their best to ensure the triumph of the law.
And if you understand why the other person is defending their position, and why you are playing the same cooperative game, you cannot have a painful conflict.
And if they’re doing it to genuinely harm you — well, fuck them.