Insight: Why Am I Afraid of Any 'Drama'?

My friend's 18 year old son once asked me why he was afraid of conflict or confrontation, yet he also liked to hang out with friends who always got into fights and sometimes dragged him into them. He wondered how he could avoid the constant 'drama'.

There are a lot of people like him around - those who put up with behaviour they don't like just to be acceptable to their friends. Yet it’s completely understandable for us to feel fearful, or avoidant of “drama”. This fear often has specific psychological survival needs and past experiences behind it.

If you, too, fear such 'drama' - meaning intense or interpersonal conflict, and emotional outbursts - it is often rooted in one, or more, of the following:

1. You grew up in an environment where conflict was frequent, perhaps explosive, or unresolved. In time, you’ve learned to associate drama with danger. Avoiding it becomes almost a survival mechanism for you.

2. If you have a strong preference for order, routine, and clear expectations, any conflict can feel like a loss of control, leading to real anxiety for you.

3. Not really fearing the drama itself, but the actual confrontation it would take to resolve it because you fear rejection. You perhaps worry that such confrontation will make others leave you, or you fear harming others, being overly concerned about their feelings. However, these fears make it very difficult to address the issue effectively.

4. Being highly sensitive in personality. Conflict is usually physically and emotionally draining for very sensitive people, which would lead you towards retreating from it.

First Steps To Being Stronger

Becoming stronger doesn’t mean you become immune to conflict; it means building your skills to address it without being paralysed by fear, and the main path to that strength is by building your confidence. But before you do that, if your friends enjoy the drama, then perhaps you should think of changing your friends.

Friends who are always fighting or dragging you into it, especially when you don’t really want to, will do nothing for you. Strength isn’t about fighting. It is about confidence, high self-esteem, personal appreciation and living true to yourself.

You would feel weak because you really don’t want to fight and are living against your own values. You need the confidence to stick by your own principles, not just follow what others do in a blind, accepting kind of way. You will feel much better for it, too, when you start hanging out with people who share your aspirations, beliefs and principles, as you will feel reinforced and affirmed as a valued person.

You also need to address the contradiction that you are afraid of drama, yet you are hanging out with people who are only interested in drama! That would create continual emotional discomfort and dissonance for you. This would make you feel stressed and inadequate because you are not being affirmed in your beliefs and identity. Time to change your crowd and find people who share your world and hopes. You will start to feel much better about who you are, and what you care about.

We all have a feeling of wanting to belong, to be included and valued. Your wish to belong is drawing you towards the wrong kind of people for you, which would do nothing for your self esteem because they don’t reflect how you feel. I think once you change your friends - perhaps by joining clubs and societies that you like - you are likely to find that you feel much better within yourself and far less troubled about your life.

Coping Strategies

In the meantime, you can use these simple strategies to strengthen your ability to deal with conflict.

• Stop seeing conflict as an immediate emergency or merely ending relationships. Instead, see it as information - a signal that a boundary has been crossed, or someone’s need is not being met. You should keep saying to yourself, ”Conflict is not a catastrophe; it is a communication.”

• Practise setting some boundaries. This is your single most powerful step. Establish your limits: What kind of emotions or behaviour are you willing to accept from others?

• Practise saying “No”: Use simple, clear statements like, “I can’t talk about this right now, but I can come back to it in an hour,” or “I am not participating in this discussion.” You have rights too to refuse to be drawn. When you set a clear boundary, you stop the drama before it spirals out of your control.

• When you do need to confront an issue, focus on your experience, not the other person’s flaws. This should keep the conversation focused and less volatile. For example, instead of saying: “You always explode and start some drama,” try this: “I feel overwhelmed and shut down when our voices are raised. I need to take a break and discuss this calmly.”

Remind yourself that you can control your actions and reactions, but you cannot control the other person’s emotions, or how they react to your boundaries. Accept that, sometimes, the other person will still create drama - and that is their choice, and not your fault. Your strength is in maintaining your peace, regardless of their reaction. Often that is not easy to do, but the alternative just makes the situation worse.

In summary, make sure to:

• Keep it Brief: The longer your explanation, the more room there is for argument.

• Keep Calm: Deliver whatever you say in a steady, neutral voice, regardless of the other person’s tone.

• Follow Through: Say your words, and then physically remove yourself (walk away, hang up the phone, etc.). The actual boundary is in your action, not just your words.