When clients avoid conflict, it can make sustaining relationships difficult.
And that includes the therapeutic relationship.
But according to Eboni Webb, PsyD, before you address your client’s conflict avoidance head on, you might want to consider their attachment style.
In the video below, Eboni walks through her attachment-based approach with clients who avoid conflict or confrontation.
Take a look.
Click here for full transcript
And what I find with the avoidant attachment, again, going back to the study, these were the children that when their parents left, there was often not a lot of kind of disruption for them, but also they did not transfer any sense of care to the care provider, so they were not really well soothed by care providers. And when their parent came back, it wasn’t necessarily that they were very much seeking attunement from their care provider. And often those care providers maybe were not attuned and they would overdo their caring and it just agitated. And so there was always a space with the children who had the avoidant attachment. It’s the close, but not too close. The closer you can yet, the more agitated. And also the child learns that the closer I get to my parent, who’s also avoidantly attached, they will become agitated with me. So it’s learning how to navigate the space that is close enough for safety and regulation.
And so that’s where we have to kind of navigate. How do I approach this client who has this kind of barrier? The you can come close, but not too close, and how do I help them sense that conflict is actually a healthy part of relationship when they have not experienced that. And so we really want to orient them to understanding. I like to get a good family history of how was conflict handled in your family? Was it? How do you perceive confrontation? A lot of times these clients will perceive confrontation as hostile, something to be avoided.
But also here’s another developmental wound that I think we have to understand because a lot of clients that are very conflict avoidant are so interestingly self-reliant, and a person who’s self-reliant has come to learn that they have to kind of build their own resiliency because help is not coming. And in fact, the idea that help is coming is threatening. And so that’s where they just kind of have to figure it out themselves. And so that idea of confronting them is actually you inviting them into a kind of push and pull, but an engagement that they don’t want. They just want to kind of have their own solution and walk it out.
So to kind of get underneath that self-reliant, that it’s safe to problem solve this with me, you do have to work, again, with kind of having them sense the felt safety of even just being confronted physically by you. And so with these particular clients, I establish in my therapeutic space what is close, but not too close. And once we establish that and we literally do an exercise where I will kind of navigate moving closer to them, not too close. And they can tell me, “That’s enough. I don’t want to be any closer than that.” And then when I establish that, then I tell them, “Anytime you want me to come closer to you, you can ask me to come closer to you. You can also tell me to back off or to move back.”
So part of this is the autonomy. It would appear that a person who is avoidant or just kind of avoiding confrontation, they’re having all the control, but actually this is a different way of giving them autonomy to choose when they need you to come closer to them and to feel the safety of confrontation. And so we want to understand that this is definitely coming from a wounded place. A lot of people who are conflict avoidant have experienced some type of trauma or stressor around confrontation, where it has been either violently expressed, or that there has just been that kind of silent treatment that is equally as punishing. So I think that’s also very important to understand the struggles that these clients have to feel the safety of confrontation.
For more expert strategies on working with the neurobiology of attachment, check out this course featuring Bessel van der Kolk, MD; Dan Siegel, MD; Pat Ogden, PhD; Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD; and more.
Now we’d like to hear from you. What other techniques have you found effective in addressing a client’s attachment wounds? Please let us know in the comments below.
very well presented and also helpful by giving the example of the exercise with clients of physical closeness vs distancing