I hate conflict, I have for as long as I can remember. The earliest clear memory I have of it is when I was 8 or so, and I met a couple of the neighbour’s kids (who I didn’t know) at the back of our garden. When I inquired as to why the two of them were in our garden (they’d come in from the fields behind) the girl just laughed, and started splashing water from a nearby trough or something up at me. I just stood there, in my red patchwork trousers, too embarrassed and upset to do anything other than a freeze-response as she soaked me again and again. Once she’d had her fun and left, I cried for about ten minutes, before taking my drenched ass back to the house. I recounted the story to my mother, who asked why on earth I didn’t just walk away.

I didn’t walk away because I didn’t know how to. No-one had ever, ever, taught me either to stand up for myself, or that it was okay to take myself out of a harmful situation. My mother hated conflict more than I did, and because of this I had absolutely no idea how to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. I didn’t defend myself, or retaliate in any way, because I was never taught to be brave. It wasn’t innate for me, because being taught (or shown) courage in the face of difficulty would have meant I might have had a chance to either stand up to – or leave – my mother when she was behaving inconsistently, or angrily, or cruelly.

I was, perhaps predictably, relentlessly bullied until I was about 13. I’m not sure what changed, but I made friends around that time that I still have to this day.

Over the years I’ve seen my share of conflict. Clashes with my mother during my teenage years. Partners who, by punching holes in walls near me (presumably to show how much they would like to hurt me if they thought they could get away with it) showed me how little they valued me (and still I didn’t leave). Fights with my own daughter during a time when I was not in a healthy enough space to parent appropriately. The list goes on.

The long and short of this is that I handle conflict poorly, and one of the reasons is that I’m terrified of my own anger (I touched on that in therapy a few days ago). I don’t know how to be ‘rationally’ angry – behave appropriately to the situation – so everything gets bottled up and almost never comes out. I back down, mediate, control the situation, silence my own needs, all because I have no idea what standing up for myself looks like. This behaviour means a faster resolution, and peace for whatever the circumstance is, but as a dumb quote I read on the internet said, what about my peace? Am I being true to myself and my own integrity if I always back down? And does that make me a mediator, or a coward?