Understanding Defense Mechanisms Series: Avoiding Conflict and Discomfort

When discomfort feels unsafe, the mind and body find ways to protect us, often by keeping things calm on the surface.

Avoiding conflict is one of the most common ways people manage emotional discomfort. It brings immediate relief, but when repeated often, it shapes how we relate, express, and connect. Some forms of avoidance are conscious while others happen automatically, but all serve the same purpose of protecting us from what feels too threatening to face.

How Avoiding Conflict Protects Us

The idea of defence mechanisms comes from the psychodynamic tradition, which views them as unconscious processes that protect the self from anxiety or internal conflict. They are part of how the mind regulates emotion when distress feels too great to bear.

Avoidance is one of these classical defences. It helps us sidestep difficult feelings or situations to preserve composure. Other familiar patterns share this aim.

Suppression keeps distressing thoughts just below awareness, allowing us to stay functional. Rationalisation offers tidy explanations that soften guilt or disappointment.

Reaction formation replaces uncomfortable emotion with its opposite, such as acting kind when we feel resentment.

These mechanisms can be useful. They allow us to stay stable and in control when emotions threaten to overwhelm. Yet when they become habitual, they also narrow our emotional range. What we push away remains unresolved, colouring our mood and relationships in quiet, unseen ways.

When Protection Moves Into The Body

As psychological theory evolved, the understanding of self-protection broadened beyond the mind. Trauma research and somatic psychology began to describe how the body also participates in defence through automatic survival responses.

When the nervous system perceives a threat, it reacts instinctively through fight, flight, freeze, or appeasement. These patterns are not conscious choices but physiological reactions designed to maintain safety. Appeasement, sometimes referred to as the fawn response, occurs when the body seeks safety by complying or soothing potential conflict.

These bodily responses differ from classical defence mechanisms, yet they serve a similar purpose.

• Classical defences act through the mind’s perceptions and thoughts, shaping awareness of emotion.

• Trauma responses act through the body’s physiology and behaviour, shifting energy to ensure safety.

  
  

Both arise from the same need for protection but work through different systems, one psychological and the other physiological. Understanding this distinction helps explain why avoidance can feel both emotional and physical: a tightening in the chest, a quick agreement, or a sudden wish to leave.

The Social Tone Of Avoidance

Many people who struggle to assert themselves grew up in environments where saying no came with consequences. A parent’s anger, cold silence, or disappointment could feel unbearable. As children, we adapt quickly. We learn to please as a form of safety.

Even as adults, that pattern remains. In cultures that prize harmony and respect, avoiding conflict can feel not just personal but expected. We are taught that politeness is a sign of maturity and that avoiding conflict helps keep relationships strong. Yet underneath the calm, many carry the quiet ache of wanting to be honest without being seen as ungrateful or difficult.

The Cost Of Staying Comfortable

Avoidance offers short-term calm, but it leads to long-term strain. Emotions that are suppressed or redirected do not disappear. They accumulate as tension in the body or restlessness in the mind. The body often carries what the mind cannot say through fatigue, irritability, or persistent unease.

Relationally, this creates distance. When we overuse composure, others sense that something is missing even if they cannot name it. Communication becomes cautious, and relationships feel stable but hollow. The absence of open conflict begins to replace genuine connection.

How Therapy Supports Change

Therapy helps us notice these protective patterns without judgment. The goal is not to remove them but to understand what they are trying to guard. Clients begin by recognising the small signals that precede avoidance: a tightening in the throat, the quick impulse to say “it’s ok” or the guilt that arises when enforcing a boundary.

Through this awareness, therapy enables the mind and body to work in harmony rather than in opposition. The person learns to stay grounded when discomfort arises, expressing emotions without collapsing into fear or guilt. Over time, the nervous system learns that safety can exist alongside honesty.

In this way, therapy bridges older psychodynamic understandings, which see defences as necessary for stability, with trauma-informed approaches that restore safety through body awareness. Healing becomes less about dismantling protection and more about expanding choice within it.

A Gentler Balance

Defences and trauma responses both tell a story of protection. One begins in the mind, the other in the body, but both come from the same wish to stay safe. Over time, they can become too rigid, keeping us distant from the connection we long for.

The work of therapy is to bring flexibility back into that system, to recognise when avoidance helps and when it hides. Peace is not found in the absence of tension but in the ability to stay present through it.

Restoring Peace is a private mental health centre offering counselling and psychotherapy for individuals, couples, families and groups facing challenges such as trauma, anxiety, depression, grief, and relational issues. Learn more at www.restoringpeace.com.sg or WhatsApp us at +65 8889 1848. For updates and resources, join our Telegram group at https://t.me/restoringpeace.

References

• Charlie Health. (2024). The people-pleasing response to trauma. https://www.charliehealth.com/post/the-people-pleasing-response-to-trauma

• Nature Mental Health. (2022). Defense mechanisms revisited: Neurobiology of self-protection. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-022-02303-3

• Verywell Mind. (2024a).Mature vs. Primitive Defense Mechanisms https://www.verywellmind.com/what-are-defense-mechanisms-5213880

• Verywell Mind. (2024b). Avoidance Coping and Why It Creates Additional Stress https://www.verywellmind.com/avoidance-coping-and-stress-4137836

Keywords

defence mechanisms, avoidance, suppression, rationalisation, trauma responses, emotional avoidance, body-based defences, psychodynamic theory, trauma-informed therapy, nervous system regulation, relational safety, authenticity, emotional expression, counselling Singapore