PhronesisCompulsive conflict-avoidance is formalized as a wrong attractor W_CCA within the displacement framework: the chronic avoidance of all interpersonal conflict organized around the conflict-as-catastrophe belief — that any interpersonal disagreement risks catastrophic relational loss, humiliation, or violence. The healthy ground state S0 is calibrated conflict engagement: the capacity to tolerate relational friction, engage disagreements directly, repair ruptures, and return to connection.
Three mechanisms sustain the avoidance basin: the conflict-as-catastrophe belief (any disagreement, boundary-setting, or expression of contrary preference is experienced as existentially threatening; genuine conflicts are avoided, de-escalated, or suppressed before they can be processed); appeasement compulsion (when conflict feels imminent, the avoidant person immediately produces appeasement behaviors that terminate the conflict signal but prevent resolution of the underlying disagreement); and conflict-free relationship fantasy (the implicit belief that the right relationship would produce no conflict; actual conflict is taken as evidence that something is fundamentally wrong).
The Peace Paradox states: compulsive conflict-avoidance reliably produces more unresolved conflict than direct engagement would; avoided conflicts accumulate as resentment and distance; small conflicts that could have been repaired become structural estrangements. Nine formal propositions characterize the attractor, with developmental roots in high-conflict or volatile families where conflict was genuinely dangerous.
Return paths include conflict tolerance practice, graduated direct engagement, and IFS work on the conflict-avoider and catastrophizing exile.