I didn’t want to join the PTA.
My roles as parent, husband, therapist, writer, educator, community helper, and doubles tennis partner already left me no time to pine for more. I didn’t need more meetings or another email thread to colonize my attention. Most of all, I did not want to step out of the comfort of familiar relationships and into potential conflict with people I knew less well.
And yet, I felt I had to. I had concerns about our school community that affected my family and friends deeply, and I wanted to address them.
Like most of my clients and friends, I’m sure you’ve had your own version of this. You identify a concern, consider saying something to the person responsible, rehearse how you might bring it up, and then imagine how it could go wrong.
What if I upset them? What if I’m too much? What if I become… that person?—the nagging, dramatic, irritating person who harshes the group vibe.
So you decide to drop it, play it cool, and say, “Actually, I don’t really care.” Or you speak with an apologetic tone (as if to ask a question, timidly). And as a result, you reject yourself before the other person has the chance to consider your point. Meanwhile, the concern eats away at your insides.
But why do we minimize our needs and desires in the face of others? What are we afraid of?
According to research, people often retreat from conflict out of a fear of losing social inclusion, experiencing rejection, or failing to “fit in” (Brown, 2010).
Fitting In vs. Belonging
Social researcher Brené Brown describes “fitting in” as “assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted.” Belonging, on the other hand, “doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are” (Brown, 2010).
Fitting in demands that we conform to group expectations (e.g., “Gosh, no one argues in this group. Guess I should keep my mouth shut so they don’t think I’m a nag.”). Belonging, in contrast, offers the possibility of finding recognition and connection with the people around us, regardless of our differences. (e.g., “Wow, it’s like that for you? For me it’s more like this.”)
But inviting the possibility of belonging is risky.
Belonging requires us to show up in relationships authentically, even if doing so provokes conflict by default. And when we depend on other people for stability—in a family, group, or community—the stakes of rocking the boat can feel enormous. The fear of losing connection can make retreating in silence seem like the safest option.
But is that always true?
Research on emotional suppression suggests that keeping our feelings hidden doesn’t necessarily improve our relationships. A 2022 study found that expressive suppression was often associated with a weaker relational quality than experienced by those with a more accessible emotional connection (Sasaki, Overall, Chang, & Low, 2022). The study doesn’t suggest that we should be open books, 24/7, but it does show that protecting ourselves and others from our true feelings comes at a great cost to both us and them.
Sometimes “keeping the peace” is simply deferring a necessary conversation that could benefit everyone.
Know Your Intention
As both a therapist and a former actor, I think about relationships in terms of scene work: What is my intention? What choices am I making to achieve it? Am I reaching for the person in front of me with an invitation to connect, and to recognize one another—to see and be seen, and to hear and be heard?
Or am I simply protecting myself from rejection and shame—to cover up my fear of “losing” by trying to “win,” to prove that I’m “right” and not “wrong,” or that I’m “good” and not “bad”?
Am I inviting people to see me? Or am I simply trying not to seem like that person?
We can’t control how others receive our invitations, but we can be intentional about how we send those invitations to those around us.
Relationships Essential Reads
We can identify our context, priorities, and what we want others to understand about us. We can speak from experience, rather than expectations for how all people “should be.” And we can make room for other experiences as well, without hiding, diminishing, or abandoning our own.
This is where the distinction between recognition and agreement (or submission) is essential.
We don’t need our listeners to agree with us to recognize our unique experiences. We don’t need to have the exact same priorities, boundaries, or context to empathize with others and take them seriously.
Research suggests that there are associations between authenticity and positive mental health, and that psychological well-being is primarily connected to our capacity to live in alignment with ourselves (Galinha, Balbino, Devezas, & Trigo, 2023).
We Don’t Have to Choose Between Self Connection and Relational Connection
Of course not every bid for recognition that we make will be fully understood. Some people will feel provoked simply by us showing up as we are. Some people will push back and challenge our voice, and we may need to take a step back, reflect on the dialogue, and decide how to best proceed, perhaps with clearer boundaries and intentions.
But we can begin by recognizing that differences between us are always present, and will always create some degree of conflict each and every time one of us enters a “scene” with another person. Even the people closest to us, whom we love the most, will, in some ways, always be alien to us.
But if we name what those differences are, we create the opportunity for both us and them to show up as fully and freely as possible in one another’s presence.
Speaking up for what we care about may very well rock the boat. And in doing so, we may have to endure periods of being misunderstood, disliked, or being cast as “that person.”
But if we approach each relationship with self-awareness, curiosity, and a deep willingness to see and be seen, to hear and be heard, stepping into potential conflict can become a regular part of creating deeper and more trusting connections with other people.
We don’t do ourselves or anyone else any favors by avoiding being “that person.”
Take Space to Make Space
And just maybe the person we’re afraid of being—the one who speaks up and names concerns at the risk of being disruptive—is exactly the person someone else needs to be invited to speak up themselves.
After my first few days on the PTA, several fellow parents said to me, “Thanks for sharing. I need to practice taking up space like that more often.”
Copyright Mark O’Connell, LCSW-R, MFA
