Welcome to The Question Underneath — with Care, my advice column where I sit with your questions about love, conflict, heartbreak, grief, and the strange, holy difficulty of being in a human body.
This isn’t a column about answers. It’s about slowing down long enough to hear what a question is really asking.
In this column I respond to one reader—not to tell you what to do, but to help return agency where it belongs. You can write to me with whatever you’re circling: a conflict you can’t resolve (internal or external), a regret that won’t loosen its grip, a pattern you’re tired of repeating.
Today I’m answering C, a paid subscriber (hi!) who asked:
I genuinely ask myself when it is okay for me to not engage in conflict with certain people. When is it my responsibility to engage in conflict, and when is it okay not to? sometimes I find that people in our traumatized communities have a lot of conflicts with a lot of people, but it’s not really about them or what happened, it’s about something else that hasn’t been witnessed within. Where does my responsibility lie here?
I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments.
