Conversations are rivers, they flow and progress, each its own journey.
In any relationship, especially close, important ones, when you avoid a conversation, you dam a river, trying to not let any of it continue flowing.
If the conversation is important to either person or to the relationship at large, you will have to avoid more and more forcefully. Because the water keeps coming, you must keep building that dam higher and stronger.
However, the more you build, the more intense the pressure becomes, especially deep down.
It may be painful to let that river flow. There may be rapids, waterfalls, or uncomfortable turns along the way. Avoiding that pain is why you built the dam in the first place. But to what end?
Ultimately, there are only two possible results:
1) You create a spill way and start opening up the flow. That is, you stop avoiding. You begin having the hard conversations. You face the pain of self confrontation and growth that ensues.
Or
2) You build and build until finally the pressure is too much. The dam breaks, decimating, devastating, and wreaking havoc all over. Relationships destroyed, hearts broken, families torn apart.
That may sound overly dramatic and it may well be oversimplified, but it's frequency can not be overstated.
