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Picture this.
You leave a friend hangout frustrated. Again. Something happened. Maybe she said something dismissive, maybe she showed up 40 minutes late, maybe she didn’t ask you a single question all night, and it’s circling in your head on the drive home.
I’ll bring it up next time.
But next time comes, and you’ve kind of missed her, and the plans are fun, and you don’t want to ruin it. So you push it aside. You convince yourself it’s fine. You’re probably being too sensitive anyway.
And then it happens again.
And again.
Until one day you are so full of everything you’ve never said out loud that you just… erupt. And sometimes that eruption is the end of a friendship you actually really loved.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: it’s not the conflict that ends friendships. It’s the silence you keep to avoid it.
That’s exactly what today’s episode is about. My guest is Colette Jane Fehr, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, TEDx speaker, and author of the number one Amazon bestselling book The Cost of Quiet: How to Have the Hard Conversations That Create Secure, Lasting Love. Her work is rooted in couples therapy, but before you click away, don’t. Because every single skill she teaches transfers directly to your friendships, and by the end of this conversation, you’ll see exactly why.
Why We Avoid (And What It Actually Costs Us)
Conflict avoidance in friendships doesn’t always look like shutting down. Sometimes it’s passive aggressive digs. Sometimes it’s just pulling away a little, being a little less available, until you’ve quietly created distance you can’t fully explain.
Colette calls the most common pattern the “victim volcano.”
“We stuff things and we try to sweep them under the rug and tell ourselves it’s not that big of a deal. It won’t be productive to say anything. It’ll only make things awkward. And then what happens is they stack up inside, and we’re collecting evidence for a narrative we’re building. And then eventually one thing happens, and we’ve had it, and then we blow like all that hot lava spewing.”
And here’s the part that really gets me: even when the eruption happens, the ACTUAL issue still doesn’t get addressed. Because now the other person is focused entirely on your reaction. The thing that caused it? Still sitting there, unspoken.
There’s also a specific message a lot of us got growing up that makes this worse: friendships should be easy. We shouldn’t be too demanding. We shouldn’t be too intense. So when something hurts us, the default is to retreat, get over it, carry on. And we do that over and over until we can’t anymore.
I’ve seen this play out in my own friendships. I’ve been on the receiving end of the volcano. I’ve also been the person who almost became the volcano. And I can tell you: the small, uncomfortable conversation along the way is almost always easier than the fallout of everything that built up because nobody had it.
The “Bad Communication Report Card” (And Why You Keep Failing It)
One of the most useful things Colette shares in this episode is what she calls the bad communication report card. It’s three D’s and an F, and if you’ve ever tried to bring something up with a friend and had it go sideways, at least one of these is probably why.
- ▪️ Defensiveness. The person you’re talking to immediately makes it about protecting themselves instead of hearing you.
- ▪️ Distancing. Shutting down, icing you out, pulling away.
- ▪️ Dismissiveness. “Calm down. This isn’t a thing. You’re being dramatic.” (If someone has ever said this to you when you tried to have a hard conversation with a friend who hurt you, you know exactly how much damage those words do.)
- ▪️ Fixing. The impulse to jump straight to problem-solving instead of just… listening.
Here’s the thing, though. These responses are also EXACTLY what you trigger when you come in hot. When you lead with your story instead of your feelings. When you say “I cannot believe you did this to me” instead of “this really hurt, and I want to talk about it.”
Colette is navigating one of these conversations in real time right now, with a friend who hurt her around her book launch. And she was honest about the part of her that wants to lead with righteous indignation. That part is real. It’s human. But she also knows:
“If I come forward and say, I don’t know what your reaction was about, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it landed really painfully for me… I’m not guaranteed she gives me a satisfying answer. But I’m gonna feel good, because I’m coming forward to the table like an emotionally mature adult, and I’m advocating for myself instead of self-abandoning.”
That framing, self-abandoning, hit me. Because that’s what we do every time we swallow something hard to keep the peace. We abandon ourselves.
Self-Connected Communication: The Framework That Actually Works
Okay. So how do you actually have a hard conversation with a friend who hurt you without it blowing up?
Colette’s method is called Self-Connected Communication, and the core idea is this: prepare before you share.
The process goes inside first. Before you say a single word to your friend, you get curious about what’s happening in your own body. The tightness in your chest. The pit in your stomach. The numbness (because shutting down is a sensation too. I know this firsthand). Those physical responses are messengers. They’re pointing you toward what you actually feel, and underneath that, what you actually NEED.
Colette walks through her own process with her friend:
“I found that there was a lot of anger, but really more of like, I was offended and insulted, and underneath that, there was just a lot of hurt and sadness… I was getting a message like, you don’t value me. I’m not important. I don’t really matter to you.”
Once you’ve gotten clear on the feeling AND the need underneath it, THEN you come forward. And when you do, you start by naming what’s hard about the conversation itself:
“This is really hard for me to bring up. I get really uneasy in these conversations, but this relationship is really important to me, and that’s why I’m bringing it to you.”
That’s it. That’s the move that changes everything. You’re not attacking. You’re not accusing. You’re being vulnerable, and you’re speaking attachment. You’re telling this person: you matter enough to me that I’m willing to be uncomfortable.
Colette said that in her practice, when people do this, when they’re clear and vulnerable and they signal safety: 99% of the time, people respond shockingly well.
I believe her. Because I’ve been doing a version of this intuitively for years, and it almost always works. The one time it didn’t? She had already decided she was done and didn’t want to do the work. But every other time (small thing, big thing) positive outcome.
If you want the full blueprint for this process, including the scripts and the processing tool Colette describes as “emotional Mad Libs,” go listen to the full episode. She walks through it in a way that makes it feel genuinely doable, even if conflict avoidance in friendships has been your default for years.
The Lateness Story (And Why It’s Actually About So Much More)
One of my favorite moments in this conversation is when Colette tells the story of a new friend who was always late.
She’d joined a book club. Didn’t know anyone. Started connecting with a small group of women. And one of them was chronically, reliably, infuriatingly late. The OLD Colette would have stuffed it. Started quietly resenting her. Eventually either erupted or just drifted away.
Instead, she used her own framework. She told her friend, clearly and without blame, that the lateness made her feel disrespected. She took ownership of her OWN reaction. She didn’t lecture. She didn’t make the friend wrong. She just said: here’s what this does to me, and here’s what I need.
The friend opened up. Turns out it was a real struggle. Something that had caused issues in her marriage too. They laughed about it. They came up with a plan. The friendship got CLOSER.
And then I had to laugh, because I had to admit: I’m a five-to-ten minute late person. Colette was essentially describing me. And what I said in that moment is exactly what she coaches people toward (I know, I’m working on it, here’s what I’ll do differently) because when someone comes to you with vulnerability instead of criticism, you can actually MEET them there.
That’s the whole point. The goal of these conversations isn’t to win. It’s to connect.
The Thing Nobody Wants to Hear About Patterns
Here’s a question I asked Colette that I think a lot of you have wondered: what do you do when something has been building for a LONG time? When it’s not one incident, it’s a pattern?
Her answer was honest:
Ideally, you address things as they come up. Because once there’s a backlog, it’s hard to stick to the issue at hand. You want to make it about the thing that just happened. And if the conversation opens up and deepens, THEN you can say: “This has happened before, and I should have said something sooner.”
Notice that phrasing. I should have said something sooner. Not you’ve been doing this to me for years. You’re taking ownership of the gap. You’re not turning it into a verdict.
This is also why building what I call a friendship culture matters so much. When repair becomes normal in a friendship, when it’s just a thing you two DO, you stop needing the big blowup conversation, because the small ones happen naturally. Something feels off, you say so, you work through it, you move on. It stops being a thing.
The muscle has to be built somewhere, though. And Colette made a point I want you to sit with:
“The more you communicate well, the less you have to communicate. These conversations are not long. You learn to be very efficient and very clear and address little things as they arise. Apologize if someone’s feelings were hurt. It’s not about your intentions. It’s just about impact and carry on.”
Good Girl-Itis: The Real Reason You’re Not Saying Anything
We saved this one for the end of the episode, but it might be the most important concept in the whole conversation.
Colette calls it “Good Girl-Itis,” and she means it literally, like a disease. A set of messages so deeply embedded we don’t even realize we’re operating from them.
The message: being a good woman means being needless. Selfless. Easy. Not demanding.
And so we go to girls’ night exhausted, carrying everything we’ve been holding all week, and we look around the room and see that everyone else is exhausted too. And instead of saying hey, I really need someone to just listen to me for ten minutes tonight, we think: everyone else had a bad week. I’ll just shove it down. I’m fine.
I said it in the episode and I’ll say it again here: that cycle is everywhere. I see it in my DMs constantly. Women doing an enormous amount of emotional labor for everyone around them, and then showing up to their friendships with nothing left to give AND nothing left to ask for.
Colette’s reframe is simple and it’s everything:
“There is room for your needs to matter. Our needs matter. They deserve to be spoken. Nobody is coming to save you but you, and it is okay to have emotional needs in friendships and to express them. When we come forward in this very adult way that honors that little girl inside and is respectful of that other person, our friendships actually get stronger and better.”
That’s the thread running through this entire episode. The silence is the thing that kills it. Not the hard conversation. Not the conflict. The silence.
And the silence is often rooted in a belief (one most of us absorbed before we were old enough to question it) that our needs aren’t worth the discomfort of saying them out loud.
They are. You are.
The full episode goes even deeper into Good Girl-Itis and what Colette calls the antidote, including the part about the little girl still living in your body who needs you to show up for her. It’s worth hearing in her words.
One More Thing: Practice on the Small Ones
I’ll leave you with what I said at the end of this episode, because I mean it.
Friendship is a skill. Actually, it’s a whole PACK of skills. And this one, the repair, the hard conversation, the small release of pressure before it builds to a volcano, this is one of the most important ones. And like any skill, it only gets better with practice.
But most of us wait until something is big and overwhelming and we’ve already got one foot in victim volcano territory before we try. And that puts so much pressure on getting it right.
Start small. The low-stakes frustration. The thing that’s been mildly annoying you. The tiny moment where you could either say something or let it go. THAT is your rep. That’s where the muscle gets built, so that when something bigger comes up, you’re not starting from zero.
If you want the scripts, the framework, and the actual tools for how to have these conversations, pick up Colette’s book, The Cost of Quiet. There is so much packed into it that we didn’t even get to today.
And if any of this hit close to home. If you recognized yourself in the victim volcano, in the good girl conditioning, in the silence you’ve been keeping, listen to the full episode. It might shift how you think about every hard conversation you’ve been putting off.
Is there a conversation you’ve been avoiding with a friend? Drop it in the comments… not the details, just the type. “I’ve been avoiding telling my friend she always cancels on me.” “I’ve never told my friend that her advice is more like criticism.” You might be surprised how many people are sitting on the exact same silence.
