How Avoiding Your Feeling’s Isn’t Actually Making You Feel in Control
Let’s start with defining what avoidance looks like and how to see if you might be avoiding your own emotions. Researchers have found that, broadly, there are 5 types of avoidance:
Substitution: avoiding painful emotions with replacement emotions, numbing out, alcohol, drugs, binging, or gambling
Situational: people, places, things, and activities
Cognitive: thoughts, images, and memories
Somatic: internal sensations such as racing heart, palpitations, breathlessness, overheating, or fatigue
Protective: avoiding uncertainty through checking, cleaning, perfectionism, procrastination, or reassurance seeking
Substitution: avoiding painful emotions with replacement emotions, numbing out, alcohol, drugs, binging, or gambling
What’s so bad about avoiding feelings? Sure it does reduce the initial experience of the emotion and provides some short-term relief. However, it doesn’t resolve the issue or really help you give the emotion what it needs to give more long-term relief. Pain, sadness, anxiety, distress, discomfort are all a part of life. Avoiding our emotions actually just teaches us that certain emotions are “bad” and takes away your ability to tolerate these emotions. Avoidance takes a lot of effort and is often very exhausting and time-consuming. Further, it prevents you from being present and may lead to other difficitules like substance addiction, helplessness, hopelessness, depression, damaged relationships, and missed opportunities.
In short, avoidance just doesn’t work. When you tell yourself not to think about something, you have to think about not thinking about it. When you try to avoid an emotion, you often end up feeling it anyway. Trying to avoid feelings will actually make you feel out of control because you feel you need to avoid the feeling to get control but feelings don’t go away and never come back. It’s a vicious cycle.
So what to do instead? First, reflect on which emotions you tend to avoid and how you tend to avoid them. Next, ask yourself, “What do I really fear will happen if I let myself feel these feelings?” Will it be too overwhelming? Will you fail? Will you let others down? The fears might not make rational sense but they might FEEL very real. Let yourself listen without judgment. You might reflect on where you might have learned this fear - maybe from childhood? Maybe from a relationship or parent? Then you can reflect on how maybe that learning, though was very helpful then, isn’t necessarily helpful or true today.
This process can be emotional and difficult at times, be patient with yourself. Share your experience with someone you trust or your therapist. Often, we need others’ support to be more in touch with our genuine self vs. acting from old emotional learnings.
