Avoidance: Put your fingers in your ears and hum ‘till it’s over.
What is avoidance?
Are you good at avoiding things?
Do you sometimes (ahem, often) find yourself making your apologies for absence from a birthday dinner? Do you procrastinate with work, assignments, or anything a bit tricky? Do you smile and nod to dodge conflict with your in-laws or the man who pushed in front of you at the shops? Do you abstain from talking about details of your life to fly under the radar prevent those close to you from breaching your cocoon of private safety? Perhaps you may actually strive to avoid feeling any emotion at all - full stop.
All of the above belong to the realm of the person with the avoidant coping style, and represent an approach to dealing with stress and distress that’s all about pushing away difficult emotions in any way possible.
Pros and cons
There’s nothing crazy about this way of coping with stress - if something strikes fear into our heart, it’s natural to not want to approach it. We all do it on the regular. In some situations, this can even be a life-saver. Ever heard of the fight/flight response? Avoidance is akin to the flight response to a threatening situation, and in deadly scenarios, sometimes fleeing is the best or even only possible response.
However, at its extremes, those who tend to cope via avoidance can sometimes find they need to constantly distract from what’s going on in their own head. They may notice this only when they’re forced to slow down and are unable to distract - imagine being stuck in your house and the WiFi is down, and suddenly realising being with your own thoughts leaves your panicked. Not only is constant self-distraction exhausting, one also becomes akin to a shaken Coke bottle: things are never unpacked, examined, or dealt with, and pressure starts to build up. Sooner or later, a tsunami of stuff is going to pour out.
Discomfort: learn to surf the waves of your own emotion.
Time to get comfortable with discomfort
What to do to avoid the inevitable wipe out? Generally, to broaden your coping mechanisms to beyond avoidance, the trick is to practice riding out emotions vs. shutting off. Some steps:
Identify the emotion coming up in response to whatever’s happening - check in with yourself regularly if you are totally numbed off, but if you can generally notice a bodily sensation when an emotion arises, what is it? Anxiety, anger, sadness, shame, disgust? Name it.
Use skills to help you manage the intensity of the emotion - self-soothe. Skill is the right word because this ability needs to be developed and practiced. That’s another post, but breathing slowly and mindfully is a good place to start!
Sit with the emotion for a bit - watch what it does; ride the wave as it increases, peaks, and then, inevitably, subsides. No emotion can last forever - this I promise you!
Once you’ve ridden the wave of emotion and all the thoughts, worries, images that come along with being in it - figure out, what do I need? Perhaps you need to confront someone, ask for something, or go to that dinner party. If you’ve not simply avoided the discomfort, you can actually start to answer this question and move forward!
This is but a starting point for the avoidant person to experiment with, well, not avoiding. More interesting perhaps is where one learned to avoid discomfort - that’s for another time. Next time you feel the urge to emotionally block your ears, try not to, and see how it goes.