Avoid Avoiding
Difference between distraction and avoidance.
I often see my clients avoiding certain stressful situations or difficult emotions. I explain to my clients the differences between distraction and avoidance. Distraction is short term and planned. Distraction can be used as a skill. There are many DBT distress tolerance skills that help us to distract when we are feeling overwhelmed with intense difficult emotions or faced with a “crisis”. I put paracentesis between the word crisis because we often believe in the moment that we are going through an actual crisis. It can feel very real in the moment, however later on when we use our wise mind, we can realize that the situation we went through actually wasn’t a crisis. I explain to my clients that when we avoid it can become habit forming, as it is easier to avoid then face difficult situations or feelings. Avoidance often makes things more problematic. As a therapist, I am direct with my clients and point out when they are avoiding. I find this helps them learn how to identify when they are avoiding outside of therapy. Awareness is the first step of breaking the chain of avoiding.
Example: When we avoid feeling anger, it can bottle up and then explode causing an array of consequences. It is more effective and beneficial to be aware of that anger, process it and cope/manage it. Anger is a natural human emotion, everyone feels anger, so why avoid it and act like it doesn’t exist. I simply remind my clients, it’s okay to feel angry and remind them we are in control of our actions.
Why we should avoid avoiding.
Avoiding can be helpful if we are avoiding certain triggers (people, places, things). However, we cannot avoid all triggers, so learning how to cope with them is important. When it comes down to emotions, avoiding them can cause several consequences. First, is the act of bottling up emotions can cause our bodies physical stress, it can cause us mental strain and can even impact our self-esteem. Second, showing emotions can help us to practice being vulnerable. There is strength in vulnerability, suppressing emotions is not helpful in practicing being vulnerable. Third, avoiding certain emotions and people that trigger difficult emotions can lead to relationship struggles. It can hinder trust and we aren’t being our most authentic self if we don’t share about our emotions. If we avoid, it can also make it difficult for us to communicate our wants and needs in relationships. If we fall into the habit of avoidance, we will not get practice coping with relationship conflict. Conflict cannot be avoided forever, so learning about conflict resolution and how to cope with conflict is so important.
As a last note, I want to point out how throughout this blog, I have not referred to emotions as bad or good. Changing the way, we look at and talk about emotions can make it less likely we will fall into the habit of avoidance. Emotions cannot be good or bad, I prefer to call them enjoyable or difficult. When we call them bad or good, it can create feelings of shame and guilt for feeling those emotions, making it more likely we will want to avoid them.