How Avoidance Can Protect and Harm Us
And how looking at it differently can help.
Maybe you've heard the term avoidance before. It is often said with a bite, a bit of sourness to it, like it's this shameful thing we do to evade responsibility. When we pause to consider our actions of avoidance in the context of our life though — the trials and tribulations and hurdles many of us have faced — we can see avoidance in a different light.
Avoidance, which can take many different forms, is something we become adept at as a shield from hurt. We develop a skillset for moving around pain or stopping before it even hits; avoidance is evolutionary in nature, a set of behaviors we engage in so that we can survive. With that in mind, maybe we can look at avoidance with a bit more fondness.
Avoidance is often our protector. Often the only defense we have against the heaviness we feel we can't let surface. It helps us move forward, not always with the greatest awareness, but forward nonetheless. So when we are shamed about this avoidance (skipping the hard conversation, opting for the extra drink, responding to someone's genuine ask that we are "doing fine"), we can feel defensive and protective over this part of us that has made us feel safe so many times.
But trying to rid ourselves of avoidance by shaming it and naming it bad certainly doesn't relieve us of it. In fact, shaming ourselves for avoiding usually makes the avoidance dig its heels in, as though it's a part of us staking its territory as a valiant protector.
Of course much of the work of therapy is overcoming avoidance so that we can wade through our painful experiences and feelings, becoming our own life raft in the process. We cannot avoid forever, no matter how helpful it has been in protecting us — like many things we love, we must learn to let go.
So what do we do? How do we overcome avoidance in a shame-free way?
We can start by meeting our avoidance with curiosity and openness. Sometimes by asking our internal parts why they operate as they do, we can be more deliberate in guiding them out of their vigilance. Understanding the purpose the avoidance serves can give us insight into alternative ways of tending to our feelings and needs — ones that actually give us long-term relief from what we have been pushing down. In getting to know the avoidance, we can practice the vulnerability we need to uncover the pain it has been blocking us from.
This work — of finding an alternative to the avoidance — is challenging, in particular because it means facing the avoidance, and in turn, what has been buried. My role as a therapist is to walk beside you as you get curious about the avoidance, open yourself to the discomfort of what lies hidden, and learn to support yourself through emotions and experiences you've been shielded from for so long.
There can be so much self-discovery in vulnerability, and learning about the many different parts of ourselves — an exceedingly vulnerable act — can be extremely fulfilling.
This idea — that we're made up of many parts, each trying to help us in its own way — comes from a framework called Internal Family Systems (IFS), which shapes much of my approach as a therapist. If this resonates with you, I'd love to connect to talk more about what it could look like to explore your own parts together.
written by Isabelle Tabah, LCSW
