Avoidance & Anxiety

People often think that avoidance is all about procrastination, avoiding the pain of being thought of as having done a bad job by not doing the job in the first place. And although that is avoidance it can also extend into many areas of your life. 

Transcript

Richard: 0:00

Hi there everybody. How was your week? It's been a bit hot, hasn't it? I'm glad that it's cooled down a bit now so that we can maybe sit outside in a beer garden or something with our friends and not worry about catching fire or sunburning, our shiny, baldy heads if you've got one of those as well. But of course that's with the proviso that meeting up with friends isn't too anxiety provoking. I meet a lot of quite lonely folk who do actually have plenty of friends. They just avoid seeing them. But for some people feeling lonely might seem a more preferable emotion than the fear of judgment, which comes out as social anxiety, and that's the same for other emotions as well. If you feel resentful or feel taken advantage of and underappreciated, it could be you're avoiding confrontation of some sort. So it's a good idea to look underneath what's going on sometimes. Because avoidance is the foundation to pretty much every phobia that you can put a name to. The more that you avoid something, the more your instincts learn that it needs to be avoided. And our instincts really only have one way of telling us what to avoid and what to approach, and that's with the fight or flight response. We see a lot of that with clients who have so-called anger problems because there are multiple layers to our emotions. And without some emotional intelligence when you ask, How did it make you feel when your wife said you couldn't go on that stag weekend? All they might see is anger, when actually the reason they were angry was because of something else. The anger was a response to feeling hurt, controlled, the disappointment that she doesn't trust him. That's the initial emotion and anger is the response. And when we can see that, we can hopefully tone it down a bit so that we can sit and have the conversation about trust and love and faith in each other. Rather than storm outta the house in a huff. But if we don't open up about how we feel, then we avoid it all because we fear judgment or maybe see any other emotion except anger as some sort of weakness. But of course it isn't. But if we have this cultural association between emotion and vulnerability, then as a society we learn that emotions must be dangerous and need to be avoided. But avoiding things makes our world smaller and smaller. When we avoid things that poke our anxiety, not only does that fuel the fear of the things, but it also reduces our comfort zone until the only safe place we've got is under the duvet. So there are a couple of things you can do once you acknowledge that you might have this tendency and you've maybe identified some lower down deep emotions that have fueled it. Some things need breaking down then into bite-sized pieces. So if you've been avoiding your friends,'cause they keep inviting you to social events that are too big for you to feel safe in, then you know that you need to start smaller. So in this case, you've probably already identified in yourself a fear of judgment from other people. So that's where you start. You do something small that puts you center stage of just one person. You learn that you can be someone's focus for a moment or even just a few seconds, and your world doesn't collapse and they don't rip you apart like an animal after all. Maybe that's just making eye contact, just saying hello to someone. Maybe just saying, Hiya, nice weekend? To somebody that you wouldn't normally speak to that often, if at all. If you try to jump into new behaviours with too steep a climb, it's gonna more than likely backfire on you and make you fear it all the more. So don't bite off more than you can chew. Just plan bite-size things. If you avoid emotion, if you avoid feeling vulnerable by opening up to your partner, how hurt you feel when they ignore your preferences, that's going to backfire. But those tiny interactions of just saying hello to someone becomes being able to have small talk about the weather or the football or Love Island or whatever. And then one bite sized piece after another. You can go to a house party without triggering too much anxiety. Now, you're probably never gonna do any karaoke or demo some break dancing or something, but you know what? You don't need to. But never avoid anxiety. I'll leave you to that for today. Enjoy your week, and if you're a patron of mine, of course, I will speak to you again on Monday. Take care everybody.