Better Mental Health.net
. . . Because You Can Feel Better

Are You Living to Avoid Feeling?

Feeling the emotions of fear, sadness, anger, guilt, or shame in your body is an icky feeling.  Your body might shake, your stomach churn, your heart race, plus the hard-to-describe sense of the emotion itself - all that weird discomfort of yuck.  It might be an emptiness, a pit in your stomach, or clenching of your throat.  Who in their right mind would want to feel this way? Avoid!

Then there are the thoughts.  When your body feels, it sends a signal to the brain that says, "okay, we have matched your thinking."  Then of course your brain pulls out more thoughts from the memory banks associated with those corresponding feelings and sends them to your awareness.  Think snowball effect. Think emotional overwhelm.

So what does someone do?  Naturally they avoid the experience or situation that creates these feelings.  If you're scared of heights, you avoid going up high.  If you're anxious about being in crowds, you avoid places where there are lots of people.  If you are anxious about driving, you avoid driving.  Think snowball effect, again.  Pretty soon you're a hermit.  This happens a lot.

The problem is that when you avoid something that creates a feeling you don't like and then you avoid the trigger, you get a quick does of relief.  Your brain now associates the avoidance with the relief and soon it is a habitual way of thinking and being. The belief, "do not do that - it is scary" fills your mind and becomes a truth that you live by. Trauma creates this too.

If you want to break habitual thinking, create new brain cells, new associations, and be able to tolerate living free from anxiety, you will have to at some point face your fear head on.  Trauma is managed a bit differently, but fear and anxiety can be reduced by facing it head on.  Someone suffering from OCD, or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, can benefit also.  If you have to turn the light in the kitchen on and off 32 times to make sure your mother does not have a heart attack, having the experience of not flipping the light on and off and your mother living is helpful. This becomes new information that disconfirms the previous belief and can help create a new one.

So yes, this is about moving into the resistance to learn and grow.  It sucks too.  It means having to go through the emotion to get to the other side.  EFT tapping is often quite powerful in helping to manage this type of situation - sometimes curing it permanently.  I have helped clients with speech anxiety do just that.

Martha Beck, author of Finding Your North Star and Steering By Starlight (two of my all time favorites I highly recommend) wrote a fantastic article in Oprah Magazine in February of 2006 about all this. Here is a link to Guide to Avoiding Avoidance.  I hope this speaks to you.  I hope you are able to break the shackles of anxiety and do as Martha suggests, live your life based on love of yourself, not out of fear.