The hidden cost of emotional avoidance
As the phone rings, I start to wonder, Will she pick up this time?
She usually avoids the phone. It gives her anxiety. Plus, she knows I don’t shy away from the hard questions.
Surprisingly, she answers today, and her face fills the screen.
“Hi, babe. How are you doing?”
“I’m good.”
“Really?“
She laughs nervously as we smile and look at each other knowingly. My eyes gently offer a talk to me invitation. It doesn’t take long before she takes me up on it and reveals the truth: “I’m not sleeping much, I don’t have an appetite, I have up days and down days. I’ve been really struggling.”
Today, she’s learned how to open up to me, to trust me. I’ve also learned how to read her and encourage her to share her feelings and what’s really going on. She knows she’s safe with me.
But this is after months and months of avoiding her feelings and emotions while insisting everything is just fine when clearly it’s not.
What does emotional avoidance look like?
When we talk about emotional avoidance, many people imagine someone who is constantly busy. After all, if you just keep busy, you don’t have any time or space to “feel”.
I’m sure you can think of a variety of people in your own life: the boss who arrives early, stays late, and never seems to take a day off. What about the hurried parent who is always running from one appointment and class to the next? Or the chronic overachiever who fills every spare minute with work, exercise, social commitments, or a myriad of endless distractions.
Sometimes emotional avoidance does look like that.
But avoidance can also look very small and quiet.
It can be someone withdrawing from friends and family, sleeping too much (or not enough), avoiding responsibilities, and even losing interest in activities they used to love.
Sure, sometimes we all feel like declining invitations or cancelling plans. Life can be exhausting, and we really are simply too tired or stressed to make the effort. It’s ok to say no from time to time. That’s perfectly normal in the short term. But when any type of avoidance becomes a pattern, it creates a widening distance between us and the emotions we’re trying very hard not to feel.
Rather than acknowledging and working through the feelings of sadness, grief, fear, loneliness, shame, or disappointment, we push them aside and hope they’ll eventually disappear on their own.
Unfortunately, emotions do not work that way.
Avoiding something doesn’t make it disappear. Sure, maybe in the short term you can suppress it, but it always finds another way to make itself known.
How and why we learn to avoid our feelings
It’s simplistic to think of emotional avoidance as a character flaw when more often, it’s a learned survival strategy.
For many people, this “skill” kept them safe in childhood, and it’s so ingrained in how they operate that they’re often not even aware of the avoidance; it’s simply “what they do”.
So how does this happen? Childhood and early relationships are the building blocks of learning to relate to our emotions. If the home is filled with love, kindness, and emotionally mature, safe caretakers, children learn that it’s safe to express their emotions—all of them, the good, the bad, and sometimes the very, very ugly. They learn that, no matter what, they will be seen, heard, understood, and loved unconditionally, regardless of the emotions they are going through. These children learn that it’s safe to feel all of their emotions, that rupture is inevitable, and what healthy repair looks like and how to achieve it. This is the most secure type of childhood one could hope for.
Unfortunately, not all children grow up with this type of emotional experience. In fact, too many children learn that expressing their emotions leads to criticism, dismissal, punishment, or shame. They are led to believe they are “bad” and not worthy of love. They fear making mistakes, as this could cause their caretaker to take away their love.
Other children grow up with caregivers who are emotionally unavailable, overwhelmed, unpredictable, or unable to provide the comfort and reassurance a child needs.
Over time, all of these children learn:
“If nobody is coming to help, I have to handle this myself.“
They’ve learned it’s no use reaching out or sharing. In fact, revealing their emotions could make the situation worse. And so, over time, they become independent, capable, and totally self-reliant.
These qualities might look admirable in adulthood as they signify strength and individuality. But beneath the tough exterior is a deeply ingrained belief that vulnerability is unsafe, emotions should never be revealed, and feelings should always be managed alone.
“The problem with emotional avoidance is that it works—really well. At least for a little while…“
But eventually, that learned childhood protection technique becomes a barrier to healing later in life. It’s difficult to ask for help or communicate needs in relationships if you never learned how. The result is a disconnection from ourselves and the people around us.
Even being surrounded by others, the feeling can be profoundly lonely.
The hidden cost of avoiding our feelings
One of the biggest misconceptions about emotional avoidance is that it protects us from pain. In reality, it often narrows our emotional world altogether.
Many people who have spent years avoiding difficult feelings describe feeling disconnected from life itself. They struggle to experience everyday feelings of joy, excitement, connection, gratitude, or hope.
It turns out, you can’t selectively numb your emotions.
If you can expertly and effortlessly shut down your capacity to feel pain, you’re also diminishing your capacity to experience pleasure as well.
The result looks and feels a lot like depression. Life and relationships become flatter, and the world in general can start to feel distant and harder to connect with. While depression is a complex condition with many contributing factors, emotional avoidance can fuel the sense of disconnection that so many people experience.
You don’t have to carry it alone
The good news is that emotional awareness is a skill that can be learned. It doesn’t require us to become overwhelmed by our emotions or spend hours analysing every feeling. Instead, it begins with noticing.
Learning to recognise what we’re feeling. Naming emotions rather than pushing them away. Becoming curious about our experiences rather than judging them. Most importantly, it involves learning that sharing and vulnerability are not weaknesses.
Looking back on the conversation with my friend, what struck me most wasn’t what she shared. I could already tell she was struggling.
It was then that she finally allowed herself to share it. She let go of the shame and fear and opened up to me.
Her struggles hadn’t disappeared overnight. The anxiety hadn’t magically resolved itself. The difficult circumstances she was facing were still there.
But for the first time in her life, she began to trust that she was safe and didn’t need to carry everything by herself.
Healing begins at The Place Retreats
Learning that you don’t have to carry everything alone is often where healing begins.
You don’t have to solve all of your problems to start healing from emotional avoidance, but you do have to stop avoiding your emotions in order to heal.
At The Place Retreats in Bali, we offer award-winning luxury wellness retreats to help clients learn to manage their feelings, heal from their emotional avoidance and live happier, fulfilling lives.
Our Balinese tropical sanctuary is designed to help clients focus on themselves through holistic therapies, movement practices, and mindfulness techniques.
Through individualised therapy sessions (including EMDR, CBT, and DBT), Kundalini yoga, meditation, and deep-tissue matrix healing, our expert team offers a personalised approach for every unique individual.
Contact us today to learn how our tailor-made retreats can help you.