Coming Face-to-Face with Emotional Avoidance

What do you do when you encounter something that you find unpleasant, whether in a situation or a person? Do you move toward it, and try to understand them and where they’re coming from? Contrarily, do you turn around and walk away, choosing to not engage in any unpleasantness, employing emotional avoidance?

There is much unpleasantness that happens in life, and quite a bit of it is difficult to face. What you do with that unpleasantness can make or break relationships, and it can make for healthy or toxic relationships.

Unpleasant situations such as an altercation or argument are often rooted in and bring up all sorts of feelings, from anger, and fear, to resentment. These emotions are powerful, and they can feel overwhelming, too. It can sometimes feel easier to steer clear of such situations altogether and of the emotions attached to them. One way of describing this aversion is the term “emotional avoidance.”

Understanding emotional avoidance

Though it may seem that emotional avoidance is just about steering clear of certain emotions, such as anger or fear, it is certainly more than that. Emotional avoidance is about feeling uncomfortable around certain emotions, whether your own or someone else’s. Those feelings may be the ones that are thought of as negative, such as anger, grief, or fear, but they also include feelings such as joy, excitement, and love.

Expressions of these emotions may feel uncomfortable, and the emotionally avoidant person may struggle to handle them in themselves as well as in other people. Emotional avoidance may present as refusing to acknowledge a child when she comes looking for comfort. It may also look like being overly positive or not embracing emotions such as sadness or anger. It can use humor to deflect inquiries about how you are doing.

Additionally, other tactics of emotional avoidance may be seeking perpetual busyness or fixating on others instead of yourself. When you stuff your schedule full of appointments, projects, and commitments, you conveniently avoid slowing down to feel the things that may overwhelm you. Likewise, if all your attention is put on another person, you can avoid dealing with your feelings or circumstances.

Vices provide a means of disconnecting from your needs and numbing yourself. Not all those vices will bring red flags to those around you. Of course, using alcohol or drugs may alert others of your emotional avoidance, but they may miss vices such as food, Netflix binging, or shopping to dull your senses.

You may choose to avoid people or places to dodge triggers or come face to face with unwanted emotions. If you’ve undergone trauma, for instance, emotional avoidance may include steering clear of the place where the trauma occurred or avoiding any people who might remind you of your experiences.

All of these and more are ways to not deal with your emotional state, needs, or thoughts.

The roots of emotional avoidance

Emotional avoidance may be caused by several factors and experiences, including childhood abandonment or neglect, and being taught to ignore or avoid expressing your problems or emotions. Some parents, because of their own experiences and upbringing, may believe that one should just grin and bear it and that expressing your emotions is equivalent to grousing or complaining. If a child imbibes this, they will embody this in later life.

Additionally, some people believe that being positive means not giving room to other emotions and experiences that may be construed as negative. Toxic positivity is one extreme example, which is when you feel that you can’t acknowledge feelings such as fear, anger, or grief because those emotions aren’t joyful. This may be for religious reasons, or from struggling to process emotions due to unresolved childhood trauma.

The negative effects

If certain emotions make you uncomfortable, or if you try to avoid situations in which such emotions arise, it can make a relationship complicated. For instance, if you are emotionally avoidant and your child expresses sadness at being bullied at school, you may struggle to give the validation and support they need. Likewise, if your spouse disagrees with you about something and a heated discussion bothers you, you might seek to avoid conflict.

Emotional avoidance can potentially result in:

Unnecessary and prolonged conflict with others

If, for instance, you’ve undergone trauma, avoiding the emotions relating to that trauma, such as anger, doesn’t result in the anger disappearing. It’ll simply resurface in your relationships with others in unpredictable ways.

Emotional neglect of others around you

If you avoid engaging the emotions of others, that means you won’t be able to meet a vital need of theirs, which is the need to have their emotions recognized and considered.

Delayed and unprocessed grief

When you avoid certain emotions, you avoid meeting your own needs. Our emotions tell us what’s going on inside us, and if there are any areas of need. Grief, for instance, helps us begin working through our loss. Not recognizing it and making room for yourself to process your grief, may lead to delayed grief.

Handling it effectively

Avoidance may appear to work in the short term, but it only pushes the problem down the road and makes it worse. The most effective way to deal with what you’ve gone through and are going through is to seek help. Through counseling, you can learn to identify, accept, and process your emotions.

A counselor at Texas Christian Counseling can help you develop healthier coping mechanisms and gain the tools to understand the sources of any unhealthy emotional responses. Furthermore, they can help you grow to express your emotions well. If you need help working through emotional avoidance, reach out to us today at Texas Christian Counseling and we will connect you with a qualified faith-based therapist in Texas.