Make eye contact with the things you’re avoiding
I’m a classic avoider. It’s a miracle I typed this sentence at all.
I spent a long time avoiding tough conversations in favour of, you know, just disappearing or being unhappy. I’ve ignored aches and pains, regardless of how they affected my mood. I’ve tried to intellectualise any feeling I had just so I didn’t really have to deal with it.
I was trying to trick myself into thinking I was fine. Really, though, I was just making myself and my world smaller. I was numbing myself. And, in the process, I was moving myself further and further away from any actual solutions to the problems I had. I was holding myself back.
This is some classic experiential avoidance. And it’s a common trap. It pops up in basically everyone’s life, in one way or another, and some people will go a long way to avoid thinking about things they don’t like.
Today we’re talking about experiential avoidance, including:
- What experiential avoidance is, actually.
- How it holds you back, and how to move past it.
- How doing so helps change your life (and the world).
The change part of this is big. This process isn’t about just accepting things as they are. It’s about seeing the world as it is and how you can change it. It’s a philosophy of action.
What is experiential avoidance?
It’s kinda in the name, really. You live your life in such a way that you avoid certain experiences, feelings, and the like. But that’s a flippant explanation of a real problem – one that can go unnoticed.
In their book The mindful way through depression, the psychologists Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn explain it through the lens of unhappiness.
They argue “we react to our own unhappiness as if it were a threat, and when we do so, the brain’s avoidance system is triggered.“ We “damp down” behaviours like “curiosity, engagement, and goodwill”. More than that, we avoid the signals our mind and body give us by “walling them off, suppressing them, numbing out, or, in one way or another, pretending that they are not around”.
All of this happens on autopilot. It’s not a choice but, because this all emanates from our noggins, it can feel like it is.
How experiential avoidance holds you back
Experiential avoidance doesn’t stop at negative feelings, though. Williams et al. explains that it comes for all our feelings. It can “mute our ability to feel anything, positive or negative”. As a result, they say:
We handicap ourselves in dealing effectively with unhappiness and reinforce the sense that, somehow, we are out of touch with the full experience of being alive but don’t know exactly why.
In the process, it denies you the full suite of human experiences. And, crucially, it stops you from making changes to your life and the world around you.
In a lot of ways, this kind of avoidance plays a role in your life. It helps protect you from pain – it is, after all, the result of your mind responding to a threat (or, at the very least, what it understands as a threat). If you tense up in the face of conflict, that’s your body protecting you.
But, in the long term, misapplied “aversion and avoidance prevent us from moving beyond old wounds and old habits of self-criticism.”
And it’s the moving beyond that helps you grow.
How to move past experiential avoidance
Williams et al. provide a meditation designed to help you practice “inviting a difficulty in and working with it”. Here’s the process:
- Sit and spend a few moments following your breath.
- Expand your awareness to cover your whole body (like in a body scan meditation).
- Think of problem you’re facing in your life – one that you’re okay sitting with for a tick. It can be big or small, so long as it’s a bit unpleasant and a problem you still need to solve.
- Tune into any physical feelings that problem summons up. See how your body responds.
- Bring your focus to the place where your physical feelings are strongest with the goal of welcoming that feeling, of being curious about it.
- Once your focus has settled on the feeling, say the following to yourself: “It’s okay. The feeling is here. Let me be open to it.” You can also try “open”, or “soften”, or your own version.
- If the feeling goes away, return to your breath.
The goal, as always, is to bring awareness to the feeling without judgement or resignation. You’re just acknowledging it with curiosity.
For me, I experience stress as tension in my jaw. Depression feels like tentacles wrapping around my heart and lungs (which is why I have a tattoo of a big ol’ octopus on my shoulder).[1] Clicking into those physical feelings helps me better understand if my mind is leading my body or if it’s the other way around. Then, I can make skilful decisions about what to do next.
This process is empowering, even if you can only do it for a moment at first, because it changes how you think about the negative experiencing. According to Williams et al., “intentionally holding something in awareness is already an affirmation that it can faced, named, and worked with.”
In a moment, it goes from something your body works to avoid on autopilot into something you can overcome. It changes your relationship to difficult feelings and emotions and – in the process – gives you the power to make bigger changes in your life (even if that means giving up parts of yourself you once thought vital).
It can be difficult but, as Williams et al. say, “the path of honesty and genuine openness” may be the only way to go “if we want freedom from the habitual reactivity of the mind” and something that approaches “healing and resolution”.
Moving past experiential avoidance lets you change your life (and the world)
This isn’t about reframing bad times. As useful as that can be, you can’t reframe your way through bad bosses, relationships, policies, or governments. It’s about learning how to sit with painful experiences so you can approach them with curiosity and do what needs to be done.
If you do that, you “take the risk of engaging with moment-to-moment living, rather than tuning out of it for fear of what it might become,” says Williams et al. You can only live in the present. And you can only change the things you engage with.
That mindset is what takes things like mindfulness from an “oh shucks, it is what it is” thing to something more transformative. The Buddha, having guided sixty monks to enlightenment, told them to go out into the world and help people:
Go forth, O Bhikkhus, for the good of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the good, benefit, and happiness of gods and men.
Sure, he was telling monks to go spread the dharma (his teachings). Proselytising was part of the deal. But the fact remains: the point of inner work, from experiential avoidance to enlightenment, isn’t to make peace with the world as is and make yourself feel okay about it.
The late Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn put it more plainly: “the peace we seek cannot be our personal possession”.
“We need to find an inner peace which makes it possible for us to become one with those who suffer, and to do something to help brothers and sisters.”
Cory Zanoni
The goal is to see things for what they are, truly and honestly. And, if you see something that needs to change, you stay in the moment, find your next step, and get to work.
As Williams et al. say, “we can transform a cascade of reactions into a series of choice points.” What choice are you going to make?
The 30-second action plan
- Book in time to do the meditation in the “How to move past experiential avoidance” section. You need to get this experience in your bones before you can use it in the moment.
- Do something nice with someone (animals included). After you get into your own head and look at something unpleasant, make sure you do something you enjoy. Pet your cat, play a game with a friend, call someone you love. Do something good for yourself.
- After you identify an unresolved problem, jot down some simple actions you can take to make a change. You don’t need to take the action immediately – just give yourself something tangible and clear to get on with.
- Find a way to connect some of these changes to your broader community. Don’t make all your fixes just you focussing on you. That’s a lot of weight on your shoulders. Maybe you find people to help you, maybe you find people to help. Just find a way to act in the world – and not just in your own head.
- I got it to remind me that depression is part of me, like any other feeling. It helps that that tatt looks cool as hell. ↩︎
