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Avoidance is a reaction to fear and what we know about fear is: the more we avoid it, the harder it is to overcome. The more we expose ourselves to it, the easier it is to manage and eventually overcome. That’s why exposure therapy is so effective^. So essentially, the short term goal of avoidance to manage fear, becomes fear’s best ally and serves to strengthen it. But don’t worry, you can follow our 3 simple steps to attack avoidance… Read on!
When you don’t acknowledge and face your fear you may win the battle, but you start to lose the war – letting fear take valuable ground in the battlefield of your mind.
I’m not saying, “go and do everything you’re afraid of right now”, but at the very least, acknowledge you’re afraid of it. Recognise it in your life and start to think how you will confront it. This doesn’t have to be completed in the next three minutes but it does have to start in the next three minutes. Because the longer you wait, the stronger the fear gets, reinforcing the pattern in your brain that ignoring it – avoiding it – means it can’t help you.
Fear is insidious, like a virus infecting your freedom. Your avoidance is an inability to create antibodies.
We all have emotions and fear is one of the six big ones! Or ‘primary’ emotions*. This is happening to everyone around you, all the time. But their fears are not yours; and your fears are not theirs. If you get someone else to do an exam for you at school you’re not going to learn… same with fear. If you have someone else solve your problems, you’ve missed an opportunity to learn how to solve your own and your avoidance means your fear grows because every time you give in to avoidance, you tell yourself you can’t deal with the problem; it’s too hard.
And eventually the problem will become too hard and you’ll have to find new, creative ways to avoid it! Drinking’s good, that avoids the problem for a few hours, maybe a night… cocaine is better; that’s gonna push the problem right to the back of the queue while your dopamine and serotonin receptors get blown out for the next few hours – depending on how much money you have!^^ Television, instagram, Facebook, watching sports, eating junk food, having reckless sex… these are all great ways to avoid problems too! To ignore the fear from dealing with life’s issues!
Now don’t get me wrong, all those things are great, if you’re doing them to enjoy them… not to avoid your issues. Because the solution to your problems can’t be obtained unless you acknowledge them and start working towards resolving them – not leaving them in the fridge while you eat everything in the pantry.
The choice is yours. When you react to the ‘problems’ in your life – the things that you don’t want to deal with because they’re scary – don’t let that reaction be avoidance. Let it be acknowledgement, good clean acknowledgement. Expose yourself to your fear so you can conquer it. And make an agreement with yourself, that in the next three minutes you start working towards confronting and resolving that problem – before fear consumes you and you’re too drunk to remember this post.
Acknowledge, assess and act – start confronting your fear and stop avoiding it. The more you think about it, the more power it has.
by Geoffrey Fox, inlyfe co-founder + clinician
*The 6 Types of Basic Emotions
