The Dance with Avoidance
A favorite question: How do you deal with challenging emotions? The hit list of strategies often includes avoiding, escaping, worrying, and seeking comfort. Most of us recognize when our strategies become maladaptive and see the lack of benefit. However, our tactics provide temporary relief by avoiding the problem, pain, or person we're struggling with. Relationally, people crave closeness and fear loneliness. Yet, the loneliness epidemic pervades society. How do we reckon with our avoidance to build closer connections?
In The Dance with Anger, Harriet Lerner writes: "It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions."
Avoidance for Avoidants. Attachment theory defines avoidant attachment styles as fear of losing independence and will tend to minimize closeness. What if it may not just be a loss of autonomy people fear but an actual fear of being close? Closeness requires courage not to be so independent. The hardest part of intimacy is having it. How badly do we want to be seen, heard, felt, and understood, yet fear opening ourselves up? The fear of being rejected, ignored, dismissed, hurt, or worse, feeling unlovable inhabits our psyche and guards our hearts. It's like a dormant virus until relational pain spreads the illness throughout our emotional system. We'll avoid getting sick at the cost of living.
The Dance with Avoidance. Think of a time when you wanted to have an honest conversation about difficulties you experienced related to another person. What did you do instead of having the conversation? Did you shove it down only to shoot passive-aggressive comments? Did you yell and scream about everything that irritated you right to them? Or did you try to manage it inwardly, only to find yourself shrinking? Vulnerability requires us to face fears associated with emotional exposure. Practicing vulnerability is a dance. You may mess up the steps, forget where you're going, or move off-beat, but the freedom of self-expression is a gift to yourself and others.
When Fear is Alive. I've been in the company of others who fear losing control. If you want to know what it's like being in a traffic jam with them, it's not pretty. A response that ensues yelling, cursing, and name-calling appears as a loss of emotional regulation (you probably have seen this happen before). Control to them is ensuring life goes according to plan, and the unpredictable is not acceptable. The exact thing they fear is already happening; they don't perceive it this way. It's similar to people who fear loneliness. In talking with many people about loneliness, they'll often keep the fear riddled with an overdose of solitude. Couples crave a level of intimacy with one another and get stuck emotionally opening up to their significant other. The fear of being seen overrides the desire for intimacy. When the fear of staying the same becomes too painful, change happens. This change is slow, exposing bit by bit to the idea of no longer avoiding emotional intimacy but embracing the closeness it brings.
Ask yourself this: How are you living your fear?
Vulnerably Yours,
Brittani
