Mind and Emotions (5 page)

Cognitive avoidance.
This type of avoidance is strictly in your mind. You avoid certain distressing thoughts or memories by consciously suppressing them and actually saying to yourself, “Don’t think about that. Just don’t go there.” You push unwanted mental images away. Sometimes cognitive avoidance takes the form of worry and rumination. You might handle your anxiety about the future and various risks in your life by constantly worrying about what might happen, running various scenarios over and over in your mind in the hope that constant vigilance will somehow prevent anything bad from happening. Another cognitive avoidance tactic is replacing distressing thoughts or memories with other mental content. You might fill your mind with distracting fantasies or daydreams or repeat mental rituals, such as saying certain good luck phrases over and over in your mind. Sometimes ritualized prayers or affirmations serve a similar purpose, with the repeated words and phrases drowning out memories or thoughts that bother you.

Protective avoidance.
With this strategy, you attempt to avoid risk and danger through excessive safety behaviors, such as checking locks, light switches, gas stoves, and so on, or by carrying certain objects with you that you rely on excessively for their protective qualities, such as lucky charms, a cell phone to call for help, mace, a whistle, or antianxiety medication. Protective avoidance can take the form of compulsive cleaning, hand washing, or wearing gloves to the bathroom. Perfectionism and overpreparation for classes or work can also be a form of protective avoidance. Conversely, you might try to avoid risk by procrastinating and putting off a feared task or event.

Somatic avoidance. With somatic avoidance, you try not to experience internal sensations associated with emotional distress, such as feeling hot, being out of breath, or getting fatigued or exhausted. You might even avoid normally pleasant sensations, such as sexual arousal or excitement about an upcoming event, because they feel similar to being anxious.

Substitution avoidance.
This form of avoidance involves replacing or drowning out a distressing emotion with another feeling. For example, you might replace anxiety with a stronger emotion that’s more tolerable for you, such as anger. Bingeing on food, alcohol, or drugs is a popular way of distracting from and covering up painful emotions. Cultivating an overall feeling of numbness can serve the same purpose. And some people turn to the excitement of gambling, risky behavior, video games, or Internet porn as a way of replacing or covering painful feelings they want to avoid.

Consequences of the Five Types of Avoidance

All five types of avoidance have the same basic consequence. Although they offer short-term gain, they lead to long-term pain. In the short term, you avoid an unpleasant feeling in the moment, but soon enough you face the likelihood of the same feeling welling up again, so you try to avoid it again. Meanwhile, over the long term, your life is on hold. The depth, height, and reach of your very existence is limited by your day-after-day, week-after-week, year-after-year attempts to avoid feelings that are, ultimately, unavoidable.

Although this long-term pattern of consequences is common to all types of avoidance, it’s like the melodic theme of a symphony; there are countless potential variations on the theme, and these can make your particular style of avoidance seem individual and unique. Let’s explore in detail how the long-term consequences have played out for different people who have practiced the five types of avoidance:

Consequences of Situational Avoidance

Marcy couldn’t abide crowds. In any group larger than four or five people, she felt smothered, short of breath, vulnerable, scrutinized, exposed, and confused as she tried to keep track of everyone who might be in trouble or dangerous or critical of her. Marcy was a smart person with a good fund of psychological buzzwords, so she excused her avoidance of crowds by saying, “I’m too empathetic and intuitive for my own good. I have very porous boundaries, and large groups overwhelm my ability to process all the inputs.” She claimed to be the type of quiet, introspective, spiritual person who prefers intimate, one-on-one communication, rather than consorting with throngs of people.

But in reality, Marcy was simply paralyzed in any large gathering. In the short term, she could avoid the paralyzed feeling by staying off of committees, not joining large organizations, avoiding big parties, and arranging her social life so that she dealt with friends and family one or two at a time. But in the long term she suffered some serious consequences. She missed her sister’s wedding. She didn’t see her daughter in her high school play. When her husband finally got her to Italy, she scarcely saw it in daylight because of the crowds. She holed up in the hotel room with a “headache,” frequented the smaller, shabbier sidewalk cafés, and roamed the cobblestone streets alone at night. In Rome she missed Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Coliseum, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. In Florence and Venice it was the same. The sad truth was, Marcy was taking a pass on a lot of her own life.

Oscar also had trouble going out in public, but his fears were all about how dirty the world is. Ever since he was a kid and saw a TV show about microorganisms, he had a thing about germs and contamination. In the short term, he avoided contamination by washing his hands numerous times each day, changing into clean clothes twice a day, and spending about twelve hours a week cleaning his apartment with his large collection of germicidal products. But in the long term, he was isolated and lonely. His cousin set him up on a date with a really nice girl, but the date didn’t go well. Oscar was a little freaked out about shaking hands with her, and then the waiter served his water in a smeary glass that looked like it was teeming with germs. Oscar tried to joke about having a “thing” about cleanliness, but he could tell the girl thought he was weird. He didn’t bother trying to call her for another date.

For Angela, the thing to avoid was any kind of challenge or change, especially at the junior college where she worked in the admissions office. Her chronic feelings of depression and hopelessness left her with no energy to cope with novelty or come up with solutions to new problems. Most days she could stick to routine and claim to be too busy to make any changes or take on anything new. But in the long term, her boss was increasingly dissatisfied with her progress on adopting new computer software, rewriting copy for the website, and finding additional storage space on campus.

Consequences of Cognitive Avoidance

Penny tried to avoid thinking about the baby girl she gave up for adoption when she was sixteen years old. Whenever she saw a baby or heard one cry, she thought about her baby, and a wave of guilt, shame, and regret threatened to overwhelm her. In an effort to suppress the painful memories of her own child, she deliberately tried to think about something else. She wouldn’t go to movies or watch TV shows about teen pregnancy, babies, or even little kids. She went out of her way to avoid toy stores and schools. Just the sight of a pregnant woman or a kid in a stroller made her feel tense and angry. She only dated younger, wilder guys who seemed unlikely to bring up the subject of having kids.

In the short term, Penny was mostly successful in not thinking about her baby girl, but she devoted a huge amount of energy to not thinking. The more she tried to suppress certain thoughts and memories, the more frequently they came to mind. In the long run, constant suppression of her thoughts and memories was exhausting and depressing in itself. She was also setting herself up for a life without kids, without family, and without any serious relationships.

Stan was devoted to worry and rumination as a way to stay safe. For example, it seemed to him that the way to avoid himself or his wife or son having a car wreck was to put in plenty of worry time about it. Stan took months to buy new cars, poring over
Consumer Reports
magazines to make sure they got the safest model. He was full of advice about what route to take, how to drive, and what to look out for. Whenever his wife or his son went anywhere, Stan worried the whole time they were gone. Beyond traffic accidents, he also worried about carjacking, floods, earthquakes, snipers, and sudden heart attacks while at the wheel. He’d had a fender bender two years earlier, and he still spent a lot of time ruminating about how he might have avoided it. In the short term, all the worry and rumination seemed necessary to feel safer, but in the long term he was still very frightened. He had a hard time forcing himself to drive on the freeway or make left turns without a green arrow. Plus, he was driving his family crazy and was starting to worry that his wife might divorce him.

Alyssa avoided any feelings of stress, anxiety, or worry with an arsenal of mental rituals and affirmative sayings. Before she opened the mailbox, she prepared herself for bad news by thinking, “Clean, green, and serene.” When worries about paying the bills came up, she told herself, “Let it go and let it flow” or “I’m manifesting abundance and plenty in my life.” She quelled thoughts about her high blood pressure with “Don’t worry, be happy.” When walking, she kept her mind calm by counting her steps. She counted spoon strokes while stirring soup and brush strokes while grooming her dog and always tried to end on a round, even number, like one hundred. She told herself, “Good news, good news,” when the phone rang, and, “Careful, careful,” when the doorbell rang. When the lights flickered and dimmed, she thought, “Bibbity bobbity … boo!” and at the “boo” the lights were supposed to come on full and steady. In the short term, Alyssa sometimes kept anxiety at bay, but eventually it always returned. In the long term, she was scattered, disorganized, and unable to concentrate and get things done efficiently because of the constant chatter of her mind.

Consequences of Protective Avoidance

Carlos’s avoidance of anxious feelings took the form of checking the locks on his apartment and car doors, turning light switches on and off several times to make sure they were really off, repeatedly checking the stove knobs and furnace thermostat, and so on. In the short term, it seemed to keep him calmer, but it often took him fifteen minutes or more just to get out of the apartment. As a result, he was almost always late for work and appointments. In addition, his checking rituals were annoying to others, and in the long run, this made it unlikely he would ever find a roommate, have a long-term romantic relationship, or even invite a friend over for dinner.

Miriam tried to avoid her fear of germs and contamination by cleaning compulsively and excessively. For example, she scrubbed the grout lines of her tile with a toothbrush dipped in bleach, then scalded the tile with boiling water. For a while this made her feel that the surfaces were clean enough, but then she would imagine the few surviving germs multiplying and evolving into supergerms, and soon she’d be reaching for the bleach and the toothbrush again. In the long term, more and more of her time was taken up with cleaning, and she worried that nobody would want to date or live with someone like her.

Isaac, a draftsman for a large architectural firm, frequently felt ashamed and like a failure. He couldn’t stand the slightest criticism, so he overdid everything at his job, yet he never thought his work was good enough. He put in hours of unpaid overtime, polishing every last detail of every drawing. He missed deadline after deadline because he had trouble letting go of a project before it was “perfect.” In the short term, his overpreparation sometimes paid off in praise for excellent work, but in the long run he was in danger of being fired for being too slow.

Consequences of Somatic Avoidance

Christy was so afraid of having another panic attack that she avoided any physical sensations that reminded her of having a panic attack. She couldn’t stand feeling too hot, so she kept the windows wide open in the house year-round and ran the air-conditioning in the car all the time. Whenever her heart rate increased, she felt like her heart was skipping beats and a panic attack was coming on, so she never did anything remotely aerobic. She wouldn’t play tag or even hide-and-seek with her kids, and she climbed stairs as slowly as her seventy-year-old mother. She tried not to get excited about anything, even nice things like buying a new car or Christmas presents, and she hated surprises. Being short of breath was another panicky symptom, so she stopped having sex with her husband. In the short term, she didn’t have any panic attacks for months. But in the long term, her daughter started calling her Zombie Mom, and her husband was getting interested in his personal trainer at the gym.

Consequences of Substitution Avoidance

Shareena, a single mother, had two kids under four years old. She was prone to depression and anxiety, but you’d never know it. Whenever she started to feel a little down or nervous, she covered it up with anger, which seemed to give her energy to power through her stressful day (not that she was all that aware of her avoidance strategy). A constant state of annoyance and irritability had become a habit with her, showing up as frequent outbursts of sarcasm, cursing, and the occasional raging tirade. In the short term, her raging was often kind of funny, and her friends said that Shareena had “attitude.” In the long term, it was getting kind of scary, and she suspected that people were avoiding her and gossiping about her.

For Keith, the way to avoid feelings of guilt and depression was to feel nothing. He cultivated a state of numbness that he thought of as “full-body Novocain.” In this spaced-out, insulated, anaesthetized state, nothing could touch him. At least that was the theory. To stay numb, Keith had to avoid socializing with people and stay unemployed. He holed up in the basement of his grandmother’s house and spent a lot of time smoking dope and watching movies he’d seen before or listening to his MP3 player blasting heavy metal and playing along with his unplugged electric guitar. Long term, he knew that his preferred state of numbness wasn’t a viable job description or the way he wanted to live the rest of his life.