Avoidance can be helpful for healthy psychological functioning and the accomplishment of your life mission.  Bet you never thought you'd hear that. 

     I'm not talking about turning the other cheek when you're angry.  Nor am I talking about keeping insensitive, harshly critical, or mean-spirited remarks to yourself, although both these examples are clearly good uses of avoidance that's more commonly called common sense.

     Psychologically, avoidance usually means the passive act of not doing something that is good for you and using or doing something else instead that is harmful, or that hinders your personal growth and healing.  Procrastination is a first cousin to avoidance, though usually of shorter duration, and with an end result of ultimately doing what is good for you after some delay.

When It's Dysfunctional to Avoid

     For Daria, being hypersensitive to disapproval and rejection, fearing the possibility of being shamed or ridiculed, and feeling inept leads to limited interactions with her peers.  Daria's social avoidance stems from feeling deeply inadequate. As a result, she finds it difficult to have easily satisfying interpersonal relationships.  Avoidance in this sense is highly detrimental not only to her personal success, but also to a good quality of life.

     Sam avoids expressing himself, or discussing interpersonal issues when it would benefit him to do so because he fears starting an argument, or embarrassing himself.  Narelle avoids paying her bills because doing so triggers irrational feelings of scarcity and insecurity, as if she might not have cash when she needs it for emergencies. 

     These individuals are using forms of dysfunctional avoidance -- acts that harm or hinder clear understanding and longevity in relationships, feeling good about oneself, and having normal effectiveness in the world. These types of thought, feeling, and behavioral avoidance are patterns that create enormous stress, anxiety, and depression.  These patterns can be detected in the self-judging, self-blaming remarks we make about ourselves, and in some of the false beliefs we have about what we can't do.

     Dysfunctional avoidance is rarely a chosen path.   Daria's, Sam's, and Narelle's avoidances are their default response to perceiving the need to do something they don’t want to do.  It's a faulty coping mechanism that kicks into gear, often without their conscious intent.  

     The more they travel that unconscious path, the deeper the "habit ruts” in their brains become. Once in the neuro-rut, it's easier to get stuck in the negative "I can't" frame of mind. 

      Dysfunctional avoidance is often fueled by patterns of unconscious denial of actual realities. Narelle's scarcity mentality, for example, is in contradiction to the facts -- she's an educated, middle class women with job security who lives within her means.  Sam's conflict-avoidance happens when he's in denial about his compassion, empathy, and good communication skills. Daria's persistent feeling of not being good enough belies the many social invitations and excellent performance reviews she receives. 

     All three are habituated to avoiding their triggers.  If they could look their realities square in the eye, they might see how their usual "I can't" could become "I'll give it a try."

Creative Avoidance Can Be Useful

     Not all avoidance is bad -- sometimes it can actually be a creative strategy when the timing and time spent allows us to intuitively gather thoughts, release stress, work up courage, and wait for calm or clarity, etc.

     Creative avoidances generally have merit in and of themselves: taking a walk is good for your health even if you do it to avoid a discussion you don't want to have, for example. Likewise, starting a craft project, or tending the garden, or (in my case today) writing a magazine article when you should be doing your taxes, are creative pursuits used inappropriately to delay tackling an unpleasant chore.

     Usually, creative avoidance involves choice -- making a conscious decision to do something that might hinder meeting one need, where the outcome furthers a different goal, or benefits our health or life mission.  Jaleesa, for example, chooses to focus on her mission to promote English literacy in immigrant communities but does this in part to avoid dealing with difficult family dynamics.

     Sometimes creative avoidance incorporates a guilty pleasure in the choice.  Patrick goes out dancing to avoid spending evening hours on client accounts, and pays for it the next day with his back in spasm. We might question if that avoidance choice was creative or dysfunctional. For Patrick, it was a little opportunity to reclaim his social life, which served his life mission of celebrating the artistic efforts of others.

2 Questions to Help You Know the Difference

     To help determine if you are using avoidance dysfunctionally or creatively, ask: 1) is the activity you're doing -- that's allowing you to avoid something you don't like -- freeing or binding you? and 2) is the avoidance time /activity producing something beneficial and helping you move toward empowerment?

      In my therapeutic coaching practice, I see much self-judgment that hurts one's life-spirit and keeps us stuck in suffering.  Reframing the "avoidance" that is actually creative processing into a perspective that's more empowering and true, is psychologically helpful and healthy.   Rather than being a method that promotes the avoidance of taking responsibility, reframing is a mental processing technique that stops us from heaping undue criticism on ourselves and helps us become more aware of what motivates our actions.

     An empowering reframing statement might be: I'm choosing to do A instead of B right now, so that I can return to A when I'm ready with clarity and courage (or with fresh eyes, or with compassion for myself and others).

      It's possible to change our habituated patterns. We can stop dysfunctional avoidance completely if we look at what's real, and follow our own deep knowings and intuitions. Creative avoidance can be fun, although it can cost valuable time and energy. Becoming conscious to our faulty beliefs, self-judgments, and actions helps us see the unhelpful patterns in our lives -- patterns that we all have the power to transform.