Is Avoidance Bad?

The answer, in the words of my grad school professor Dr. James Werth, would be - it depends.

Experiential Acceptance and Avoidance

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy learning to ride the wave of feelings and physical responses to life's situations (experiential acceptance) is a part of emotional health. I've focused a lot on emotions as an important source of information needed for our well-being. There is research which connects avoiding or repressing emotions to poorer physiological and relationship health.

In future writing I'll also be looking at the Catholic view of suffering. We shouldn't be too quick to sidestep difficulties, as they are a means to participate in the work of salvation, gain spiritual merit, develop deeper faith, and sanctify oneself. This includes not only the situations, but our very human reactions to the evil and the natural suffering of the world, such as illness and death. God calls us to lament even as prayer, as we see in the Psalms.

But sometimes we need to set feelings or memories or urges aside quickly, or we may not yet have the skill to stay with them most effectively.

We Do Our Best

Times of crisis is one of these moments. One definition of crisis, from a mental health standpoint, is a point where a person's coping skills are overwhelmed and they are unable to cope effectively.

A client of mine recently had a dramatic surge of anxiety symptoms following a doctor's visit and a scary physical health diagnosis. We decided that in the first 24 hours she was going to give herself permission to engage a lot of the coping mechanisms she has been working to avoid. This included endless reels of cats doing dumb things, little treats, and staying in bed wrapped up like a human burrito. When we were able to meet the day after for an appointment, she recommitted to her usual self-care plan.

Not every choice to go off-script with how we cope is so dramatic. Sometimes we're just tired or we want a treat or that run's adrenaline rush really will do us a different kind of good. It's all about whether...

We Stay with Our Values

ACT encourages us to consider not only what promotes psychological health, but what is within our values. These are not values chosen by the creator of ACT, or named in some research, or suggested to us by a therapist. These are our personal values, meant to align with our beliefs.

Part of the ACT work is naming the values, or qualities of behavior, you want to live out in your life. This has a whole number of purposes, and it includes guiding our choices when we need to cope with distress. Our values can help us determine whether a little avoidance might be okay, and in what way.

We'll get into more of this in a moment, but first a quick example. You have a bad meeting with your boss, log off, and are mad. It's a feeling you don't like, and you need to jump right into another meeting in 10 minutes. You choose 9.5 minutes of playing solitaire on your phone.

Is that okay?

Chances are that it's not violating any major values. Now, perhaps you committed this week to the value of intentionality or to the goal of being present to your emotions. You might want to try something different next time, then. But maybe you know that the fastest way to calm down is a good moment of gaming distraction, and a value of yours is kindness to your coworkers. In that case, maybe you chose well.

Labeling Avoidance Tactics

It's important for us to start with the understanding that avoidance is not, in and of itself, psychologically or morally wrong.

So as we get into these examples, you may think to yourself, "But that's a healthy behavior!" And you may very well be correct. Things that we like to do or even things we should do (like exercise or pray) can be used in ways which are helpful and healthy. But it may be that they also get used in a way that blocks a different healthy behavior, or used in a way that is unhealthy.

Think about a person who has an eating disorder who has been instructed to limit exercise while they're in recovery, as an example. Or a person who prays to win the lottery instead of looking for a job. So as we go through these examples, remember it's how the behaviors are used and in what contexts and with what frequency.

(c) 2025 Christine M. Williams

Distraction

Distraction can be understood as behaviors we engage in to intentionally shift our awareness away from something, rather than helping us focus on something. This could be the avoidance of any number of internal experiences including feelings, bodily sensations, memories, and urges.

Almost anything can be a distraction. It could be watching reels on Instagram, saying evening prayers, going for a run, engaging in self-injury, talking to a friend, watching a movie, or cleaning the kitchen. Again, we are not labeling these as right or wrong, good or bad, moral or evil because of their ability to be used as a distraction. We are labeling them so that we can identify that at times we use behaviors to distract ourselves.

The moral or ethical goodness of a behavior or its psychological healthiness is a different matter. Some are never good for us (self-injury, such as cutting). Others might be morally or psychologically neutral in moderation (scrolling Instagram for reels of cats) but not at certain times (while driving).

Opting Out

Opting out is avoiding people, places, or things to avoid the associated feelings, memories, urges, and so on. It is very human to avoid things which make us upset, or bring back bad memories. Someone who has a problem with alcohol abuse may wisely avoid bars or friends they used to drink with. After a break up, it can be a good idea to avoid some places for awhile and shift to a different set of favorite hang outs.

There are also forms of opting out which are not psychologically or morally healthy. For example, a parent overwhelmed by their children starts to go to the library every night and leaves their spouse to deal with the kids, coming home only after they are in bed. Now, could this is used intentionally and for a period of time, in agreement with the spouse as a way of navigating a period of high stress at work? Perhaps. But it's important to recognize that the avoidance of situations causing difficult emotions isn't helping with learning skills. It's just relief.

This is especially important in some psychological disorders, such as phobias and trauma. Avoidance can become an overused coping mechanism to avoid triggering distress. Now, avoiding snakes intentionally forever isn't likely to cause a problem, but avoiding people would have social, occupational, and health consequences. A person who was sexually assaulted may prefer to avoid intimacy, and that would be their right to choose and understandable. But healing would likely include exposure to this becoming a goal on some sort of timeline.

Thinking

Previous articles already talked about thinking as an avoidance strategy. This can be confusing, because if we're thinking about something aren't we facing it?

Not exactly the point. The point is to be facing our feelings and the bodily sensations and such which arise. Thinking can pull us out of ourselves and into our minds, away from the actual experience of our emotion. This isn't always a bad idea, such as when planning helps us overcome the fear of something happening which can be helped. Certain forms of therapy, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, encourage a person to debate the rationality of their thoughts to bring calm.

However, this can go awry when we use thinking to avoid our emotions. At the more severe end, we see this with obsessive-compulsive disorder, when feelings of anxiety are alleviated by mental rituals (such as counting). But most commonly I see this in relationships. A person will become fixed on what the behavior of the other person means. That text. The look. Not seeing each other this weekend. The choice of words. The difference between "kk," "Okay." and "okay" in a text.

There may be something important to be gleaned from such sleuthing, but where it's often more helpful to focus a person is how these behaviors are making them feel. Is it bringing up memories of past relationships? Do they feel dismissed? Are they needing something different in terms of communication or time spent together? This is using our internal experience as trail head to see what really needs explored.

Strategies

Strategies, for our purposes, are behaviors which quiet or dull our awareness of our emotions. There is a fair bit of crossover with distraction, particularly the distraction which has a direct effect on our physiology. Running and meditation might be good examples of ways we can shift our selves to quiet certain emotions.

Strategies also include the use of substances to change physiology and reduce our awareness of emotions. These can range from prescribed medications (Xanax) to legal substances (alcohol) to supplements (magnesium) to illegal drugs (LSD).

There are very legitimate reasons a person may be dulling their emotional awareness. However, prescribers and therapists are increasingly encouraging people to limit use except outside of crisis or for short-term use. This is mainly for two reasons. One is that many substances can become physically addictive. The other is that it limits the move to other coping skills which allow for the natural experience of emotions and ultimately better self-regulation.

Let's take alcohol as an example to look at the subtlety. As an adult, a person might choose to have a drink or two at the end of the week to relax. For many people, this done occasionally presents no psychological or moral issues.

However, some religions prohibit the use of alcohol entirely, and this would therefore not be a fit for this person's values. Another person might be intentionally sober because of alcoholism in their family history. They, too, would not consider alcohol as a behavior which fits with their values of self-care or sobriety.

So Should You Use Avoidance?

To sum up, the use of avoidance is best summarized as "it depends." The types of avoidance, the why of using avoidance, the benefits of not using avoidance, the values behind different forms of avoidance - they are all highly personal.

This is where I believe honest examination and maybe some experimentation is called for.

When I work with clients I like to suggest things, knowing what can work and why. If you are up to it, try thinking about when you use some of the above strategies and whether they are working for you. Are they congruent with your values? Is there something that comes from avoidance that is a negative "side effect"? Commit to some exploration this week!