"When things aren"t going well, we often fall back on avoidance. It"s in our DNA to do so. Everyone who is alive today descended from ancestors who successfully survived a harsh, primitive environment. But this mechanism to avoid remains with us and seems to be counter productive when it comes to stress, loss and even despair. Therapists describe avoidance as: A maladaptive coping mechanism characterized by the effort to avoid dealing with a stressor. Coping refers to behaviors that attempt to protect oneself from psychological damage.
Limit your tendency to avoid problems to minimize their impact.
So what can you do to manage anxiety, fear, depression, trauma? Managing acute moments of emotional pain in your life can be overwhelming. Sometimes, practicing with a simple go-to method can help firm up the "emotional muscle memory" so that when the worst hits, you"re prepared (or at least as close as anyone can be).
We often think of "getting over" or avoid problems or pain. But like anything else in life, the more we resist or avoid something, the less practiced we are. To illustrate this idea think of simple phobias such as the fear of elevators or fear of spiders. The standard treatment of care involves gradual exposure to the feared stimuli (elevators, spiders); not avoidance of it. This is the gold standard for how to generally manage these otherwise debilitating fears and it"s well known in the psychological and lay communities. However, when it comes to anxiety, depression and emotional trauma, we often talk about healthy avoidance, distraction and otherwise limiting exposure. But the hard truth is that it"s nearly impossible to truly get over something unless you go THROUGH it.
The fact is, everyday is an opportunity to become a better you but it requires that you just stop "trying". A modern example of this is in a scene from the original Matrix movie where Morpheus is imploring Neo to resist the urge to "try" and instead trust that he can "be" who he is meant to become by and trusting in the process of facing his fears and perceived limitations.
What you can do in your real world experience follows a similar pattern:"
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