What Your Avoidance Is Trying to Tell You
What you have been running from might be exactly what you need to find.
Reading time: 4 minutes
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"What we resist, persists." — Carl Jung
I am writing this on a quiet Sunday morning, thinking about all the years I spent running from things that were simply trying to get my attention.
We all know that situation.
We are sitting in a meeting with a good idea or a solution we believe in, but we stay silent.
We want to avoid the moment when we break the silence and draw attention to ourselves.
Just thinking about it makes us nervous, so we say nothing.
At home, we feel the urge to turn on a podcast the moment we walk through the door.
The silence of an empty apartment is the thing we cannot face.
Avoidance is a coping mechanism.
It protects us from discomfort and runs our life quietly in the background, often without us even noticing.
The mechanism is efficient. That is exactly what makes it a problem.
Because avoidance is more than protection.
It hides information about ourselves that we need to know.
In the meeting it is not really about the attention.
It is about the fear of being exposed as not good enough.
At home it is not really about the silence.
It is about the loneliness or sadness waiting underneath it that we are not ready to sit with yet.
The pattern is always the same. The avoidance is never really about the thing on the surface.
In my own life I often did not send job applications.
Not because I was lazy but because I wanted to avoid the interview where it might turn out I was not good enough for the role.
In my relationships I stayed silent when something bothered me or when I wanted something for myself because I was afraid that showing my real needs would risk the harmony and eventually cost me the relationship.
The hidden information underneath both was the same belief: I am not good enough, and if people see that, they will leave.
Nobody wants to face that about themselves.
But that belief, once you can name it, is actually valuable information. It is the starting point of everything that can change.
As long as you stay in avoidance mode you keep that information hidden.
You never get the chance to question it, challenge it, or collect evidence that it is wrong.
You never find out that the thing you feared was never as dangerous as the avoidance itself.
What happens when you stop avoiding
The first thing you will experience is discomfort.
There is no way around it and no shortcut.
That is something you have to get through.
But on the other side of that discomfort, your energy improves.
Avoidance is exhausting in ways you do not notice until you stop.
The internal dialogue loops, the constant low level stress, the bad sleep.
When you stop feeding the avoidance, that weight lifts.
More importantly, you start collecting real information about yourself.
What you are actually capable of.
Where you genuinely need to grow.
The picture of yourself becomes clearer and more honest, which makes every future decision easier and faster.
You also lose something.
The short term relief that avoidance gave you disappears.
But what replaces it is something more durable: the quiet confidence of someone who shows up instead of hiding.
How to quit the avoidance loop
You do not have to go from zero to one hundred.
The best approach is to shrink the avoided thing down to its smallest possible version.
If you fear silence, start with short walks without music or earbuds.
If you avoid writing because you believe you are not good enough, open the document and write one deliberately bad sentence.
The goal is not to complete the task.
It is to put one foot in the room, stay for two minutes, then leave.
Then do it again the next day.
Tell yourself before you start that it will feel uncomfortable.
That single step adjusts your expectations and almost always leads to the same realization: it was not as bad as you thought.
Remove the escape routes.
No phone on the desk when you sit down to write.
No earbuds when you walk.
And when you finally speak about something real, do not soften it with humor.
If you do not take the conversation seriously, neither will anyone else.
What I found when I stopped running
Silence was one of my biggest enemies.
I lived in constant noise so I would not have to hear what was happening inside.
When I finally started walking without distraction, I felt the discomfort immediately.
But I also found the man I had been neglecting for 35 years.
Someone who had many interests but never got the attention he needed.
I found warm memories from my childhood I could finally use as a compass.
I found things that needed work, my lack of confidence, the belief that I was not enough.
And in meetings, when I finally spoke up, I found that people appreciated what I said.
Nobody laughed.
Nobody judged the out of the box ideas.
My words mattered more than I had ever allowed myself to believe.
That is what was waiting on the other side of the avoidance.
Not the catastrophe I feared.
Just myself.
What Was Always Waiting
Avoidance feels like protection.
And for a while it is.
But it is a short term strategy with a long term cost, because everything you are hiding from yourself is also everything you need to grow.
The courage to face it does not have to be dramatic.
It starts with two minutes in the room, one honest sentence, one walk without noise.
That is the lowest price you will ever pay for the life waiting on the other side.
Thank you for reading.
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