Avoidance: How to Stop Procrastination and Worry

[Music] Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forest Hanson. If you're new to the podcast, this is where we explore the practical science of lasting well-being. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I've been looking forward to today's episode, where we're going to be getting back to our roots a little bit here and talking about a common psychological challenge, avoidance and avoidant behaviors. We'll explore what avoidance is, some common forms it takes, and what we can do to limit the unhealthy aspects of avoidant behavior and the impact that that has on our lives. So to help me do that, I'm joined as usual by Dr. Rick Hanson, so dad, how are you doing today? I'm good and I'm really glad that we're going to talk about this topic because I've avoided important things at different times in my life and I can relate to this topic quite personally. Yeah, same. I mean, I think it's one of those ones where we've all done it and sometimes it can be really easy to almost lose track of the enormous impact that avoided behaviors could have on somebody's life. And then there are a lot of things that people avoid where we don't necessarily really think of them as being avoidant until you start kind of delving more into the psychology behind it and you can see how underneath it all, there is truly some kind of a critical experience that a person is avoiding. And as they open themselves up to it, all of a sudden all this kind of new possibility can unfurl from that. But we'll get to that in more detail in a little bit. Before we get into our content, I want to give you a couple of quick reminders. First of all, you can find us on social media, the podcast, Rick and I all have our own Instagram and Facebook profiles. I've included some links to those in the description of today's podcast. Second, if you'd rather be watching this episode right now and you're listening to it, you can watch it on my YouTube channel. I've also got a link to that in the description. Finally, if you'd like to support the podcast, we have a Patreon page. It's patreon.com/beingwhilepodcast and for the cost of just a couple cups of coffee a month, you can support the show and you'll receive a bunch of bonuses and return. So to kind of start our episode today, let's begin with a couple of basic definitions of some psychological terms here. We use the word avoidant or avoidance pretty colloquially, just like talking with other people about it, but maybe more from a psychological perspective. What do we mean by avoidance? You're exactly right. There's two major dichotomies related to motivation that involve pleasure and pain. It's the idea basically that people approach pleasure and avoid pain. Now, it gets kind of complicated because people can approach enjoyable, beneficial things as part of an ultimate strategy to stay safe and therefore avoid pain. And then people can also avoid pain like losing money, losing friends, losing their health in the larger service of approaching the things they really, really care about. Maybe a different term inology for these is promotion or prevention. You know, are you trying to grow things or are you trying to minimize or diminish things? So that's the overall kind of structure. And I want to just kind of throw a little noodle in here that I think that there's a third fundamental motivational category that the tradition of Western psychology and frankly Buddhist psychology, much Eastern psychology has not really addressed. Maybe in part, I have my personal pet theory, is this because it's a lot of men who've propounded these theories. And this third way of coping, this third way of functioning in life is neither approaching nor avoiding. It's about abiding in relationship with. It's about abiding in connection with you're not particularly moving toward or away, you're resting in relationship with. And we won't really talk about that here, but I just want to call it out that it's an important thing, I think, to keep in mind. And sometimes keep in mind is a kind of corrective to a pretty historically male dominated approach in psychology or philosophy. Yeah, I think it's a great point. It's a great wrinkle to kind of throw into the cloth of this episode, maybe a little bit here, especially since we're two dudes. I think it's good to call it out. Yeah, absolutely. It's fair enough because we are two dudes. It's a good thing to acknowledge. So maybe to give a little bit of context here for what we're talking about, really, really common avoidant behaviors that most of us have done at some point in our lives include things like procrastination, putting something off on duly passive aggressive behavior kind of talking around a topic with a significant other, rather than really engaging it. Even things like excessive rumination where we just choose something over in our mind over and over can be itself a form of avoidance will sort of get into that a little bit more later. And then limiting the kinds of situations that you allow yourself to be in, because they make you feel different kinds of things that are uncomfortable. And all of this kind of falls under the big category of what's known as avoidance coping, which involves trying to avoid things that cause a stress rather than address them directly. So rather than dealing with the stresses that we're facing, the stressful thing is avoided and replaced with some other kind of feeling. Oh, yeah, I think you're getting at the ways that whatever we do is a kind of coping. And really letting that sink in personally can give you a break because you start to realize that that dumb, stupid, misguided, wacko stuff you've done in your life deep, deep, deep down is always motivated by something positive. There's some fundamentally positive aim in it, even if it's really misguided. So avoidance is a form of coping, approaching is a form of coping, abiding in relationship as a form of coping. The question is, is it healthy coping or unhealthy coping? For example, driving down the street, you stop at a red light because you want to avoid a car crash. Okay, that makes sense. That's healthy coping. Not getting in your car because you are phobic, a gauraphobic event about being exposed out in the world in normal human ways these days. Well, that form of avoidance would be unhealthy coping. Similarly, you can cope through approaching in ways that are useful. Let's say you want to meet some new people maybe dating again, you know, being appropriate, maybe going on some sides, being friendly, that's good. Being a jerk by hitting on people in bars, that's not healthy, approach oriented coping. So just because it's avoiding or approaching doesn't mean that it's healthier unhealthy, it's kind of the big picture here. Now we're going to focus on unhealthy avoidance coping, but I want to kind of zero it in there. Yeah, I think it's a great point and a really, really good framework overall for the episode that none of these things are, I mean, there are behaviors that are in there, it's a good or bad, but these various coping behaviors are generally motivated toward positive ends and it can be a little dangerous to frame one of them as inherently superior to the other. There are a host of experiences that we avoid for perfectly good and understandable reasons. So just because you're avoiding an experience doesn't mean that the experience is inherently good or bad for you or that the avoidance is inherently good or bad for you. That said, the big problem with avoidance coping, there's been a ton of research on this is that over time, it actually increases the amount of overall stress that a person is exposed to because we don't address the issues, the problems start to pile up and this tends to make things worse in the long term than they would have been if we had just addressed them directly and started there. So we're increasing both the length of the stress and its intensity and some of this is because most of the time we kind of know that we're avoiding something. We don't stop thinking about what we're supposed to be doing and man, I've had a thousand incredibly painful experiences of this where I'm just chewing on something in my mind that I know I'm supposed to be doing and for whatever reason I just couldn't bring myself to do it then the days went by, the pain piled up, the problem got worse and worse and all of a sudden things have really spiraled out of control. I want to say first that it's important to appreciate that what is healthy avoidance for one person may be unnecessary and therefore unhealthy avoidance for another person. For example, sometimes as people get older and become maybe more frail with their health, they start to avoid certain activities that they used to do that are honestly just too challenging for them or as their capacities start to diminish somewhat, they simplify their lives and they just sort of avoid certain kinds of things that were just too complicated, I don't really need that. Maybe people around them might be saying, "Hey, you shouldn't be avoiding this or that, it's a growth opportunity, get out there, no pain, no gain, but the truth is for that person, maybe also because they've got other major burdens on themselves at this time, caring for young children, stressful job, personal illness and so forth, they just don't want to add on that other thing." And other people I think can kind of helpfully appreciate that to realize that, well, maybe you've just got more capacity right now than the person standing next to you. Totally. And it's appropriate for them to avoid x, y or z. Okay, great. All that said pathologically, you bet you that there's a lot more mental pathology generally associated with unhealthy avoidance than with unhealthy approaching. I mean, in unhealthy approaching, you have the addictions. People are just hooked on one thing after another. You know, shopping, porn, drugs, blah, blah, blah. You know, that there. But a lot of psychopathology has to do with forms of withdrawal, slumping, dissociation, numbing, spacing out, feeling helpless, depressed mood, and those are not really good for you. Also, when we avoid, we're not so engaged with reality. We're learning less about it. And we're not updating our information stores about the way the world really is, often because we're stuck in an old view of ourselves or view of reality that prompts us to avoid when, in fact, we don't actually need to do so. But because we're avoiding, we don't challenge that hypothesis about ourselves in the world and have an opportunity to dispute it and grow around it. So yeah, probably, you know, unhealthy avoiding, it's a real concern. You've already given some examples right there of kinds of avoidance. And I gave a few earlier. I named sort of some more task-oriented ones like procrastination. And you right there said dissociation, which I think is really interesting. Dissociation is absolutely a kind of avoidance of our lived experience. So I thought that again, maybe to do a little helpful framing here for people. We could kind of go through some of the common forms of avoidance and particularly some kind of families of the experiences that people tend to want to avoid. Okay, well, first off, situations. At the extreme, you know, there are people who have great phobias of particular kinds of things. And for example, I worked with a child once. She was had a phobia about grass. Now to be a child with a phobia about grass is very, very limiting. And I could add as well that one way people manage their fears because avoidance is at bottom and anxiety disorder. It's an anxiety. It's driven. We're very much in the mix there. Anxiety at some level. What are you afraid of? You know, that you're trying to steer clear of by avoiding, right? And people can realize, oh, what's the function of my avoiding? And usually it's to avoid or prevent something that I find threatening such as, for example, certain kinds of situations, like maybe leaving a job when there's a challenging coworker. I just don't want to get into it or I don't want to stand up for myself. Or maybe I want to avoid being in large groups because that makes me really nervous. Or I just hate being around authority figures given my childhood. So I want to avoid that kind of a person. So that's one category. Situations that people avoid. Great points about it. And also just a very touching story with regards to the the kid who is being avoidant of grass. And I think that it's a great example of the ways in which, as we've talked about on previous episodes, we can kind of hold the bars of our own cage. You know, the grass isn't going to get you. It's a pathological belief. This isn't a real fear. And framing it that way in that very childlike way, or it's very clear that the grass is not going to get the kid can kind of be a helpful way of framing some of our own. Maybe pathological fears about different things that that truly aren't helping us very much. So, but anyways, that's just be kind of offering it aside for a second. That's really true. Yeah. Yeah. Another kind of avoidance that comes up a lot is sometimes known as like cognitive avoidance. Your avoidant painful thoughts, feelings, memories. This can include stuff like ruminating, constantly worrying about what could happen or running these crazy disaster scenarios over in your mind because you think that they sort of keep you safe from something. Sometimes even daydreams can be a form of avoidance. Like you were saying dissociation. I'm not sure if I would put that in this category or one we're going to get to in a second, but that could also maybe be a kind of cognitive avoidance where you're avoiding thinking about a sort of thing that's really freaking you out. Yeah. One thing that I think is really helpful to appreciate is that very often worrying or ruminating serves the function of keeping feelings at bay. And so it seems like that the worrying is a problem. The ruminating is a problem because that people don't like doing it. Let's say they suffer while they're doing it, but it serves the purpose of keeping underlying feelings at bay, whatever they might be, or underlying longings or desires at bay. And therefore, the way out of that is to become more able to tolerate those underlying feelings and longings and be able to hold them with mindfulness. That being overwhelmed by them while also being present with them. And that's a good useful thing to be aware of. Yeah. I think again, great idea. Really, really useful for people. Another thing that maybe kind of connects to that a little bit to those cognitions, those thoughts and feelings that we have about things. A really, really common form of emotional avoidance is where we avoid one kind of emotional experience by replacing it with another kind of emotional experience. The most common example of this generally has to do with anger, where sometimes people refer to an anger as a secondary emotion. We've talked a little bit about that on the podcast in the past. And you know, I've kind of have two minds about it. Sometimes I think that anger is a very primary emotion. But a lot of the time, people shield themselves from more vulnerable emotions, particularly sadness, by displaying a lot of anger. And maybe another form of this kind of substitution of avoidance could be binging on different kinds of substances or experiences in order to avoid painful emotions, kind of like you were describing earlier in the episode as a sort of unhealthy approach of avoidance. It might be an unhealthy approach, or it might even be an avoided behavior because you're trying not to feel a certain kind of experience. Yeah, classic, you know, eating or, you know, retail shopping. Yeah, totally. Yeah. It's in effect what I my comments about worrying and ruminating related to this in that. Often it'll happen that person A, let's say, is worrying a lot about something or ruminating a lot about something. And then person B says, why are you doing that? Because person A is complaining, oh, I'm worried about this a lot or I just keep ruminating about this or that. And then person B says, well, why don't you stop it? Let's say. And then or starts to try to argue with the worrying or argue with the ruminating, present counter evidence and so forth. And then person A though doubles down and says, no, I believe what I'm worried about. I believe what I'm ruminating about. It seems really true to me. And so there's no budging them. So the way out of that is to step out of really arguing pro or con with the ruminations, but ask a deeper question, what's the function that psychological activity that mental activity is serving? That's always the money question in practical psychology. What's the function? You know, follow the money, right? That old line. What's the function? Follow the money, follow the reward, follow the path. What's the path? And then if you address that question, which is at a deeper level, you bypass arguing pro or con about the content of the worrying or the content of the ruminating, you get to what's underneath it, which is, you know, what's that ruminating or worrying, keeping it bay? And what would it be like to open to whatever you're keeping it bay? This is a great example. And I was wondering if you have something off at the top of your head. Oh, sure. We've kind of already given a couple, but would you mind sort of giving a practical example of this? Because I think that this is just such a key idea. Oh, yeah, it's so useful. Yeah. So let's say you're ruminating about something you resent, some way you feel hurt or angry at another person. You know, you're caught up in your case about that. And I use this one because it's a familiar example for me personally, something I have to be careful about doing. And you're getting righteous about it and you're playing the moral superiority card and you just weigh into it. Fine. But really a whole bunch of that, whatever is true about it is true. But why are you rehashing it? In other words, why isn't one lap around the track enough? If it's clear to you that, yeah, the other person did you wrong, they were wrong. They were bad. You know, you can't ever trust them again. Why are you still thinking about it? The answer to that, the why is because it serves a function. And maybe the function it serves is to keep the hurt at bay. So you don't really feel the hurt of how they treated you. Maybe you don't really feel the younger material that gets stirred up, related to how they treated you that then associates to stuff other kids did to you when you're in the fifth grade. That would be an example of that. And often what I find is if people just take a breath and you know, resource themselves a little bit maybe kind of ground themselves to be able to do it and just open to whatever is there to be felt. It usually washes through you in a dozen seconds within a handful of breaths. The bulk of it, the main charge of it washes through you. Almost always. It's not so bad. We're afraid of it, so we avoid it. But it's not so bad when you actually feel it almost all the time. Man, I think that's really tremendous advice for starters. Very personally useful in my life to have those repeated experiences of allowing myself to open to the more painful experiences that lie underneath whatever's going on between me and another person or me inside of my own process. And I think that the right that most of the time those feelings can dissipate pretty quickly. I've certainly had some examples of some major stuff, some big self-concept stuff or some major league. I mean, not quite pathological, but certainly like pretty intense avoidance stuff that took a little longer for the ripples of hate to settle down in my experience. But with most stuff, I think that you're really right that the pain that we're feeling from avoiding the thing regularly is often greater than the pain of the actual experience itself, which is such a huge takeaway for this whole conversation here today. Yeah, there's an old saying. I don't mean to overstate it, but it's the classic line, right? The coward dies at thousand deaths, but the hero dies, but one. There is something about just realizing that if you open to it, yeah, it'll be intense for a few breaths, maybe a few minutes, but after that it's going to kind of wash through you. I want to give you a separate example about worrying. So very often people will be worrying. Maybe they're worrying about a health issue where they're worrying about an impending trip, like they're going to get on an airplane and it might crash, or they're worrying about money, say, the worry itself, when you ask them, what is it mainly like for you to worry? It's mostly their thinking, often engaging a lot of verbal activity. Well, that's a clue. There's not much feeling or sensing in the experience at the time. It's thinking as a defense against feeling. So if you ask the person, well, this thing that you're worried about, what would you feel if it actually happened? Right? And then you might come to a very primary fear like, well, I'm afraid to die. I'm afraid of dying. Perfectly legitimate. What would happen if you just felt that fear of dying? Or you just felt that fear of bankruptcy? What would you feel if you were bankrupt? Can you open to imagining that? It's a big yuck. I don't want you to go bankrupt. You're not going to go bankrupt. Your plane is not going to crash. All right. But what if you just open to that that deep down fear that anchors, the whole stack, the top of which is worrying. And suddenly, it's not so bad at all. Really, it's not so bad at all. So that's another thing too. To try to get to the feeling of the deep fear, whatever it is, including extremely primary fears of annihilation or dying or horrible public humiliation. You know, okay. Can you feel it? Usually if you just feel it, it's quick. And then you don't need to worry anymore. Yeah. We often orient these conversations in the more cognitive realm of things. You know, how are we going to process our emotions? What's going on in the, you know, the tofu between the ears, the whole thing. But a huge part of it is the sensation that happens in your body. And as you're talking about feeling it, I think that that somatic aspect of it is a huge part of the whole picture. And it's also a big category of things that people are often really avoided about. You're bad. Particularly sensations in the body that are kind of commonly associated with painful or difficult experiences of different kinds. Something I've done a lot of thinking about personally is how excitement and anxiety are both very arousing emotions. They're both very revving like you know, your heart rate increases. The blood pulses through your body. You can get sort of breath. You get that quick inhale and exhale, whatever it is with both of those. And I think that for a lot of people, those two emotions are just like a hopscipping a jump away from each other because the somatic sensations are so similar. And it mostly just has to do with are you bringing like positive emotional affect to it or more negative emotional affect to it with anxiety. And for a lot of people when they've had really, really negative experiences around a certain kind of body sensation associated with a certain kind of experience, particularly an emotional experience. Yeah, they start to avoid the emotional experience entirely. And then they start to avoid emotional experiences that are kind of like that emotional experience as well because they have similar impacts on the way that the body feels. And that can be a very subtle way that avoidant behaviors start to creep into our ecosystem a little bit. You know, I remember the very first time I repelled on a rope. And he was one of the scariest things I'd ever done. And basically, as I was repelling down, I'm sliding down the rope. And I knew that if that rope broke, now it wouldn't break because it could live to car, but I imagined it breaking or the anchor's pulling, which wouldn't happen because my friend was up there watching them and there were three of them. And then each one of them would be perfectly adequate. Okay. But still, as I'm sliding down this rope, I had this intense visualization of it snapping, you know, like 60 feet above my head. And then I could see the kind of ripple of the rope coming back to me and the feeling of, "I'm starting to fall backwards." And initially, I thought that, but the effort I was putting into fighting it, and this is one of the key points about avoidance, that the benefit of avoidance is often vastly exceeded by the cost of it. The effort I was putting in to avoiding that fear actually made me less capable of doing the actual activity for pelling. And it paradoxically exposed me to something really going wrong. But it was one I just relaxed. And I kind of allowed that fear to ripple through me, not overwhelming me, but kind of passing through me that middle place, where you feel it, but you're not overwhelmed by it. Then I was okay. And I could actually start to really enjoy the experience. That's really lovely. Yeah. No, I think that's a really great lived example of how avoidance can keep us from the experiences that we really want to have in our lives. Before we go too much further, I want to talk a little bit about maybe not the positive aspects of avoidance, necessarily, but just some kind of useful ones, some things that we can can take advantage of, based on our tendency to avoid different kinds of experiences. And I was just sort of thinking about this while we were doing the planning for the episode. It's really understandable to frame avoidance as this negative thing. And we talked in the beginning about how nothing is good or bad in these different coping mechanisms. They just have good or bad consequences, essentially. They're good aspects and negative aspects. One of the things that I think can be really useful about avoidance is that it can be a great indicator that hello, there's something that we're avoiding. There's a certain kind of emotional experience that we're nervous about or we're scared about or we don't really want to engage with for some reason. And sometimes that's really obvious, but sometimes it's really not. Sometimes it is very subtle. And we can often in our own experience not even be aware that we are concerned about a certain kind of emotion or avoiding a certain kind of emotion. But if we start to pay really good attention, we can maybe start to track the kinds of circumstances like we were talking about earlier with sort of circumstantial avoidance. The kinds of circumstances that we just don't want to be in over and over and over again. And if we pay attention to it and we really do some kind of self analysis, we can dig down a little bit and go, huh, what is it about that circumstance that I'm trying to avoid here? And in that way, our avoidant behavior can really be a kind of teacher, sort of indicator about something that's going on in the layers of our psyche that maybe we're a little bit less consciously aware of. That's great for us. You remind me of this saying from attachment theory, a whole area of developmental psychology. The phrase is avoidance or distance in the service of attachment. And the version of that is the proverb, fences make for good neighbors. And it's the idea that sometimes to be able to achieve something important, you need to step back. And there's really a place for respite. And I'm thinking about healthy coping, healthy avoiding where you just say, you know, I'm going to step out of the culture of go, go, go, go, go. And I'm going to avoid the hamster wheel for this day, for this Sabbath or for this month, where I'm just going to dial back in general, where I'm going to do things in every day in which I find sanctuary in withdrawal from the Hurley-Burley of the world. Meditation, your exercise routine, sitting outside with a cup of tea, walking the dog, whatever it is you might do. And I think that it's really important to honor those times and to give themselves to you and to recognize the value of them. So you've worked with a lot of people over the years in clinical practice, setting with them as a psychologist. And as we've talked about during the episode, you know, avoidant behaviors are really common. We've already given a number of examples. And you've sort of started talking about this a little bit, but what are some of the things the big families of the things that you've found that tend to really kind of help people work through different sorts of avoidant behaviors. One of them that you named already is trying to understand what the underlying motivation is, like what is the avoidance of voiding or what's the secondary gain that we're getting from the avoidant behavior? Yeah. There's a classic line goes back to psychoanalysis, join with the defense. In other words, instead of doing a frontal attack on the irrational worrying or the marinating in resentful remination, rather than doing that, you join with it initially. And this is a good strategy, not just for therapists, but for friends and partners and relationships, parents often with their kids. And also with yourself, you can join with it. By starting with, wow, it's normal, usually other people do this too, common humanity. It's not bizarre that you're avoiding in this way. And what's good about it? What do you like about doing that? What do you like about putting off one day after another, not asking your boss for a race? What do you like about deferring one day after another, stopping smoking? What do you like about it? What do you like about spending hours bouncing around YouTube videos rather than sitting down and finally getting started on that XYZ project you really want to begin? What's the payoff? What are the benefits? What are you getting out of it? And to be really honest about that and to encourage a person to go through a process of taking responsibility for them. In other words, people often try to avoid responsibility for being avoidant. Yeah. A great place to start is to own it. And because then if you're responsible for doing it, that means you're the source of doing it. And if you're the source of doing it, you can be the source of not doing it. Once you make that deep down choice and then help yourself live into that new habit, that new way of being. So owning the benefits and taking responsibility for them, your avoidant behaviors are not something thrust upon you. Nobody's making you do that. Maybe there is a limited amount of rationale for them in your outside world. But independent of that, there's almost always, especially if it's unhealthy avoidant coping. There's almost always some personal psychology in the mix that's above and beyond whatever reasonable basis there is for doing that avoidance. So that's one of the most powerful things just right there. I love that. And by the way, the idea of kind of joining with the defense is something that it's from the broader literature on psychology. Yeah. You know, I've certainly been sitting in the therapist's office by self and kind of noticed the practitioner joining with my various defenses and appreciate again because I was pretty identified with them at the time. I remained fairly identified with some of them these days. So you know, it is what it is. But honestly, it's just a great way to take some of this thing out of it also. Yeah. Because it's like, there are reasons that we do things. And a lot of the time, we internalize a lot of external messages about different behaviors we have, being really bad, like really shameful. Oh, there's this thing about myself and I just know it's such a bad thing and I just know I should do it. And we can get very self punishing about it. And it also in a weird way kind of takes us out of agency because it moves from something we're doing to something we are. And it's a lot harder to do something about something that we are rather than a behavior that we're doing. And once we have that framework of like, oh, this is a behavior that I'm just taking on. Wow, all of a sudden we're so much freer that feels so much lighter. That's so good. And it really honors the fact that we acquired avoiding behaviors. We weren't born avoiding. We were born, you know, avoiding as a form of healthy coping, but we had to learn unhealthy forms of avoid and coping unnecessary forms of avoidance. When in fact, we could quite readily approach things and get more of the good stuff in our life altogether. The point is we learned it. It made sense at the time. Often it was necessary. It's how you survived middle school or that horrible divorce you went through or the nightmare boss you had last year. It's what you learned to do. So it's really okay to start there. I'll tell you a second thing. It's to be really clear what you would actually do if you weren't avoiding. People would actually look like and we're not yet up to trying to convince you to do it. And clearly also as soon as someone starts saying yes, but you need to go back to the first step appreciating the function of the avoidance, appreciating the benefits of it and seeding them in responsibility for it. Which is a very broad point. If there are two people together, one of them is let's say suffering, one of them is doing stuff that's hurting themselves and others. And if the two people, their friend is taking more responsibility for that behavior and trying to change it, that's a problem. So one of the fundamental things is to move into responsibility for the avoidant behavior and not avoiding responsibility for it. So if you start moving into yes, but that's an indicator. You're not fully established yet in responsibility for it and clarity about looking for other ways of doing things. Okay. That said, yeah, really naming it kind of concretely, it really helps. Okay, what if I no longer put off dealing with my car registration? What would I actually do? And what would it actually take? It's funny for me. I have my versions of car registrations. I did not fill out a proper form at UCLA when I was back there in school and I had to take an extra class. I didn't really want to take. It was consequential, but I just kept, I didn't like paperwork. Scared me, it annoyed me. It reminded me of my controlling parents, you know, my big screw you to the paperwork, which was a proxy for my mom and dad. Actually heard me. Never heard my mom and dad, you know, they didn't care. And, but it's when you realize, you know, to do that thing would take 20 minutes of my time. Yeah. You wouldn't take that long. People often avoid conversations. I'll get into something a little, maybe controversial. In relationships, some people tend to avoid conversation with a partner. They're kind of afraid that, oh my God, if I start talking with my partner, it's like a black hole, like a human vampire, my God, I'll never get away. All this stuff's going to come up. Yeah. But in fact, the partner would be so happy with 15, 20 minutes of feeling really listened to and close and connected and simple about it. It's not that big a deal. 20 minutes. A few times a week. Let me tell you. It can go a long way in important relationships. And there are other versions of that, you know, getting my car fixed. I got to take it in. All right. Fine. How long is it going to take you total start to finish? Yeah. I'm going to start talking about that. So I'll go back to the car thing. Oh, what if they tell me I need a new set of breaks and I'm really confused. I don't really understand cars. Maybe they're lying to me. It starts costing a lot of money. Yeah, whatever it might be, ask yourself, okay, how would I cope with that? What could I do being resourceful, being capable in my coping with life as a reasonable adult? Well, maybe I would take my car to a second mechanic, just a double check that I really need new breaks. You know, I'd finish getting my oil changed, but then I'd leave and check out another mechanic. Or I think about selling my car all together if it didn't make enough sense to me. Or I would drive it less while I saved the money to spend several hundred bucks on getting new brake pads, something like that. I would cope. And there's a real emphasis here. I kind of wanted to draw for us in that. It's easy to think about psychology, positive psychology, mindfulness, transpersonal psychology, spiritual psychology, all that stuff. As really Lucy Goosey, as sort of the frosting on the cake for very, very privileged people. And no, so much of the heart of what motivates you me in this work is a view of life as very challenging. And one that calls us to be scrappy, determined, resourceful copers. There's no replacement for that. Yeah. Now we can cope with the resources we have. And we want to be honest about that. This is not about burdening yourself in unrealistic ways. But within the frame of whatever your capabilities are, that's sense of taking responsibility and taking initiative, being at cause wherever you can, focusing on what you can do, maintaining good process. What can I learn here? How can I move forward? How can I enlist expertise? How can I draw and analyze? How can I get the job done? That view of yourself has someone who has what's called an internal locus of control. That the origin point for your actions in this life comes from inside you in relationship with everything, rather than external locus of control, which makes you like a ping pong ball tossed about in the surface of a raging flood of life's currents. That internal locus of control is really at the heart of what you and I are talking about. Yeah, I think that was a great summary of, in a lot of ways, kind of the podcast vision statement there. So thanks for giving it that. It's totally true where, man, a lot of the criticism that gets leveled at positive psychology is exactly what you just named, which is that, you know, is this just for people who aren't really going through a lot in life? And that just couldn't be further from the truth. These are all techniques, skills, capabilities that become more necessary, the harder your life is. And I think that a lot of the stuff that we've outlined already today is particularly useful when you're really in the thick of it, when you're really unhappy, when you're really going through something challenging, when these avoidant behaviors are starting to have a really negative impact on your life. And you kind of hit that moment where things have gotten pretty bad. And you suddenly have the motivation because they've gotten rough, because things are hard to tackle them in a more kind of comprehensive and useful way. Yeah, it's kind of like, do you see yourself as a coper? Yeah. I mean, how you see yourself? And some people avoid seeing themselves as a coper. Yeah, because that serves the function of maintaining forms of dependency on other people. Sometimes people can have the beliefs that, oh, if I'm really a strong coper, other people will then think, ah, they don't have to be in my life. And they'll abandon me. And I don't want that. Or alternatively, if I see myself as a strong coper, I'm going to have to start blaming myself if things don't go well for me in this life. When in fact, no, you don't have to blame yourself. You do have the opportunity to learn from what happens. And make course corrections and improve your coping along the way. No big deal. Nobody is a perfect coper. So that's a key question. Can you see yourself as a coper? And in a funny kind of way, I think of the alternative. Like either a ping pong ball swept along in the raging torrent or classic parable. 50 frogs fall in a vat of cream. And they just can't get out because it's steel sides and so forth. And they give up one by one and drown. But one of them, froggy, is determined and sees itself as a coper. And so froggy keeps swimming and treading cream. And in the process of that, gradually churns the cream into butter. And so it solidifies and then he can hop out from it and get out of the get out of the bat. So do you see yourself as the ping pong ball or froggy? And I want a life I show with froggy. And I know they're going to put it on my tombstone, still churning. Oh, yeah. So, you know, I think you're a great coper, dad. I think that you're somebody who's really had a focus in your life on how can I make things better? How can I change my experience? How can I grow a little bit from one day to the next? And obviously it comes through in your work. I mean, that's what you've spent most of your professional life trying to figure out and trying to help people figure out themselves. And it's kind of modest too, you know, just be like froggy. Do the best you can. If I could, I'll leave you with this fundamental exercise that I learned a long time ago in some human potential workshop in the 70s. That's really powerful. So it's structured like this. Part one, you recognize how you're tending to do things and why you're tending to do them. All right. So I'm avoiding in various ways because it has certain payoffs. I get it. I also recognize the costs. So I'm recognizing what I do. I'm understanding the functions of it, the payoffs. And I'm also understanding the price I'm paying for doing it. I'm just being honest about it. OK, good. Second step, identify the other way. I'll call it the higher road. The other way you want to be identify the issues you might bump into if you do it and how you would solve them, identify the benefits of the higher road. Identify, also, be honest about the costs. Maybe you might have to put in some more effort for an hour, two or three initially or something like that. OK, fine. Then in the third step, this is really important. You make a moral choice in the core of your being. It's like an existential choice, a sacred choice. Which one am I going to choose and be really honest about it? If the truth is you are choosing the old way, the lower road, that's the one you're choosing. OK, and you're going to do that. Got it. Just know what you're doing and take responsibility for that choice. On the other hand, as people usually do, choose the higher road, feel it. And then here's the thing. In the fourth and last step, really imagine yourself taking that higher road. Really take some time, a few breaths, a few minutes to imagine it in living color. And especially focus on the rewards of it, how it will feel in your body, some ways you will move, some ways you will maybe talk. Imagine the realistic positive possibilities of how other people respond, and how good that will feel, and how glad you will be for the benefits for them of this new way of being. And really rest in the sense of this new way of being, kind of anchor it in yourself, internalize it into yourself so that you will live from it the next opportunity. That's a really lovely outline for kind of sustained change, particularly around avoidance behaviors, but probably just around a lot of the experiences that people go through in their lives and how we can kind of change in positive ways over time, which has been such a focus of our content on the podcast, such a focus of your work in general. And I think that it's just a really nice place to leave our conversation today. So today we talked about avoidance. Avoidance coping is a way of dealing with problems where rather than trying to address the painful stimulus, the painful thing that's going on in our lives, we just avoid it. Rather than dealing directly with the stressful demand that we're experiencing the stressful thing is avoided and then often replaced with something else. As Rick really highlighted early on in the conversation, this is a coping behavior. It's a behavior that we perform in response to stress. It's a way for us to protect ourselves against a painful experience. Avoidance gets a bad rap and yes, it certainly has a lot of costs that are associated with it, but it can be kind of helpful to frame it in this way because it allows us to be a little bit more self-compassionate about our avoidant behaviors. Some common forms of avoidance include procrastination, passive aggressiveness, and various forms of excessive rumination. Rick also named dissociation as a common way that people avoid their experiences. There's a framework of different kinds of avoidance behaviors that actually comes from the book Mind and Emotions, a universal treatment for emotional disorders, which was written by Dr. Matthew McCay and others that categorizes five different. big forms of avoidance. The first is situational avoidance, avoiding specific kinds of situations. The second is cognitive avoidance, avoiding painful thoughts, feelings, and memories. And the third is what they call protective avoidance. This can include excessive safety behaviors, checking yourself over and over again before you leave the house, cleaning, over-preparing, or in Rick's case, perfectionism. Then there's substitution avoidance, avoiding one emotion by replacing it with another. The example that I gave is somebody moving into anger so they don't have to experience sadness. Then finally, there's somatic avoidance, avoiding different kinds of feelings in the body because they remind us about some sort of painful experience. We ended our conversation by talking about some of the ways that people can start to avoid their avoidance, or maybe just deal with those avoidant behaviors in healthier ways. One of the most important frameworks that we had overall, just during the conversation, is the idea that knowledge is power here. Really being aware of the underlying experiences that you're avoiding can be a great indicator of some ways to deal with them more practically. And the more self-aware we are, the more that we understand our underlying motivations, what we're getting out of the avoidance, the better we can get at dealing with it in healthy ways. So on the one hand, you can recognize what are known as the secondary gains of avoidance, the various ways in which it might benefit you. And then on the other hand, you can clearly see its costs, all of the things that you are not able to do because you're being avoidant, all the ways in which the bars of the invisible cage around you are getting smaller and smaller over time. So that's it for today's episode. If you've been enjoying the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. If you would take a moment to subscribe to it through the platform of your choice, and maybe even leave a rating and a positive review, it really does help us out. 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