Some of the following examples of emotional avoidance highlight its potential for creating negative consequences: Not engaging in meaningful conversations to avoid feelings of intimacy. Procrastinating an important life goal to avoid feelings of inadequacy. Overusing substances to avoid feelings of loss or grief.
For example, someone who is anxious in social situations may not answer the phone or avoid eye contact in a social engagement that cannot be escaped and may be emotionally arousing. Someone else might avoid emotional greetings or goodbyes.
Emotional avoidance is when a person avoids thoughts or feelings about a traumatic event. This type of avoidance is internal to the person; others around you may not know what you are avoiding and why.
Here are a few other examples of avoidance: Someone might avoid triggers such as people, places, and things that may incite uncomfortable feelings. Those dealing with social anxiety, for example, might avoid crowds of people or hanging out with a group of friends.
Avoiding reminders—like places, people, sounds or smells—of a trauma is called behavioural avoidance. For example: Assault survivors might go out of their way to stay away from the location of their attack or places that remind them of the assault.
Avoidance-avoidance conflict is when a person has difficulty choosing between two unfavorable options. Examples of this include choosing between surgery or radiation treatments for cancer, or choosing between a lower salary at work or unemployment.
Emotional avoidance is a common reaction to trauma. In fact, emotional avoidance is part of the avoidance cluster of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, serving as a way for people with PTSD to escape painful or difficult emotions.
Procrastination, passive-aggressiveness, and rumination are examples of unhelpful coping mechanisms that we may consciously or unconsciously use to avoid tackling a tough issue or facing thoughts and feelings that are uncomfortable. These behaviors are forms of avoidance coping.
A common form of conflict avoidance is to deny there is an issue at all. As an example, two colleagues might disagree regarding an approach to a particular problem.
While avoidance provides short-term relief, overusing it can cause more stress. Ignoring or denying problems, procrastinating, canceling plans, or using substances are all examples of avoidance-focused coping skills.
When you try to avoid an emotion, you often end up feeling it anyway. Emotion avoidance often leads to suffering: addiction, helplessness, hopelessness, depression, damaged relationships, and lost opportunities.
A common response to trauma is emotional avoidance. Those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sometimes include emotional avoidance to avoid unpleasant or painful emotions. This is part of the avoidance cluster of PTSD.
Avoidant attachment occurs when an infant or child does not consistently receive the care and attention that they need to develop a healthy relationship with their parent or caregiver. An avoidant attachment style may cause a child to hide their feelings and become emotionally distant from their parent or caregiver.
Avoidance training occurs in two forms: active and passive. In the active form, the avoidance contingency depends on the occurrence of a specified response on the part of the organism; in the passive form, the avoidance contingency depends on the nonoccurrence (i.e., the suppression) of some specified response.
All kids avoid doing things they're asked to do from time to time. But some go to extremes to avoid or resist anything they perceive as a demand. Avoidance can take many forms, including making excuses, creating a distraction, intense focus on something else, withdrawing, escaping, or having a meltdown or panic attack.
Avoid – eliminate the threat to protect the project from the impact of the risk. An example of this is cancelling the project. Transfer – shifts the impact of the threat to as third party, together with ownership of the response. An example of this is insurance.
An example of risk avoidance might be a manufacturing business not using certain hazardous materials or chemicals due to the dangers of handling and storing them; or, an organization limiting the type of customer data it stores on its computers in case of a cyberattack.
They might be discrete like Jayne, asking politely to go somewhere else, but task avoidance behaviors can also take a disruptive form, like creating confrontations with the teacher or classmates, talking out of turn, phone use, or putting their head down.
All healthy people engage in some forms of escape and avoidance behaviors. Consider wearing a seatbelt to avoid injury, wearing sunglasses to escape the glare of the sun, or wiping our nose with a tissue to end the unpleasant effects of a runny nose.
Approach–avoidance theories aim to describe the major systems that motivate behaviours in reaction to classes of appetitive (rewarding) and aversive (punishing) stimuli, and to explain consistent patterns of individual differences in these behaviours.
By early adolescence, it is common for some students to become experts in avoidance strategies — avoiding asking for help when they need it, withdrawing effort and resisting novel approaches to learning — in order to deflect attention from low ability.
Emotionally-based school avoidance is a term referring to reduced or nonattendance at school by a child or young person. Rather than the term 'school refusal', the term EBSA recognises that this avoidance has its root in emotional, mental health or wellbeing issues.
People with avoidant personality disorder have chronic feelings of inadequacy and are highly sensitive to being negatively judged by others. Though they would like to interact with others, they tend to avoid social interaction due to the intense fear of being rejected by others.
Avoidance is the attempt to minimize and avert perceived threat, danger, or anxiety, says Michael G. Wetter, PsyD, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, California.