Feelings can be uncomfortable, often our automatic response is to evacuate! We think we are getting away from them but they continue to manifest in behaviours like-
- Staying busy
- Comfort eating
- Engage in impulsive sexual activity.
- Taking drugs
- Binge drinking
- Oversleeping
- Over exercising
- Avoid triggers, people, places.
- Overthinking
- Intellectualizing
- Procrastinating
There are many ways we react to difficult emotions, often these avoidances happen without us even being aware that we are avoiding something.
These things may provide us with temporary relief, but they don’t always align with the direction we want our lives to go in. We often then have further uncomfortable feelings about the action we have taken to avoid the initial feeling. We then come to live from a place of reactivity and avoidance rather than from a place of conscious choice.
When we are in pain, the decisions we make will be different to that which we would make when we are not. The first is influenced and determined by the want to avoid that feeling, the latter we are able to consider the direction we want to move in.
One is a movement away and one is a movement towards. One of these may leave us feeling overwhelmed and unhappy with the direction our lives seems to have taken and one gives us the opportunity to choose and take control of the direction of our lives.
How do you deal with your difficult feelings? When something feels uncomfortable to you? How do you avoid that? Becoming aware of our ways can really help us to unhook us from this automatic reactivity. Instead of mindlessly acting we think a? I'm engaging in this behaviour, am I avoiding something?
Once you are aware of your ways-
What could you do differently? How could you go from reacting too those feelings, too acceptance and utilisation?
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