Latest / RiseUp - Live Joy Your Way / The Hidden Cost of Experiential Avoidance
Transcript
- Voiceover: [00:00:00] Rise Up Live Joy Your Way from emotional intelligence through cognitive distortions, certified life and wellness. Coach Kamini Wood is on a mission to help people see the magnificence of their own unique human spirit. Through these small bites of self visualization and self-confidence, you can have healthy relationships, success in business and career, and live the life you want to live, rise up live. Joy your way. Kamini Wood: Hi there and welcome to another episode of Rise Up Live Joy your way whether it's morning, afternoon, or evening. Thank you for taking time out of your day to spend with me. And today I want to dive into something you may not even realize you're doing. But once we start talking about it, you might notice. Oh, yeah, I actually do that. And it's it's the topic of experiential avoidance. So I want to talk about what it is and why. This is why it's important for us to have the conversation. So what do I mean by experiential avoidance. It is when we consciously or subconsciously try to avoid either thoughts, emotions, sensations, conversations that we perceive and feel will be uncomfortable. So if you think about a time when something maybe felt too painful or too awkward or too overwhelming, and you notice that you actually distracted yourself, maybe you numbed out, maybe found yourself scrolling on your phone endlessly. Those are examples of experiential avoidance in action. And I want to just offer that this is completely natural and it is completely human of us. However, it is not always helpful. So why do we avoid our experiences if avoidance doesn't actually solve anything? And it's because our brains are wired to protect us. Our brains are wired to protect us. We're wired for survival. And when something feels threatening, scary, intense, our mind tells us, let's not go there. It's a strategy that has worked for thousands of years. You know, it's the, I'm going to avoid the thing that could potentially threaten my survival. So in our modern lives, what that really looks like is I'm going to avoid these really hard emotions, and I'm just going to make them disappear, or I'm going to avoid that conversation because it just feels too uncomfortable. But what ends up happening, like most things, is if we avoid it like emotions, they're just going to grow louder and louder until we absolutely have to face them. Or if there's a situation that we're avoiding. It may work for a certain amount of time, but eventually it keeps popping up in different ways where we have to actually address it. So maybe as I'm talking about this, you are thinking about, conversation that you may have been avoiding because you're afraid of the conflict or you're afraid of rejection, or you're afraid of maybe a very negative reaction that you might receive. Or perhaps you don't check your finances because you know that every time you open up your bank account information, you feel this sense of anxiety and it's overwhelming. Or, you know, you're avoiding vulnerability in relationships because your past experiences have taught you that. That meant, heartache. And so you, hold yourself closed off for avoiding those connections with people. Those are all ways that you might be trying to protect yourself. But again, that protection comes at a price because what happens is, is it keeps us stuck. It eventually emotionally exhausts us, and it actually leads to disconnection with our self. Because when we are experientially avoiding things, what we're doing is we're actually, keeping ourselves from genuinely either healing or genuinely connecting, we're keeping ourselves from from the ability to grow by continuously avoiding that discomfort. We are we are absolutely avoiding this, stepping into that that growth zone and avoiding the ability to to connect deeper. So instead, I offer this. It's learning to sit with discomfort. It's learning to look towards your emotions instead of away from them, recognizing that the discomfort may be intense, but even the discomfort it's it's intense, but it's not dangerous. Thinking about this, you know, what can I offer in terms of how can you put this into practice? What I'd offer to you is simply observe when you feel the urge to avoid something, and when you when you feel that urge, take a moment to name it. Give that feeling or fear whatever or thought. Give it a name. Really acknowledge what it is, and then take a second to just pause and breathe before you decide how you want to respond, and then decide consciously. Can I sit with this even for a few seconds longer, and then choose how I want to move forward? When we are recognizing that we're avoiding things, it can feel really uncomfortable. And I and I can only imagine that even hearing me say this. I'm not saying that you just need to sit in discomfort all the time, because I'm not saying that to put your your nervous system in a state of fight or flight constantly, but growth in and of itself is not always super straight linear. It's not always simple. It can be messy, messy, it can feel uncomfortable. And so when we are thinking about the things that we are avoiding, it's important to recognize that when we go through that messiness, we are offering ourselves an opportunity to grow as an individual, and we're also offering ourselves an opportunity to connect with maybe the person that were avoiding that difficult conversation with as the example with the finances. It can be really uncomfortable to look at that. But when we actually take the time to sit down and look at our finances, we're offering ourselves the ability to grow our own financial independence as an example, because when we finally take the time to look at those those numbers and sit with the anxiousness that comes up with that and then with that anxiousness, work through it and recognize what we're afraid of, and then ask for support, for instance, and seek out that support. Now are working through it. And instead of avoiding it, it allows us to understand what's happening with our finances and then to make a plan to move forward. If you'd like to explore, maybe how you might be holding yourself back, what you might be avoiding, and want to just understand how coaching can help you work through that and help you work through even you know how to grow past experiential avoidance. Feel free to book a time with me anytime at coach with comedy.com. And until next time, stay well. Voiceover: Thank you for listening to Rise Up Live, joy your way. For more information, book a chat with Kamini at www.chatwithKamini.comorvisitourwebsiteatwww.com wood.com. You can also find Kamini on Facebook or Instagram. Username. It's authentic me. Thank you for [00:07:00] listening.