The cost of avoidance

Avoidance seems to be a recurring theme for me this year and the more I delve into it the more I unearth.

Observing a couple of my friends relationship with avoidance, held up a mirror to reflect on how I am avoidant of my own feelings because I a) do it unintentionally and was taught to avoid them and b) my emotions and feelings are so heavy to process and it’s easy just to store them deep away.

What I was really doing was storing it into my body and we all know that the body keeps the score and my body is now fighting my past trauma and my current trauma and we equal a whole host of physical illnesses. Moral of the story: find healthy ways to release your emotions, even if you can’t name them, describe them and give yourself love and grace.

That all being said!!

Dealing with avoidant people is so stressful [for me] as I am a deep and emotional person, so I require healthy communication. But when a person is avoidant there won’t be healthy communication because their avoid their own feelings and most definitely yours!

A very dear friend of mine is extremely avoidant, and we have ended up not talking because this person refuses to communicate with me. Which is such a shame because I believe our friendship to be healthy, a safe space for both of us, fun and refreshing aside from the lack of communication.

SN: the lack of communication is over what I believe to be the other persons fear of my emotions to something that is bothering me and just doesn’t want to hear it. This defence mechanism is something humans have been afflicted with for eons!

How are they a dear friend you ask! Because this person has held space and held judgement from the way I am. I can completely be myself, I feel safe with this person. This person gets my jokes, listens, says nice things about me and also wants to protect me! A feeling I rarely experience in my everyday life.

I miss my friend, our keke’ing, our honesty and vulnerability but I can’t help but resent the manner in which avoidance hangs over, most, if not all of us and wrecks interpersonal relationships.

Avoidance isn’t just about avoiding one another, it’s about avoiding or pretending we don’t feel the way that we really feel. It also causes us to be a target for toxic people.

A recent thought came to me about avoidance and that it makes us naive & vulnerable. We are so busy pretending to ourselves that everything is okay and not everyone is bad, that we become naive to people with nefarious intentions.

I reflect back on when I used to pretend that everything was okay and I was happy, I see how gullible and naive I was. I’m beginning to understand why I was and still am gullible, but thats for another day, however all the pretending made me see things that weren’t there.

Avoidance keeps us from exploring, reading patterns and deep diving to get to the truth, whether that be ourselves, our relationships with one another, neighbourhood community or the wider society. It [avoidance] ignores the red flags and the alarm bells that fire within us, when something isn’t right. It teaches us to be docile and subservient to wickedness.

This causes us to be a dysfunctional society, ran by people with nefarious intent aka toxic people. They are allowed to get away with their behaviour because they groom us, they charm us and then when they see that they have successfully gotten us hooked, they pull the rug from beneath us.

It is so important to keep our eyes and minds open in our self development work, so that we can see clearly and not through rose tinted glasses that leave us open to being taken advantage of.

This also applies to our interpersonal relationships, it’s important to keep an open mind to the people who we claim to care abouts needs. Not everything is about our feelings and just because it isn’t, doesn’t mean that we are less than or a bad person.

Black and white thinking has been pushed onto all of us and its easy to believe that when someone has a trivial grievance with us that it automatically means that they have contempt for you, when that isn’t true. If they didn’t care or wished you harm, would they be trying to work things out with you?

I doubt that my friend will see this, but on the off chance that they do, I want them to know that I love them and I wish you would just message me 💜

I don’t want to lose a friendship to avoidance!