It is easy to treat avoidance as one coping style among many. On the latest Got Therapy?, Dr. Dan Rose put it more bluntly, and I think he was right to.
Avoidance, he said, is "the biggest sin" in this way of thinking about people. Not because avoiding pain is shameful, but because it is the very thing that turns pain into suffering. "we often go to lengths to avoid something, and in avoiding it, we're actually making things much worse."
So here is the position: the struggle against pain, not the pain, is usually what the client is suffering from — and our first job is to make the pain bearable enough to stop struggling.
Dan's example was an ordinary one. The student with a major paper due cleans the house five times over and is left with three hours to write. What was being avoided was not the paper. It was the fear the paper carried — "the shadow that this task has over their life." Had the student allowed a small dose of that overwhelm at the start, the freedom to act would have been there all along.
That has consequences for how we work. It means we are not in the business of removing symptoms so much as helping people stop running from what the symptoms point to. Dan's account of character is consistent with this. Each of us settles on a structure — a symptom that answers reality — and the move that opens things up is acceptance, not demolition. Name the pattern in front of someone who can help put it into words, and there is room for a pause: the "free won't."
It also means taking seriously what avoidance looks like now. In this day and age, as Dan put it, it's possible never to be alone. Dan's point was that solitude itself has a price of admission: getting there "often initially requires a certain amount of suffering" — guilt, anxiety, disappointing people by saying no.
We have said on this show many times that we cannot get free of suffering. "We just have to get better at it." Getting better at it begins with turning toward it.
Got Therapy? is hosted by Michael Baltimore Ph.D. and Dan Rose Psy.D.