When we avoid emotions, we fail to hear their messages, meaningful communications from our authentic self.

Emotional avoidance can negatively impact our mental health, social relationships, and physical health.

We first need to develop skills in resilience to fully engage with our emotions.

To some extent, most of us have learned to avoid fully experiencing and embracing negative emotions such as sadness, grief, loss, anxiety, and shame. At times, we may similarly try to ignore positive emotions–especially if they are associated with feeling vulnerable or anxious.

Anna Freud identified some key “defenses,” strategies practiced in an effort to support emotional avoidance. These include “suppression,” “projection,” “denial,” and others. Each of these defenses is a kind of mental sleight of hand whereby we avoid experiencing the raw, painful sting associated with our emotions. When we suppress our emotions, we may have a momentary awareness of them but quickly bury them as we redirect our attention elsewhere.

When we engage in projection, we attribute to others feelings that we have evaded. For example, suppressed or denied anger may be expressed as, “I’m not angry; you’re the one who is angry.” Denial, considered developmentally a more primitive defense, entails denying reality. A child with chocolate icing on his face may simply deny that he touched the cake on the counter.

Defenses evolve in an effort to protect us from harm. And while this isn’t constructive in the long term, they can at times be quite helpful. Being a witness to or a victim of bodily injury due to a car accident arouses great emotional trauma. In response, certain defenses may shield us from feeling overwhelmed by the feelings that such an event can trigger. Similarly, an individual going through the heartache of divorce needs to have the flexibility to, at times, intentionally shelve her feelings about it as she carries on at work or parenting.

However, our emotions don’t just go away when we try our best to avoid them. All emotions, positive and negative, are communications to us. They provide information to us that informs and helps motivate us toward our goals. They signal us to take actions to maintain our safety. They are evidence of a deeper sense of self, often described as our authentic self, which embodies our core desires, values, and beliefs.

General consequences of ignoring our emotions

Emotional avoidance saps our mental energy, whether it is consciously or unconsciously driven.

This avoidance of our inner emotional landscape contributes to emotional difficulties, including anxiety, depression, stress, and even numbness. It can also contribute to physical symptoms, including headaches, digestive problems, and exacerbation of illnesses such as asthma.

In part, these occur as a result of emotional substitution. We may suppress anger and instead experience anxiety at the slightest arousal of anger. By contrast, it may contribute to ongoing anger as a reaction to and distraction from underlying anguish—often related to male depression.

Emotional avoidance can leave us hostage to the heightened pursuit of positive emotions—a reaction that may lead us to neglect our key life goals and even those activities essential for daily living. This may even contribute to attempts to escape from oneself through addictions or excessive work.

Withdrawal from engaging life

Emotional avoidance inhibits our capacity to be fully engaged in our lives. A high school student doesn’t try out for the swimming team because of his fears of rejection, even though he loves swimming. A man fearful of being seen by others and himself as vulnerable unwittingly sabotages his career advancement due to his suppressed anxiety about his self-doubt and fears of responsibility. A woman who has had losses refuses to admit how much she cares for her partner. She may then restrain her expression of caring to such a degree that her partner subsequently withdraws—fully concluding that she’s just not that excited about her.

Major or minor trauma that is not fully grieved and mourned leaves us hesitant to commit in intimacy and even in taking actions to improve our lives. This is true especially when we’ve not fully grieved and mourned our losses.

The avoidance of emotions can show up just at those moments when we can choose to assert our will and effort. It can arise during moments of great significance or even when they are less important. Years ago, I saw a woman who panicked when giving her first speech as one of the vice presidents of a professional organization. Despite years of successful presentations, it was this new title that caused the reemergence of feelings of inadequacy. These triggered shame and feelings of inadequacy that her past successes had helped her to bury. Progress occurred when she was able to accept such feelings as part of a natural reaction to a new challenge.

Emotional avoidance is harmful in the following ways:

Conflicts in relationships: Emotional avoidance leads us to become less emotionally invested and available for genuine connection. Additionally, the source of emotions may become blurred (e.g., experiencing a partner as being angry or manipulative when we are angry and seek control).

Procrastination: Procrastination is often an attempt to avoid the negative mind-body reactions associated with a task (e.g., learning a new hobby, writing, doing an assignment at work or school, or going to a doctor when it is clearly indicated, or even paying bills).

The avoidance of recognizing emotional complexity: There are many situations in which we experience a variety of emotions that may seem to be at odds with each other. These might trigger positive as well as negative emotions (e.g., getting a new job that is highly desired but that arouses anxiety over new challenges and responsibilities, or deep sadness over the ending of a relationship, even when you are the one who ended it).

A lack of self-connection: Avoiding emotions undermines self-awareness that is essential for recognizing our desires, values, and motivations. It inhibits our capacity to make decisions that are rooted in our authentic selves. This lack of connection can leave us prone to self-doubt, the need to please, and even feelings of being controlled.

Shame: Shame is an uncomfortable negative emotion, most often a reaction to our critical judgment of our emotions or thoughts. Shame evolves from self-judgment as well as actual or perceived judgment of others. It can lead us to isolate. As described by psychologist Chris Germer, “Shame is an innocent emotion that arises from the wish to be loved.” It is then understandable that shame is another layer of distraction from our authentic self.

Facing the challenge to embrace our emotions

Much of personal growth evolves from greater self-understanding, especially with regard to our emotional awareness. Psychotherapy and bibliotherapy offer individuals greater flexibility in their capacity to recognize, sit with, and fully experience their emotional life.

Becoming comfortable in meeting this challenge requires first developing a variety of strategies that enable us to sit with such experiences without being overwhelmed by them. This is called resilience, a fundamental capacity for emotional regulation. It is an endeavor that takes time, patience, and commitment, but one that is essential for more fully embracing our humanity and life in general.

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