Fear, grief, shame, embarrassment, and other uncomfortable emotions are not pleasant. From time to time it is quite normal to avoid a situation, person, place, or thing that might trigger an undesirable emotion, but when it interferes with your daily functioning and/or becomes a problematic recurring issue, it is clinically defined as emotional avoidance.
Emotional avoidance is anything you do to make an emotion go away or become less intense. We all do it at some point but the problem with emotional avoidance is that we usually view the emotion (and the physical feelings that come with it) as dangerous or threatening. In turn, many people do everything possible to make the emotion go away or become less intense. How do they do that exactly? Through five “strategies” – or rather, unproductive coping mechanisms – referred to as total avoidance, subtle avoidance, thought avoidance, worry, and safety signals.
In my work as founder and director of the Kentucky Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, I treat many people who find it difficult to stop the cycle of emotional avoidance. But it is possible to do, and treatable, and my patients go on to live healthier, fuller, more assertive lives.
Three Types of Emotional Avoidance
One type of emotional avoidance is easy to recognize; total avoidance is completely avoiding a situation, or pretty much anything, that triggers an intense emotion. In total avoidance, we often state, whether externally or internally, “I don’t do _____” as if it is a part of who we are. Total avoidance can include physical things or places like social gatherings, public speaking, crowds, theaters, driving on the interstate, open spaces, tunnels, and bridges, as well as emotional processes like apologizing, listening to certain songs, or not wanting to have any contact with someone who previously wronged you.
Another type, subtle avoidance, refers to being in an uncomfortable situation but not fully experiencing that situation. I refer to this as “I’m there, but I’m not completely there.” For example, you get anxious ordering food at a restaurant. Even though you order your food, you never make eye contact with the person taking your order. Other examples include sitting alone in another room during family gatherings or not speaking to someone in a social situation, driving your car to social events “in case” you get anxious and need to leave early, always using the self-checkout line at a supermarket to avoid people, not watching a sad scene in a movie, or sitting in an aisle seat at a theater in case you feel you are in danger and “need” to escape.
Thought avoidance, yet another emotional avoidance strategy, refers to things you do to keep your mind off uncomfortable thoughts. Examples include pushing away negative thoughts (which come back), distraction with things like video games, TV, music, or even taking a nap. One of the most common thought avoidance strategies that plagues many people is something we are all familiar with – worry.
Worry as an Avoidance Strategy and Why it Doesn’t Work
Worry, a strategy where you avoid the emotions and the negative images of the feared outcome (that is unlikely to happen), is often misunderstood. As a Christian, I believe all emotions are a gift from God, even “bad” ones, but as a clinician I also know that we don’t have to be mastered by emotions like worry and that we can live in emotional maturity. Worry is not only unhelpful but it can deceive us – Jesus himself tells us not to do it – and therapists know it is unproductive. In my recent book, Mastering Our Emotions: Biblical Principles for Emotional Health, I explain how we can experience emotional transformation. Using my therapeutic expertise and providing exercises, worksheets, reflection prompts, and Scripture readings, I help readers better understand thinking patterns, emotional triggers, and avoidance behaviors.
Identifying worry is an essential skill in recognizing the process of worry so we can control it and hopefully put it out of our minds. Worry is not anxiety, but rather a response to anxiety. And while intentions are good, people often try to use worry to manage their anxiety, but it never works. Anxiety and worry have a bidirectional relationship; anxious thoughts often lead to worry as an attempt to manage anxiety but worry as a strategy leads to more anxiety in the future.
Problem Solving Instead of Worry
Worry occurs in our brains to shift our attention away from “seeing” the images of the feared outcome and preventing us from processing the emotions associated with that feared outcome. For example, let’s say you get anxious about an unknown physical sensation in your body. To cope with the anxiety, you worry about the physical symptom. You check Google for hours for what the symptoms might mean, asking family or friends if these symptoms are normal, searching online for remedies, or even distracting yourself with something else. In the short term, you feel relief because it seems like you are problem solving.
But really what you are doing is feeding the worry and that leads to more anxiety over time. In fact, most people worry about events that have a very low probability of happening. True problem solving, on the other hand, leads to resolution and a decrease in anxiety.
Safety Signals – What Are They in Emotional Avoidance
One of the most subtle avoidance strategies you may use in emotional avoidance is called a ‘safety signal’. It is anything – a water bottle, an essential oil, a figure, a mobile phone or other device, or even a specific person or pet – you must have with you to make you feel more comfortable in a situation that you perceive as dangerous.
Safety signals work by reinforcing the idea that situations are not safe unless you have this object or person with you. Many people condition themselves to manage intense emotions in this way. As a result, when the object or person is not there for a perceived dangerous / uncomfortable situation, the limbic system is activated and intense emotions occur. As such, you learn to associate feeling less distressed with your safety signal and it becomes a habit for you to have it. And it may be that you avoid the intensity of emotions in the short term but keeping safety signals with you maintains the intensity of these emotions in the long term.
It can be necessary at times to have a support person with you in situations that are realistically challenging or dangerous, such as awaiting news from a doctor or attending a parent-teacher conference, but some people with an emotional avoidance condition get so used to safety signals that they don’t see them as a problem until they don’t have the item with them.
Adapted from Mastering Our Emotions by Kevin Chapman. ©2025 by Kevin Chapman. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
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