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“The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.”
— Margaret Atwood, from MaddAddam
“…but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”
— Benjamin Franklin, from a 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, translated from the original French
Avoidance gets a bad rap in our culture. We use “avoidant” and its cognates as pejoratives, indicating weakness, sloth, or cowardice. “Get in there!” or “Suck it up!” we say as a way of bullying each other – or ourselves – into doing something we don’t want to. We say about others things like, “he’ll never face up to x” or “she couldn’t handle y” as evidence of failure or lack. Explicitly calling someone avoidant is a deep insult. The thing is, avoidance isn’t an inherently bad thing.
For example, we (humans) have spent, as of this writing, roughly the last two and a half years avoiding each other for very good reason: tiny beasties living in our mucus have been killing us and the best way to keep them from continuing to do so is to keep ourselves apart. That’s smart. Similarly, I’ve been avoiding bears all my life and it’s worked very well for me so far. Same thing with toadstools, angry men with knives, and very large meteors. So, avoidance per se clearly isn’t a problem; there must be more to it.
What is avoidance, if we boil it down? One way of thinking of it is as motion away. I see a bear and, unless it’s in a zoo or otherwise clearly unable to reach me, I’m going to move in a direction to put more distance between it and myself. Toadstools, leave’em be, and run away from angry men with knives. Very large meteors might be more tricky to avoid, but with enough warning, maybe we can.
As avoidance is demonized in our culture, approach is lionized. Confronting and overcoming something dangerous or aversive is considered an inherent good. Harry Potter and his lion-mascotted Gryffindor mates are shown to be leaders because of their bravery. The man staring down the tanks rolling into Tiananmen square faced an overwhelming force, which then balked, and thus he became an icon of heroism (despite the fact that, to this day, his fate remains chillingly unknown). Farragut’s “Damn the torpedoes!” allegedly shouted as a command that his fleet run through a naval minefield is still quoted after more than 150 years in encouragement to take high-risk, high-reward actions.
Yet fantasies like Harry Potter, incomplete stories like Tank Man’s, and cherry-picked histories like Farragut’s don’t account for the realities of approach strategies. Unquestionably, facing challenges is an indispensable skill, but our glorification of the white-knuckle, teeth-gritting, hunker-down-and-get-through-it approach often leads us to outcomes like perseverant failure, exhaustion, burnout, and even retraumatization. These are especially common, in my experience, among people whose careers arise from their passions, such as artists or folks in prosocial fields like diversity, equity, and inclusion or health care, just to give a few examples.
Balance is a central concept in much of my work with patients, in this case balance between approaching and avoidance. Neither one is inherently good or bad, but instead they are two different strategies that each have pros and cons. As I said above, avoiding bears seems to be a pretty good strategy; they can be very dangerous and avoiding them has had, for me anyway, no meaningful consequences. But useful as avoidance can be in some scenarios, in others, it doesn’t work well at all: if I avoid calculating and paying my taxes, that would very likely lead in the long run to my incurring significant financial costs and/or jail time, so it’s actually more dangerous not to do them, even though the task may feel aversive. When it comes to taxes, an approach strategy makes sense.
Some folks I work with need help with improving their approach skills – socializing, getting important work done – and so cheering them on with Gryffindor references or playful shouts of “damn the torpedoes!” might be helpful. But some of my patients are looking to bolster their avoidance skills – saying no to others’ inappropriate demands, letting go of perceived obligations – in which case stories of standing one’s ground or even wise retreat are more pragmatic. Neither approaching nor avoidance is always the most effective response; optimal mental health means having facility with each strategy and to be able to discern when to apply which.
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