What It is:
Emotion avoidance is a coping mechanism that involves escaping things you find emotionally uncomfortable or stressful. Emotional avoidance is not a disorder, though its overuse is associated with a variety of mental health concerns including anxiety and trauma.
Depending on your adolescent’s neurotype, personality, or learning history, they may attempt to escape your emotions in different ways. Sometimes your teen may try to escape physically (e.g., leaving a stressful situation), emotionally (e.g., numbing painful emotions with substances), or mentally (e.g., trying to focus on something else or push emotions away). Within emotional avoidance, we often look for:
- Attempts to numb the emotion or suppress the intensity
- Withdrawing from important activities or situations because the adolescent wanted to avoid feeling “bad”
- Feeling compelled to distract themselves from the emotion or how they feel
- Looking for certain sensations or pleasure seeking in order to get through the emotion or have a different emotion
- Trying to control their emotions or uncertainty through perfectionism, rumination, or compulsion
While most people use these coping strategies some of the time, some teens may become dependent on these strategies and become unable to tolerate difficult emotions or stress. When an adolescent becomes reliant on emotionally avoidant strategies, this often results in problems in day-to-day life, such as:
- Being unable to attend school or complete homework
- Social isolation or social dependence
- Experiencing intense anxiety or panic when asked to do things that are uncomfortable
- Perfectionism that gets in the way of completing tasks
- Impulsive or self-destructive behaviors (e.g., substance misuse, self-injury)
- Inability to complete complete developmental appropriate tasks
- Inability to navigate social interactions such as asking for help, taking feedback, or interacting with others your teen finds aversive in some way
Does This Sound Familiar?
Emotional avoidance can present very differently in different people. You may observe one or more of the following:
- My teen keeps themselves constantly busy or distracted so that they never have to think about their problems
- My teen avoids tasks, interactions, or situations that could make them uncomfortable, even things that they have said they wanted to do
- My teen seems to use things to “get through” stressful interactions- like substances, anxiety medications, or having a safe person with them
- My adolescent tries to be perfect so that they never have to feel a negative emotion or cause a negative emotion in others
- My adolescent gets angry or hostile if anyone tries to talk to them about their emotions
- My adolescent “shuts down” or tries to change the subject if anyone tries to talk to them about their emotions
- My teen spends a lot of time trying to “feel good” by using substances, thrill seeking, or impulsive behaviors
- It seems like my teen would do just about anything to avoid their emotions
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