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How The Pain You Avoid Causes You Even More Pain
“You get hit the hardest when trying to run or hide from a problem. Like the defense on a football field, putting all focus on evading only one defender is asking to be blindsided.” (Criss Jami)
The avoidance of emotional pain is so much a part of our culture today that we have become numbed to the truth of the situation. We don’t truly understand how big of a problem this is for us as human beings and how we interact within the world because of it.
Why do we avoid emotional pain?
We avoid emotional pain in the very same way that we avoid physical pain and physiologically, there are essentially the same thing when it comes to what parts of the brain are activated.
As organisms, we move towards pleasure and avoid pain of any sort for the sake of our survival. This is so deeply wired within us that so many of our actions within our daily lives revolve around these two states — the avoidance of pain and the movement towards pleasure.
Here are a few examples:
The highly processed and refined food that you eat is a manifestation of you moving towards pleasure and can also be an avoidance of pain (emotional eating).
The shopping habit that you engage in is a movement towards pleasure and novelty.
