Stop Harmful Avoidant Responses

Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm an anxiety, attachment and OCD recovery coach. Helping people recover fully so that you can live a happy life and have amazing relationships. Today I want to talk about avoidance techniques and how we stop this pattern of avoiding things that are either overwhelming, slightly uncomfortable, or even very uncomfortable. The brain seeks comfort and wants to avoid discomfort, which is why a lot of people struggle with addictions and OCD compulsions and avoidance techniques, because it teaches us to run away from those things that are uncomfortable. The brain isn't always directing us in the right direction. It can sometimes direct us in the wrong one. And a pattern of avoidance in life relationships is going to negatively affect your life more and more over time. If you stop avoidant patterns, what's going to happen is it may be uncomfortable at first and hard to do, but. But with time and practice, you're going to build comfort and confidence in whatever that situation is. So if people are helping you and encouraging you to avoid or run away from uncomfortable situations, whether that situation feels extremely uncomfortable and anxiety provoking, or whether your brain is just making rational excuses for not doing it, there are different levels of discomfort here. The more you do that, the worse it's going to get and it will negatively affect your life. So your goal needs to be to stop avoiding all things that cause discomfort. Some examples might be relationships a lot of people avoid. And I was one of those that avoided relationships for about 17 years. I didn't realize I was anxious, I didn't realize it was fear based. My brain was coming up with rational excuses like I'm just gonna focus on school or I wanna make friends first or I'm just not attracted to that partner. We're not compatible. It all seemed very rational. Unconsciously, it was fear and discomfort. And it didn't start really affecting my life until my late 30s when I realized I was the common denominator as to why I wasn't married or had kids yet, which was a goal of mine. Sometimes that discomfort shows up in just being overwhelmed with housework or at our job where we tend to procrastinate and avoid instead of doing it anyway. What we find is the more that we avoid, the more the stress builds up and the lack of confidence in ourselves builds up when we actually do that thing anyway. And face it, yeah, maybe it's not easy, maybe it takes a little bit more time than we want it to, but we accomplish it and we feel really good about ourselves. And this habitual pattern will lead us not to procrastinating and feeling stressed, it will lead us to facing those uncomfortable situations that conflict those uncomfortable feelings, that person that we need to talk to. It is uncomfortable, especially at first. But if you make exposure to those things that you're uncomfortable about a habit, you're going to build comfort more and more and more over time. You have to have some consistency here. And a lot of people need help doing this and support doing this because it can be really helpful to have somebody who understands and who could push you, push you towards being accountable to making the changes in your life that you need to make. While you get comfortable in those situations, having someone to be there for you, someone who understands what you're going through, can be really helpful to actually getting there, pushing you and helping you be accountable. It makes all the difference in the world. I hope this video was helpful for you. If you want help with this, check out the links in the description below. We're here to help you. I promise you can build so much change and confidence in your life and and reach those goals that you're wanting to reach. We're here to help you. We'll talk to you very soon.