What is Avoidance Coping and How Is It Related to Anxiety?

Avoidance coping is a common maladaptive coping strategy that avoids stressors rather than dealing with them directly.  Avoidance coping also goes by the names of avoidant coping, avoidant behavior, procrastination and passive aggressive behavior (see my article: Changing Maladaptive Coping Strategies That No Longer Work For You: Avoidance).

Avoidance Coping and Anxiety

Why Do People Use Avoidance to Try to Cope With Stress and Anxiety?

Avoidance coping is often used by people who are anxious and get stressed easily.  They feel temporarily relieved not to deal with the anxiety and stress.  But in the long run it only makes the problem worse, more stressful and more anxiety producing (see my articles: What is the Difference Between Functional and Dysfunctional Anxiety? and How to Increase Your Tolerance For Uncertainty to Reduce Your Anxiety).

How Does Avoidance Coping Create More Anxiety and Stress?

Here are some of the ways that avoidance coping creates more anxiety and stress:

• Avoidance coping, which can temporarily decrease anxiety and stress, creates more anxiety and stress in the long run because problems get worse and you feel worse about yourself, which creates a negative spiral.

Avoidance Coping and Anxiety

• Avoidance coping doesn't resolve the problem.

• Avoidance creates frustration for you and for others who are affected by it.

• Avoidance often creates conflict with others who are upset about problems that aren't being addressed.

• Avoidance may cause others to withdraw emotional support because they feel frustrated when you don't deal with problems directly.

Clinical Vignette: The Link Between Avoidance Coping and Anxiety and How to Overcome Avoidance Coping

The following clinical vignette, which is a composite of many different cases with all identifying information removed, is a common scenario.  It shows how anxiety and avoidance coping are linked and how therapy can help:

Gina

Ever since she could remember, Gina experienced a lot of anxiety whenever she had to confront a difficult situation.  

She grew up in a family where both her mother and father were highly anxious.  They tended to catastrophize whenever they were faced with a difficult situation which, in turn, made Gina anxious as a child. 

Gina often saw her parents become excessively worried on a regular basis when they had to file their taxes, fill out any kind of official papers, deal with any kind of deadline or confrontation or handle any situation where they felt uncomfortable.

Rather than deal with stressful situations directly, Gina's parents often procrastinated until they couldn't procrastinate any more.  Then, they would try to rush to solve problems that had become worse because they didn't deal with the issues early on.  This only created more anxiety for them, which fueled more avoidance, and so on.

Gina didn't learn to develop healthy coping skills as a child because she wasn't taught to develop them by her parents.  Instead, she internalized their way of avoiding and delaying (see my article: Intergenerational Family Dynamics).

This meant that homework assignments were often done at the last minute or, if she was anxious about a test, she wouldn't prepare for it and she would delay going to class until she was late.  This often meant she had less time to complete the test.

Over time, Gina's avoidance got worse as her anxiety got worse.  Anxiety fueled avoidance and avoidance fueled anxiety until Gina often felt like she was spiraling out of control.

Since she was smart, Gina got good grades in college, but she often created more anxiety for herself by procrastinating with papers and projects.  

After graduation, Gina became a newspaper journalist.  She loved the work and she was enthusiastic about the topics she worked on but, due to her anxiety and propensity to use avoidance to try to cope with anxiety, she usually delayed turning in her story until the last minute.  

She was often up until all hours of the night working in a frenzy to get her assignments in by the deadline.  These all nighters were taking a toll on her sleep so that she often felt exhausted and even more anxious.

After she got married, Gina and her husband, Tom, would argue about her procrastination.  Early on in their marriage, Gina took on the task of paying bills, which she often paid late because money issues made her highly anxious.  

After a while, the late payments affected their credit score, which made it difficult to get a mortgage when they wanted to buy an apartment.

Tom urged Gina to get help in therapy to deal with her anxiety and procrastination.  She assured him time and again that she would seek help in therapy, but her anxiety about confronting her problem got in the way of her seeking help.

Over time, Gina's anxiety and procrastination continued to get worse.  After she missed three work deadlines in a row, she was terminated from her job and the shock of this crisis finally brought her into therapy.

Gina'a therapist provided her with psychoeducation about how Gina was using a maladaptive strategy of avoidance to deal with her anxiety.  Her therapist helped Gina to gain insight into how she made matters worse for herself.

They also worked on her unresolved childhood trauma of feeling unsafe as a child in a home where her parents were highly anxious and, as a result, were unable to provide her with an emotionally stable home environment (see my articles: Overcoming Unresolved Childhood Trauma and How Emotional Avoidance is Related to Trauma).

Her therapist used Parts Work to help Gina deal with the internal parts of herself that were avoidant (see my article: How Parts Work Therapy Can Empower You).  

They also used EMDR therapy so she could work through unresolved childhood trauma (see my article: How EMDR Therapy Achieves Emotional Breakthroughs).

Over time, Gina learned to develop healthy coping strategies to calm herself and deal directly with issues instead of using avoidant coping strategies (see my article: Developing Internal Resources and Coping Strategies).

Gradually, starting with relatively small issues that she would normally avoid, she learned to deal with increasingly stressful tasks and situations.

There were times early on when she was tempted to cancel her therapy sessions as part of her avoidant behavior.  However, she learned not to give in to this urge, especially when she saw that she was feeling and coping better.

Tips on How to Overcome Avoidance Coping

The scenario above about Gina illustrates how avoidance coping is related to anxiety and how it can get worse over time without help.

Here are some tips you can try if you want to overcome avoidance coping:

• Acknowledge that You Use Avoidance Coping: One of the biggest problems with people who use avoidance coping is that they often avoid admitting to themselves that this is a problem for them.  They make excuses even to themselves.  But if you see a pattern, it's important to acknowledge the problem so you can deal with it.

• Learn About Avoidance Coping: Understanding why avoidance coping makes matters worse is important to changing it.

• Recognize That You're Using Avoidance When You're Doing It: Rather than avoiding looking at your avoidant behavior, become aware of it as it's happening.  Catching yourself in the moment is important if you want to change this behavior.

• Take Small Steps:  Rather than starting with a big stressful task or situation, start with something small and work your way up to bigger tasks and situations as you achieve success with the smaller steps (see my article: Expanding Your Window of Tolerance).

• Identify Healthy Coping Strategies: If your usual way is to avoid stressful situations, think about what else you can do that would be a healthier way of coping.  Do you know someone who deals with stressful situations well?  Observe what they do and see if you can use some of their strategies (see my articles: Mindfulness Meditation Can Reduce Anxiety and The Benefits of Journaling).

• Seek Help in Therapy: Trying to overcome avoidance coping can be especially challenging on your own.  It's easy to convince yourself that you'll deal with it "tomorrow," but tomorrow never seems to come (see my article: Starting Therapy: It's Not Unusual to Feel Anxious or Ambivalent).

Getting Help in Therapy

You're not alone.  Avoidant coping is a common issue.  

Getting Help in Therapy

Unfortunately, avoidant coping often gets worse over time as it gets reinforced over and over again.

The good news is that working with a licensed mental health professional can help you to deal with the underlying issues that created your anxiety and avoidant coping so you can overcome these issues and cope in a healthier way.

Once you deal with issues as they develop, you can feel more confident and live a more fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples, and I have helped many people to overcome trauma, anxiety and avoidant coping (see my article:  What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Changing Maladaptive Coping Strategies That No Longer Work For You: Avoidance

Do you ever wonder how people develop maladaptive coping strategies?

Changing Coping Strategies That No Longer Work for You:  Avoidance

Well, to begin with, we all learn different coping strategies that start out being a combination of our own particular temperament and as well as the coping strategies that we learned growing up in our home environment as children. Two children who live in the same household under the same conditions can develop very different coping strategies.

Often, there are coping strategies that might have worked for us as children to preserve our safety and emotional well-being that no longer work for us as adults. Avoidance is a particular maladaptive coping strategy.

Avoidant Coping Strategies

What are Avoidant Coping Strategies?
The following is a list of the most common avoidant coping strategies:

Social Withdrawal:
The person who uses social withdrawal or social isolation as a coping strategy disconnects from the people around him.

Social Withdrawal as Avoidance

He might disconnect by staying home alone and watching an excessive amount of TV or spend many hours on the Internet without having in-person social contact with others.

He might appear to be very "independent," but this is often a pseudo independence whose main purpose is to avoid dealing with others. People who engage in social isolation often prefer jobs where they work alone and only engage in minimal social contact.

Psychological Withdrawal:
The person who uses psychological withdrawal as a coping strategy copes by "numbing" herself emotionally.

The main goal is to keep herself from feeling overwhelmed. She might also spend a lot of time in her own fantasy world as a way to avoid dealing with the people and problems around her.

Another form of psychological withdrawal is dissociation, which can range from moderate to severe. An example of moderate dissociation is something that we all do from time to time--daydreaming. Daydreaming. in and of itself, is not necessarily avoidant.

Psychological Withdrawal as Avoidance

Many creative ideas come to us from daydreaming. However, if a person spends a lot of time daydreaming, rather than dealing with the world around her, this is considered a form of avoidant coping.

An example of severe dissociation is when a person has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. When someone has DID, most often, she has experienced severe trauma and her personality fragments as a way to compartmentalize the overwhelming experience.

Compulsive and Addictive Behavior:

Compulsive and Addictive Behavior as Avoidance

Compulsive and addictive behavior include many different types of behavior: abusing drugs, abusing alcohol, overeating, bingeing and purging food, compulsive exercise, compulsive overspending, compulsive gambling, workaholism sexually compulsive behavior, compulsive risk taking, and other tendencies that seek excitement and distraction to avoid dealing with whatever is too emotionally overwhelming.

The following fictionalized scenario, which is not based on any one person, illustrates how these avoidant coping strategies develop over time:

Jeff:
Jeff and his older brother, Tom, grew up in a household with an alcoholic father and a passive, emotionally overwhelmed mother. Their father, Dan, would come home from work everyday, eat his dinner alone in the den without interacting with the rest of the family, and then spend the rest of the night drinking beer and, eventually, falling asleep on the couch.

Sometimes, he would become angry and belligerent and pick an argument with his wife, Betty. Most of the time, she ignored him by retreating into the bedroom and closing the door. Sometimes, she would yell back at Dan and they would have an explosive argument. Even though he would wake up most mornings with a bad hangover, Dan almost never missed work as a train operator for the MTA subway system.

Even though Jeff and Tom were only a year apart and growing up in the same household, they each experienced their father's drunkenness in very different ways.

Jeff tended to be a very quiet child who would retreat into his room and watch TV quietly, losing himself in whatever program he was watching. If he was watching a program about an ideal family, he would fantasize that he was part of that family.

Tom would often leave the house, slamming the door behind him. By the time he was a teen, he had his own car and he would sometimes drive off in anger to get away from the home. He would meet his friends and they would go drag racing on the boulevard. He was brought home by the police a few times for speeding at 90-100 mph.

One day, Dan was sent home from work after he tested positive for alcohol on a random alcohol test at work. His supervisor told him that he would be brought up on disciplinary charges and he would either have to get into an alcohol treatment program or face losing his job.

They considered him to be too high a risk to allow him to drive the train. Before his disciplinary hearing, he would have to serve a 30-day suspension without pay.

Until then, even though he was an active alcoholic, Dan had been a good provider. Now, his job was in jeopardy, and this placed another burden on the family and created more tension in the household.

Neither his mother or his father talked to Jeff about this, but he overheard them talking quietly in the living room. He heard them say that they wouldn't tell Jeff and Tom about Dan's problems at work, so Jeff had to pretend that he didn't know and try to act "normal" around them.

When Tom got home, Jeff spoke to him quietly about what happened. Tom was furious. He told Jeff that he hated their father and he wished the father would die.

Fearing that his parents would hear Tom, Jeff tried to get Tom to be quiet, but Tom was so enraged that he ran out of the house, and sped away in his car. Jeff knew that Tom liked to speed and he worried that his brother would get into trouble. His parents were so preoccupied that they hardly noticed that Tom left in a rage.

Jeff spent the rest of the night in his room spacing out in front of the TV for hours. He had fallen asleep in front of the TV when he heard the doorbell ring late at night.

From inside his room, he heard a commotion at the front door. When he got up to see what was going on, he was not surprised to see a police officer at the door informing his parents that Jeff had gotten into an accident while speeding and he was in the local hospital. Fortunately, he survived the crash and he only had a broken leg and no one else was hurt, but the car was totalled. This was the beginning of Tom's long arrest record for reckless driving.

When Jeff got older, he moved out on his own. He had a few people that he socialized with occasionally, but he tended to keep to himself.

He was employed as a technical researcher, so he spent most of his working time alone as well. Although he tended to avoid socializing, he was often very lonely.

Part of him wanted to have close friends and a special woman in his life but, at that point, a bigger part of him was too afraid of getting hurt and disappointed.

Because he had spent most of his childhood isolating, he also lacked the social skills to go out to meet other people. And when he had opportunities to meet others in college or at work, he was too afraid to open up to these experiences.

By the time he was in his late 20s, he felt depressed and miserable. His father had long since retired on disability due to alcohol-related medical problems, and his mother was depressed and emotionally withdrawn. His brother had moved out of state and he was estranged from the family. No one knew where he was. So, Jeff felt like he had no family and no friends.

Jeff couldn't imagine spending the rest of his life in this state, so he knew he had to do something, but he felt too afraid to seek professional help.

For the next year, he went back and forth in his mind about whether he should see a psychotherapist. He realized that he was spending far too much time by himself watching TV and feeling lonely, but he couldn't get passed his fear of opening up to a stranger.

Finally, when he began having thoughts of killing himself, he called the Suicide Prevention Hot line and they gave him a referral to a therapist.

Because the pain of remaining isolated became greater than his fear of opening up in psychotherapy, Jeff decided to make an appointment to see the psychotherapist.

During the first session, he found it very hard to remain present in the session. He alternated between wanting to zone out and fall asleep.

Over time, Jeff learned how his avoidant coping strategies helped him when he was a child to avoid dealing with the situation at home, which would have been emotionally overwhelming for any child, but especially for a child who was as sensitive as Jeff.

Changing Coping Strategies That No Longer Work For You:  Avoidance

He also learned how this avoidant coping strategy was no longer working for him and that he needed to learn new coping strategies so he could live a full life and not spend the rest of his life hiding. He also needed to learn new social skills so he could meet other people and have a life outside of his work.

It wasn't easy, and there were many times when Jeff wanted to quit therapy because he felt too afraid to come out of his emotional shell. But when he thought of the alternatives, Jeff stuck with it.

Gradually, he learned to trust his therapist. Step by step, he developed better internal and external coping strategies.

Instead of losing himself in front of his TV, he incorporated new coping strategies: He began attending a yoga class and learned how to meditate in that class. He joined a local running club and met other young men and women who liked to jog and bike.

Jeff also began to date, and soon he met a woman that he really liked and they began dating exclusively.

As often happens in intimate relationships, some of Jeff's core emotional issues came up in this relationship, and he was often tempted to withdraw emotionally. However, he dealt with these issues with his psychotherapist as they came up, and he learned to cope with emotions that were difficult for him.

Even though this was a lot of hard work for Jeff, he felt like he was alive for the first time in his life. He realized that by withdrawing from difficult emotional experiences all of his life, he was also withdrawing from positive experiences as well.

Getting Help in Therapy to Change Coping Strategies That No Longer Work

He came to realize that, to survive as a child, he had blunted his emotions so that he felt almost nothing. So, taking the risk of feeling some pain came to outweigh feeling nothing.

In the above scenario, we can see several examples of avoidant behavior in Jeff's family, including alcoholism, social and psychological withdrawal, emotional numbing, and reckless risk taking behavior.

We can also see that engaging in avoidant behavior as children often allows us to survive overwhelming emotions. It comes at a cost in terms of the child's emotional development, but often the child has no choice if he or she wants to survive emotionally.

In addition, we see that the avoidant coping strategies that serve children in terms of emotional survival don't work for adults who must interact and make their way in the world.

Getting Help in Therapy
We also see that there is a lot of emotional pain for adults who recognize that they're stuck in maladaptive coping strategies, but there is also hope for those who seek the help of a licensed mental health professional.

I am a licensed psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing therapist in NYC.  I work with individual adults and couples.

I have helped many adults to overcome coping strategies that no longer work for them and learn to develop new coping skills.

To find out more about me, visit my website:  Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Also see my articles:  Coping Strategies that No Longer Work: Passive Behavior

Coping Strategies that No Long Work for You: Controlling Behavior