avoidance – The Healing Modalities

What’s yours is yours.

Have you ever found yourself stressing about someone else’s choices? Maybe a friend is making decisions you don’t agree with, or you’re worried about the way your partner is handling a situation with a colleague. Or perhaps you’re caught up in something bigger—like the state of the economy or what the weather will be like next week.

It’s exhausting, isn’t it?

I learned a concept from Byron Katie that helped me untangle what often became a mental mess. She offers a powerful framework that explains there are three types of business:

God’s business: Things beyond human control, like the weather or natural disasters.
Their business: Other people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions/decisions.
My business: Your own thoughts, feelings, and actions/decisions—the one realm where you truly have power.

When we’re caught up in “God’s business” or “their business,” we disconnect from ourselves. We avoid looking at what’s really going on in our lives and miss the opportunity to make meaningful changes.

Why do we do this? It can be easier to fixate on what others are doing or what’s out of our control than to face our own fears, desires, or responsibilities. But when we do this, it’s a recipe for anxiety, frustration, and feeling stuck because we’re trying to control things that are not ours to control.

The good news is that we don’t have to stay there.

We can get back into our business by:

Pausing and reflecting: “Whose business am I in right now? Is this mine to control?”
Shifting our focus inward: Instead of ruminating on others, think about what you can do today to feel more empowered.

I love what Byron Katie has on her website:

Ask yourself: “Am I in their business? Did they ask me for my advice?” And more importantly, “Can I take the advice I am offering and apply it to my life?”

Staying in our own business can be one of the most freeing things we can do. When we stop trying to control what isn’t ours, we reclaim energy for what is—our goals, our relationships, and our peace of mind.

Your turn: Where in your life are you caught up in someone else’s business, and how is it affecting you? What’s one area of your business that you’ve been neglecting or avoiding? How might your life feel different if you focused only on what you can control?

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And what if that’s OK?

All of us experience emotional pain at regular intervals in our lives. We often turn to food, alcohol, shopping, work, or something else to ignore the pain we feel. These actions are called buffering (more on that soon). These temporary distractions only prevent the process that needs to happen to let the painful feelings go.

What happens when feelings hurt:
• Something happens to trigger your emotional pain.
• You can barely make sense of it and it overwhelms you.
• Emotional pain racks your body—the vibrations in your body caused by the thoughts you’re having are excruciating.

You can make a choice to: avoid it, resist it, react to it, or process it.

Avoiding
When you choose to avoid your pain and pretend it isn’t there, you are basically lying to yourself. This doesn’t work long term. The truth is that avoidance causes pain to fester. The more you avoid it, the more you have to avoid it. You might eat, for example, instead of feel. Then you might get upset because you ate when you weren’t hungry. Then you might obsess about your body or your exercise routine. All of these tactics keep you from addressing the cause of the pain and instead, multiply undesirable symptoms such as weight gain.

Resisting and Reacting
When you resist the emotion, you tell yourself that you shouldn’t be feeling this way and then you feel bad in addition to the painful emotion you’re already feeling. When you resist, it’s like trying to hold a large beach ball under the water. The beach ball always wants to pop back up and gets stronger the more you try to push it down.

When you deal with pain this way, you act it out or fight against it. You might yell at the person you believe caused your pain. You might talk behind their back, you might give them the silent treatment, or maybe take even more drastic measures against them. This may seem to help with the pain temporarily because it alleviates the vibration in the moment, but these actions almost always backfire.

When we react from negative emotion, we almost always get a negative result. Our actions are usually uncontrolled and unthoughtful. Fighting against the emotion becomes a losing battle–anxiety speeds up the vibration of the already painful emotion, making it even more intense.

Processing
When you choose to process pain, you are choosing to feel it. We are so reluctant to feel pain on purpose. We tell ourselves that feeling pain is a bad thing because it feels bad, but this isn’t the truth. When we allow ourselves to feel our pain all the way through, we see that it’s manageable and it can do no long term harm (unlike avoiding and fighting, which can have many long term consequences).

Allow the feeling to be in your body even if you can’t make sense of it in your mind yet. Watch and notice. Say in your mind “I am processing pain” over and over as you feel the pain. You don’t need to fix it or make it go away.

Notice any desire to react, resist, and avoid. You can say the desire out loud or in your mind, or write it down. You don’t have to act on it—just acknowledge it. You can tell yourself, “That won’t help” or “That’s not worth it” every time you notice the desire. Remind yourself, “This is pain…This is part of being human.” Allow the painful vibration to be there as you do laundry, take a shower, drive your car, or talk on the phone. Notice its heaviness, its energy, its ability to take your breath away. Just notice.

As you do this, you’ll begin to see that your thoughts about the situation appear. It may take some time–a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks. Let it take as long as it takes—there’s no need to force it. Just keep noticing what you notice.

Your turn: What happens to the feeling if you just allow it to be there and feel it all the way through? What happens if you’re allowed to feel this way without reacting, resisting, or avoiding the emotion?

Next week we’ll talk about how our thoughts about our circumstances/situations create our feelings. It’s easy to think our circumstances (other people, our job, our neighborhood, traffic, etc.) create our feelings. It’s all our thoughts. And that’s where our power lies.

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Tag: avoidance

None of your business?

Sometimes our feelings hurt…a lot