Gemma Spake

Over time, what happens is something psychologists refer to as experiential avoidance.

This is a really key concept from acceptance and commitment therapy.

And essentially, the more we try and suppress or outrun a feeling through whatever behaviors, working, anything, the more persistent and intrusive it becomes.

The emotion, yeah, it seemingly disappears immediately.

It's actually like in the background doing pushups and getting stronger and stronger and stronger because it starts feeling more and more and more scary the more we avoid it.

And we just keep delaying the moment that we will eventually have to face it, meaning that when we eventually do, we start to believe that all emotions when we encounter them must be difficult to manage because we only feel them at their most extreme point.

Why we're really doing all of this is like because we're scared.

Like we're really scared that when the emotion finally hits us, it's going to take out the whole village and we're not going to be able to cope.

Probably because, yeah, again, we're falling into this pattern where we don't feel, we don't feel.

And then when we do feel, it's at like level 530.

thousand and we're so scared of excessively ruminating we're so scared of hyper vigilance taking over our lives we don't know how to down regulate our feelings we don't know how to stick like just to sit with them

We don't know how to deal with them.

And so it just gets worse.

Again, not by choice, but through years of subconsciously teaching our minds that big feelings are big disasters.

Therefore, they should be avoided.

Therefore, when we do feel them there, we don't have any healthy coping skills because the only way we cope is to just put up as many barriers as possible between us and the feeling.

It's very sad.

I think it's sad because it actually denies us the ability to enjoy a rich and meaningful life or to identify what needs to change or to work through things until they have a stable resolution.

Also, we don't know ourselves.

We don't know ourselves.