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5 Signs That Indicate You Avoid Confronting Your Feelings
Feelings and emotions can be hard to manage but there are ways to confront and process them better
I don’t know about anyone else, but I was conditioned to avoid uncomfortable feelings.
Growing up, I felt lots of emotions, such as anger and frustration but because I wasn’t educated on how to understand my anger, how to process anger, or how to react to it, I kept falling into cycles of problematic behaviours and reactions stemming from my inability to tune into my anger.
I think this is normal for almost every single person. We all grew up labelling feelings as “good” and “bad” — when in reality our feelings are not binary. They exist within a spectrum that coincides with our other psychological activities.
Although it is sometimes in our best interests to suppress negative feelings, it’s not a long-term solution. If we continue suppressing our emotions, it can lead to unhealthy behavioural patterns, “ignoring” the issue at hand, and a decline in our mental and emotional well-being.
Because of this, it’s important to be aware of the different ways we may be ignoring our feelings and processing them. Below I have listed 5 different ways you may be avoiding confronting your feelings.
1. You like to keep yourself constantly busy or working
If you find yourself over-committing to things, always finding something new to add to your to-do list, or constantly feeling busy, it could possibly be your coping mechanism to avoiding your feelings.
I feel like this is a common way to ignore our feelings, especially in a day and age where we are taught that the only way to get somewhere in life is to “grind” and “hustle”.
The reality is that sometimes the expression the only way out is through, is not a good way to deal with your emotions — it actually perpetuates a cycle of avoidance.
2. Feel “nothing”, numb, or empty all the time
Another common mechanism people use to avoid confronting their feelings is tapping into different emotions that feel “neutral”.
