When You’re Trying Not to Feel
- Sarah Lawson, Clinical MSW Intern
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
Lately, you’ve probably seen a lot of social media posts and newsletters about Mental Health Awareness Month, offering inspiration, resources, and support throughout May.
Though this kind of advocacy and awareness-building is important, it can sometimes be difficult to see when you already feel overwhelmed and stuck in your own mental health challenges. For example, if you're feeling immobilized by depression and anxiety, sometimes the very reason you’re on social media is to not think about how you’re feeling.
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), experiential avoidance refers to strategies like this—when you're trying not to feel—in which we use to distance ourselves from uncomfortable emotions, thoughts, and experiences or sensations. Instead of addressing issues or feeling emotions, experiential avoidance does just what it says: avoids the experiences that you consciously or subconsciously judge to be uncomfortable or overly intense.
At first glance, this seems to offer an easy out—”if I just avoid my thoughts and emotions, I never have to feel bad”—but it actually reinforces psychological rigidity that leads to increased suffering and deeper issues.
Some typical avoidance strategies include:
Distraction: This can include endless scrolling, excessive TV or movie watching, or even overworking.
For example, choosing to numb yourself with constant input from work, social media, alcohol, or drugs, can be a sign that you’re resisting your personal reality, which also keeps you from working through feelings like disappointment, shame, or burnout and creating a different future for yourself.
Denial: This is an avoidance tactic for internal states, where you simply pretend not to feel the thoughts or emotions you’re feeling, even though they’re still there.
For example, if you’ve experienced trauma, experiential avoidance can become a coping skill that you rely on to try to avoid reliving the trauma or feeling the resulting emotions—like anger or grief—but it also limits your ability to explore strategies that can support you in addressing the trauma.
Projection: Sometimes externalizing your own uncomfortable feelings onto other people is a way to avoid addressing the issue yourself.
For example, getting upset with your partner about their spending habits instead of addressing your own fears about money, which typically just creates more discomfort and drama.
Opting Out: This looks like avoiding situations that might bring up uncomfortable experiences.
For example, if you’re avoiding feeling anxiety, you may be drawn to creating a safe space where you feel protected from the world, but that may also involve increasingly withdrawing from the people and places that used to give your life meaning.
You might notice that each of these avoidance strategies comes with a cost. Avoidance may be a short-term way of dealing, but ACT also offers a long-term way of beginning to embrace experiential acceptance in order to develop psychological flexibility and allow yourself to live more fully.
Experiential acceptance does not mean you have to enjoy the thoughts, feelings, and experiences you have, but rather that you accept that they are happening without getting caught up in the need to try to avoid them. Through experiential acceptance, you can begin making positive changes that are aligned with your values and goals, supporting the future you want to create.
Typically experiential acceptance includes a few phases:
Acknowledge: Before anything else, you need to identify and name what you are avoiding.
Allow: The goal of acceptance is to allow the discomfort—of feelings, thoughts, or experiences—without trying to change or control them.
Accommodate: Make space for the discomfort, get cozy with it, and welcome it in.
Appreciate: Develop an appreciation for the discomfort. This doesn’t mean you have to like it, but it means you can begin to see why experience is an important part of life and what experiencing your thoughts, feelings, and experiences can offer you as a person.
This Mental Health Awareness Month, I’d like to invite you to set aside some time to think about what you’re trying not to think about. Grab a pen and paper, or a journal if you already have one, and find some quiet time to be honest with yourself—even if it’s just for five or ten minutes. Then, consider:
What are you currently trying to push away or avoid feeling?
What are some of the costs of that avoidance?
What is one thing you can do to welcome this experience or feeling in the future? This could look like sitting with an uncomfortable emotion or choosing not to run away from an awkward situation.
What future would you create if that thing you’re avoiding wasn’t something you had to spend energy on anymore?
Because that's what’s powerful about Mental Health Awareness Month to me: The opportunity to imagine a future in which we have the resources and support to address the mental health challenges we all face sometimes.
Sarah Lawson
Clinical social work intern
Student therapist at Divergent Path Wellness
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