Avoidance Quotes

“Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.”

“If you pay attention, you may find that it is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable, so you avoid doing the thing that will evoke fear and other disquieting emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.”

“To live a lie may allow us to avoid the truth, but the real lie lays in believing that we can avoid the truth in the first place.”

“Fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thinking that there is something to be avoided manifests something to avoid.”

“He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.”

“Our inner experience is that which we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan and predict. These experiences are actually mental actions, or mental activity (Van der Hart et al., 2006). Mental activity, in which we engage all the time, may or may not be accompanied by behavioral actions. It is essential that you become aware of, learn to tolerate and regulate, and even change major mental actions that affect your current life, such as negative beliefs, and feelings or reactions to the past the interfere with the present. However, it is impossible to change inner experiences if you are avoiding them because you are afraid, ashamed or disgusted by them. Serious avoidance of you inner experiences is called experiential avoidance (Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, & Follettte, 1996), or the phobia of inner experience (Steele, Van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2005; Van der Hart et al., 2006).”

“The avoidance of pain is the avoidance of life.”

“Avoidance therapy does not work. One major reason for that is because Avoidance Therapy (diversion, think yourself happy, positive affirmations) is predicated on the validity of 'Failure of Will.' Depression is not a choice.”

“To live a fantasy is to avoid a life.”