The Four Ways We Avoid Emotional Pain — and Why They Keep Us Stuck

Releasing trapped trauma and discussing the four ways people avoid their emotions. This excerpt is from Lecture 15, Part 1 of The Calmness in Mind Process by John Glanvill, a Complex Anxiety Specialist.

Anxiety is not always the enemy. Sometimes the sensation we label as anxiety is simply trapped energy from the past beginning to move. When people start to calm down through exposure work and self-observation, that very calmness can signal to the system that it is finally safe to release what has been held down for years. The feelings intensify. Progress appears to reverse. Many people then panic and conclude they are failing. In reality the battery is discharging. The work is working.

The problem is that most of us have spent a lifetime perfecting strategies to avoid feeling bad. There are four main ones.

Suppression is the conscious decision not to look at what needs addressing. You know the job is wrong, the tooth needs attention, the friendship is corrosive — yet you tell yourself to wait six months, hope it settles, or that it is just the way they are. The discomfort is pushed aside. It does not disappear. It sits in the background, slowly draining the emotional battery until the eight-year-old part of the mind begins its sabotage routines: poor sleep, foggy memory, heightened doubt.

Expression is the less common but more dramatic route. Someone explodes, blames, or forces others to walk on eggshells so that the uncomfortable moment ends as quickly as possible. The immediate pressure is relieved, but the underlying fear remains untouched and the environment becomes exhausting for everyone involved.

Distraction is the most widespread. Workaholism, endless gym sessions, phone scrolling, gaming, substances, relationships, or compulsive rituals all serve the same purpose: keep attention elsewhere so the internal discomfort does not have to be faced. The atomic battery never discharges. The emotional battery runs down from the constant effort of avoidance. Eventually the person collapses under the weight of both the original issues and the secondary problems created by the distraction itself.

Repression is the unconscious version. The mind hides entire events or rewrites them so that the conscious self never has to feel the original pain. You may have no memory of something that happened, or you may remember a version in which you were solely the victim when the truth was more complicated. The energy of those events is still stored. Cover stories form around the gaps. Triggers appear without obvious cause. Large animals, certain tones of voice, particular situations set off the amygdala while the conscious mind has no story to attach to the reaction.

These four strategies keep the trapped energy locked in place. The body becomes denser. Vibration lowers. Recovery stalls.

A different approach is possible. It begins with the willingness to sit with whatever arises without immediately adding a story or reaching for a distraction. The Vipassana retreat I attended years ago forced this lesson. Ten days of silence, ten hours of meditation daily, no books, no phones, no conversation. The first sessions were almost unbearable. Neighbouring fidgets, laboured breathing, my own racing mind. By the third day, spontaneous crying began. Memories that had been buried since childhood surfaced. Physical sensations moved through the body — tension in a hand that had been burned years earlier, numbness in a face that had taken multiple impacts. The more I stayed out of the stories and simply allowed the sensations, the more the system released.

What looks like anxiety can be the controlled venting of stored potential energy into kinetic form. Numbness, heat, pins and needles, muscle spasms, shaking, tears, even the urge to vomit energy rather than content — all of these can be the body clearing itself. The rider’s job is to remain present, use slow diaphragm breathing, and refuse the old narratives. If the intensity becomes overwhelming, brief tapping can settle the system, but the long-term direction is toward allowing rather than interrupting the release.

You cannot always know in advance what the landmines are. The unconscious has hidden them precisely so you would not have to feel them. The practical method is therefore systematic and patient: create the conditions of safety and stillness, then gently explore. Over time the cover stories lose their power because the energy they were protecting is no longer there.

The people who recover most fully are those who stop treating every uncomfortable sensation as a problem to be solved or avoided. They learn to distinguish the fight-or-flight response that still needs retraining from the deeper discharge that needs permission. They make decisions instead of postponing them. They become a little more willing to look selfish about their own needs. They accept that what others think of them is largely none of their business.

The next step is the structured meditation that teaches you how to locate and safely release what has been held. Until then, the invitation is simple: notice which of the four avoidance strategies you reach for most readily, and begin the practice of staying present a little longer each time the discomfort appears. The battery wants to empty. Your job is to stop shoving the charge back in.