Avoidance by Dr. Deb Hirschhorn

Dr. Deb

Avoidance

By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.

There are many ways to avoid yourself, or at least avoid the parts of you that you are most unfamiliar with and you don’t want to know.

Of course, one way to avoid yourself is through addictions. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that people are “chemically” addicted to a substance and that’s why they “can’t” break the habit. The reality is that those who refuse to leave the office – called “workaholics” – and those who gamble are in the exact same addicted boat as those who drink or drug.

The chemistry that takes place in their brains occurs because of the addicted behaviors. That is, people first engage in their escape and avoidance behaviors and then the chemistry kicks in. So whether the behavior itself causes a chemical change in the brain or whether just the excitement combined with the escape and avoidance of what people don’t want to think about causes the chemical change, it hardly matters.

But escape/avoidance/excitement doesn’t even have to be through what we call an addiction. There are so many other behaviors that bring on that same cascade of chemicals including rage, cutting, bingeing – even being a salesman.

When someone cuts themselves, for example, the body supplies a rush of endorphins. This is a normal, protective mechanism of the body to wounds. Endorphins are our brain’s own opioids which signal pleasure and coping with stress or, in the case of wounds, temporary pain relief.

When we exercise, we also get a flood of endorphins to counteract the aches to our muscles. This is what entices many people to exercise in spite of its drawbacks. Eating also does that. After eating, we have a general feeling of pleasure and satiety which we need so as to know when to stop. However, when depressed and miserable, binge eaters will consume more. What happened?

We all start out with the same mechanisms. I get a little tired and draggy around 3p.m. and 4p.m., and researchers concur. We all find that a little bit of carbohydrate does absolute wonders for us at that hour. Researchers reported in Psychology Today that this period of the day “seems to be a universal carbohydrate-craving time.”

For most of us, we feel satiated and comfortable due to the release of serotonin which also is a general mood stabilizer. Along with the serotonin

release goes an insulin release. But the insulin crashes in order to stabilize our system. If a person is already depressed, this becomes a terrible problem as it also means that the decrease in serotonin means there will be a feeling of emptiness…which leads to more consumption.

Not only that, the reward feeling of dopamine will go down as well, again pushing someone who already feels low towards over-eating or binge eating.

I’m drawing a picture here of how the addiction cycle is applicable to any behavior associated with an attempt by our bodies to simply feel better when we don’t. We pathologize it, but really, it is not a sickness or a disorder, whether we’re talking about overeating, over-working, or any other “solution” our bodies and minds come up with to avoid pain, doubt, worry, shame, guilt, self-blame, hopelessness, and helplessness.

It is a pattern of running as fast as possible away from any inner reflection at all.

Sure, there’s a chemical substrate, but there is a need to be clear on which came first – the bad feelings or the “solution” we find to comfort and distract from them.

If you take this concept to its logical conclusion, any behavior meant to avoid those unwanted feelings can also be thrown into the pot of “addictions and other ways to avoid pain.”

So I’ve got to share something that I have seen way, way too often: It is a pattern of running as fast as possible away from any inner reflection at all.

How many marriages could cut out endless years of misery if people would recognize that in an attempt to feel better, like the addict and like the binge eater or the cutter, they are only making themselves more wretched by running away from who they really are.

Just today, a crying wife got her husband on a call with me and he said, “Dr. Deb, I watched your video and the inner child, trauma stuff turns me off.”

Just to be sure I understood, he added, “and it is not applicable to me!”

Then he read me a text he wrote his wife and started crying.

Yeah. Not applicable.

No trauma there. No, sir.

The clear pain they both were in told me that they needed to heal. Yet, he was rushing in the opposite direction. I give this man credit, though. He loved his wife enough to go ahead and commit to do the work in spite of what must be a feeling of terror that he has of looking inside.

Let’s go back to the brain function to understand what’s happening here.

I am sure that the stress hormone cortisol is released at just the thought of examining the hurt parts of himself. The release of cortisol leads to the “fight or flight” response which includes the release of adrenaline to prepare us to run. Fast. The other way.

So it makes total sense to me that automatic responses of the body would compel people to mentally “run” when the option of deep reflection is presented. This would be especially true for people who were given the message as children that they were “wrong” or “bad” or, G-d forbid, a “mistake.” Because, at some level, people with a history like that believe those messages – however untrue they are. So, of course, they don’t want to go there.

The saddest part of the whole thing

is that in working with me, they would be given more than a half-dozen powerful tools to “know” in their gut that the original messages were what was wrong and that there is nothing wrong with them.

As I write this, there was a part of me that wanted to present those tools for you right here. Then this other part of me argued that the skeptics present would mock them or dispute their effectiveness – even though I stand by them with a guarantee.

So I came up with a solution: I will go ahead and present the seven tools on condition that if you’re going to dismiss them anyway, then stop reading now.

So here are the healing tools for the braver souls amongst my readers: • Mindfulness Meditation. Research shows that meditation creates linkages between parts of the brain that need it, such as the cerebral cortex and the amygdala (the fire alarm), so as to calm down our automatic distress reactions. It also creates a profound sense of clarity and connection to oneself, over time. • Affirmations. Yes, there is science behind the act of saying positive, affirmative messages to oneself daily. The trick is that we do not normally believe them, so saying them should not work. And they often don’t for that very reason. The way out of it that I created is to craft affirmations that a person can believe. • Distress Tolerance. The creator of an approach called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Marsha Linehan, found that sometimes the only way to “get through” challenging moments is to increase our ability to handle them. Distress Tolerance is a kind of exposure therapy, helping people tolerate little, annoying things better (but of course, never working to tolerate abuse). • Juxtaposition. This therapy was created by Bruce Ecker, and it is absolutely brilliant. It is based on the fact that when we recover a memory with emotional intensity, the DNA in those neurons is softened and is subject to change within a 6-hour window. Therefore, if we juxtapose on the memory a fact, mood, or experience that contradicts the original one, then the original DNA will be reconstituted as a memory with a different feeling. We use this to “correct” bad feelings that we no longer need. • Leading Your Inner Children. Our brains with their 85-100 billion neurons have many connections. Old memories exist in so many of them, and while we may not remember specific incidents, they still leave an emotional impact. It is because of them that we are triggered, or we have fears, preferences, and moods. When we discover these memories and moods and why we have them and learn how to take Self (soul) leadership over them, we can literally choose whether we want bad feelings to rule us. • Five-Step Apology. This one I totally took from the Rambam. For a fabulous current-day depiction of how to apply it, I’d suggest you find the video that Rabbi David Fohrman did about four or five years ago on teshuva in his Aleph Beta series. • The Antidote to Resentment. Over and over, the person in the marriage who has been hurt now finally gets what they want from their partner – sensitivity, empathy, kindness, respect, understanding – and they think, “So now that I put up with decades of pain, I should just pretend everything’s fine? No way.” But then there is another part of them that is sick of feeling angry, bitter, and resentful. I have resolved that dilemma, too.

Well, I’ve spilled the beans. These are the absolute best of the best of tools to heal. They work. Deeply. All a person needs is the courage to embark on this journey.

Dr. Deb Hirschhorn is a Marriage and Family Therapist. If you want help with your marriage, begin by signing up to watch her Masterclass at https://drdeb. com/myw-masterclass.