Why Fighting Our Feelings Leaves Us Exhausted
How Do We Avoid Hard Feelings?
Clients often come to me to work on behaviors they see as problems. Typically, they look at these behaviors as addictions. Popular media often depict addictions to alcohol or illicit drugs. However, some behaviors are not shown the same attention in the discourse which can force many to suffer in silence. For example, most people in 2025 spend much of their time scrolling their phones, but if scrolling for hours is causing problems, this could be a behavior to look at deeply in the context of therapy. Others become addicted to video games, pornography, or shopping. What is common in many who report problems with these behaviors is that they are using them to avoid hard feelings.
What Are We Avoiding?
Shame, fear, and grief are just a few hard feelings that people try to avoid. I am being deliberate in my use of the phrase “trying to avoid” rather than “avoid.” Hard feelings do not simply go away. They may be pushed down through distractions, like these avoidance behaviors, but they will pop up again and at times when they can cause further problems.
A Day At the Pool
An analogy I like revolves around a nice day at the pool and an ugly beach ball. Imagine you are having a nice day at a pool. The sun is out. Your friends are with you. You are enjoying the cool – but not cold – water on a hot summer day. Within your sight, you see an ugly beach ball that is impacting your ability to enjoy yourself. You decide to grab the beach ball and pull it under water to hide it. This works for a few fleeting moments, but as soon after, the ball pops right back up. You push the ball under water again and the same thing happens. You continue doing this until you are tired from the work of plunging the ball and all you are thinking about is this ball, that you see as unsightly, and now you are having no fun at all. All that work of avoiding the beach ball has taken over your existence and the outcome is far worse than seeing the ball.
The beach ball in this analogy is the hard feeling – it can be shame, fear, or grief, as stated earlier – or also anger, fear, disgust. There are many feelings people avoid, but the one commonality is that avoidance is temporary and the work of avoidance can become a full-time job that creates further problems.
Imagine that instead of expending all that energy in plunging that ball under water, you simply held the ball under one of your arms, and continued enjoying your day. You can still float and talk with friends and bask in the sun. The ball is with you, but you are no longer staring right at it. You have accepted the existence of that ball and you know that it is with you, but it has no longer become the focus of your time at the pool.
What We Avoid Tells Us Where We’ve Been. What We Learn from It Tells Us Where We’re Going
In therapy, we can work on integrating those hard feelings into your life story. By processing hard feelings and difficult experiences, you can live a life of presence. Avoidance behaviors only make the very thing you are trying to avoid grow into a bigger part of your life, and the unintended consequences of the addictive behavior can impact you physically, emotionally, professionally, and in your relationships.
