Avoidance Quotes

Business crises energize me. Personal crises devastate me. The doctors call it an avoidance tendency. (Mirena to Eve)

~ J.d. Robb

It wasn’t until I slowed the car and rolled down the windows that I realized I spend most of my days driving ‘through’ life without driving ‘in’ life. So, I’ve decided to walk because the pace is slower and the windows are always down.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ Northern Adams

People with anxiety and trust issues find themselves drawn to people of consistency because they feel safe with someone who is predictable. However, that doesn’t cure their problem. The anxious person still remains the same because anxiety is a wave that crashes on the shore every time an unpredictable circumstance challenges their expectations and comfort zone.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Most of us will do anything to avoid facing ourselves

~ Lolly Daskal

But we always avoided talking about these things—difficult things—and I wondered if that meant we'd be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives.

~ Catherine Lacey

We play phone tag, back and forth, the kind of tag where it's clear we're avoiding each other, where no one wants to be touched, tagged, you're it

~ Adam Berlin

In the grief that comes with recognizing what happened to us, we often feel there is nowhere to turn for solace…We do things to keep it away, such as becoming overly busy or using drugs or alcohol to numb our feelings. When we are caught up in resistance, we do not feel hope, but when we surrender to our sadness fully, hope trickles in.

~ Maureen Brady

People were freaked out, but they showed it in weird ways. Back home, people would have been weeping and doing a lot of very public group hugs. At Wexford people just aggressively pretended nothing had happened.

~ Maureen Johnson

At the end, a journey based on my imagination will leave me imagining that I should have engaged the very thing I used my imagination to avoid.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Laws of silence don't work....When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant....

~ Tennessee Williams

I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.

~ Fernando Pessoa

Alterations in regulation of affect (emotion) and impulse:Almost all people who are seriously traumatized have problems in tolerating and regulating their emotions and surges or impulses. However, those with complex PTSD and dissociative disorders tend to have more difficulties than those with PTSD because disruptions in early development have inhibited their ability to regulate themselves.The fact that you have a dissociative organization of your personality makes you highly vulnerable to rapid and unexpected changes in emotions and sudden impulses. Various parts of the personality intrude on each other either through passive influence or switching when your under stress, resulting in dysregulation. Merely having an emotion, such as anger, may evoke other parts of you to feel fear or shame, and to engage in impulsive behaviors to stop avoid the feelings.

~ Suzette Boon

Changes in Meaning:Finally, chronically traumatized people lose faith that good things can happen and people can be kind and trustworthy. They feel hopeless, often believing that the future will be as bad as the past, or that they will not live long enough to experience a good future. People who have a dissociative disorder may have different meanings in various dissociative parts. Some parts may be relatively balanced in their worldview, others may be despairing, believing the world to be a completely negative, dangerous place, while other parts might maintain an unrealistic optimistic outlook on life

~ Suzette Boon

We numb our minds and heart so one need not be broken and the other need not be bothered.

~ Peggy Haymes

Embrace those parts of yourself that you've skillfully avoided until now. That's your true adventure.

~ Gina Greenlee

Well, it is true. Sometimes avoiding something can give it more and more meaning rather than less and less.

~ Tom Mcneal

The problem with trying to find your happiness through avoidance is the nature of reality. Reality simply does not allow us to evade unwanted experiences. Sure, we might be able to escape a few {...] but the evasive life often comes at a cost, like having to live your life in terror. Even if we can successfully ward off some terrifying experiences, we can not advert them all. Particularly, the most unpleasant ones: sickness, old age and death. If our strategy has been to flea unpleasant circumstances, when they come to meet us - as they surely will - our suffering will be great indeed.

~ Mark W. Muesse

My mother's mouth drops. 'Emmy...don't say those things Emmy. Remember, we don't talk about those things.''Yes Mom. I remember. That's why I'm here, looking like this.'An orderly knocks on the door and announces that visiting time is over.My mother and I look at each other awkwardly, and hug.'I love you,' she says.'I love you too, Mom.''You aren't telling them too much are you?' she asks, afraid.I sign. 'No Mommy, I'm not.'She's visibly relieved. She leaves the room.The orderley comes back and escorts me back into the main room.I just sit and laugh to myself. (after Emmy's suicide attempt) ~ The Finer Points of Becoming Machine

~ Emily Andrews

The only way to avoid failure is to sit in a corner and do nothing.

~ Kevin Leman

The reason placing blame repeatedly fails to work is that I repeatedly place it on everyone else instead of where it actually belongs.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I advise people to be careful about taking advice from long term Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) victims. If they have had it for decades and have not cleared it up, then you can discount what they have to say regarding curing the condition. However, they are an excellent resource on the biological harm of electromagnetic fields (EMF), EMF avoidance and low EMF products.

~ Steven Magee

She's terrified that all these sensations and images are coming out of her — but I think she's even more terrified to find out why. Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing.

~ David L. Calof

If you avoid your truthful emotions and pain you will implode and contract into a diminished and feeble state.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Tilly screamed. Anna’s shocked brain only registered annoyance at the sound. Really, when had someone screaming ever solved a problem? She recognized her fixation on this irritation as her own way of avoiding the horror in front of her, but only in a distant and dreamy sort of way.

~ James S.a. Corey

Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life - to be tame or to be wanton. to be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life.And extremes - whether of dullness or fury - successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies - unconscious strategies- to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too - sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.It takes courage to feel the feeling - and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing all the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable?I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.

~ Jeanette Winterson

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

~ Alain De Botton

I’m like a fish in a pool, turning quickly to avoid what challenges it. My only decision is whether to go right or left to sidestep confrontation.

~ Doug Cooper

We want to 'write in' our plan and 'write out' the consequence. When we do that, we're headed 'right back' to what we foolishly thought we could 'write out.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

But such is the nature of man that as soon as you begin to force him to do a thing, from that moment he begins to seek ways by which he can avoid doing the thing you are trying to force upon him. A man with malaria parasites in his blood is a danger to his companions. To kill all the parasites, he was then required to continue doses of quinine a week or ten days after his fever. When the convalescing men were given their daily dose of quinine they would manage to throw their tablets out of the dispensary window. The old turkey-gobbler pet of the hospital gobbled up all the tablets he could find. He became so dissipated he finally developed a species of blindness caused by too much quinine. I cannot vouch for this, but I was often twitted with this story as an illustration of how the men were treating prophylactic quinine.

~ William Crawford Gorgas

Collision avoidance systems are the next big radio frequency (RF) toxin to hit the USA general population as they become standard safety equipment in most new cars.

~ Steven Magee

My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that is to say, Joe and I were going.

~ Charles Dickens

Running was not always the coward's route; it was a matter of survival. The fewer violent encounters one invited, the longer the life.

~ Marjorie M. Liu

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

~ Vironika Tugaleva

You cannot avoid what you fear because what you fear is inside of you.

~ Bryant Mcgill

We say, It wasn't that bad. It was all my fault. I’m making all this stuff up. All my life, I spoke bitterly of my mother's treatment of me as a child.Friends asked, “What did she do to you?“ I couldn't really describe it, and in frustration would say, “Well, she didn't lock us up in closets. in fact, my mother behaved much worse than that, but by focusing on the empty closet, I avoided looking at what waited beyond it.

~ Sarah E. Olson

Being satisfied with the little we have; academically, spiritually, financially, ecumenically or otherwise will prevent a lot of problems from coming to us, and our dependence in our abilities and talents will go as far as bringing us satisfaction in life.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

No, what's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics--the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working concensus to tackle any big problem.

~ Barack Obama

This world today makes one by the day a recluse

~ Siân Lavinia Anaïs Valeriana