Asha Bauer, PsyD.
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Vital Living

A blog on mindfulness, courage, and intention
"I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn from what it had to teach...
​I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."
​Henry David Thoreau
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Avoiding Avoidance: Why Pushing Away Anxiety Backfires

3/5/2018

 
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What would you do if your hand touched a hot stove?
 
That is not a trick question. We all pull away. It’s biologically engrained into us that we should avoid pain. And this is not a bad thing! Avoiding pain is a matter of survival. If you did not pull instinctively away from the hot stove, I think we can all agree you would be in a whole world of trouble.
 
Here’s the thing. We pull away from the hot stoves in our mind the same way. Our brain is efficient and wants to avoid pain; it doesn’t differentiate between emotional pain and physical pain. What is your inner hot stove? The looming deadline. The memory of a traumatic event that revisits you when you least expect it. The plane or spider or whatever else sends shivers down your spine or sends your heartbeat through the roof. The interesting person we keep running into that we fear will reject us if we approach them. To our primal sense of survival, it’s all a hot stove.


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Asha Bauer, Psy.D.
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