Best 113 quotes in «avoidance quotes» category

Most of us will do anything to avoid facing ourselves

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

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

Nobody Home: Until we're ready, we're pretty much primed for denial. Even on the river of change, we're most of us slow rowers.

Nobody Home: With feelings there's no easy con. You're either willing to ante up or you're not. You're either ready to be present with what's happening or you kick the problem into your future

Our inner experience is that which we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan and predict. These experiences are actually mental actions, or mental activity (Van der Hart et al., 2006). Mental activity, in which we engage all the time, may or may not be accompanied by behavioral actions. It is essential that you become aware of, learn to tolerate and regulate, and even change major mental actions that affect your current life, such as negative beliefs, and feelings or reactions to the past the interfere with the present. However, it is impossible to change inner experiences if you are avoiding them because you are afraid, ashamed or disgusted by them. Serious avoidance of you inner experiences is called experiential avoidance (Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, & Follettte, 1996), or the phobia of inner experience (Steele, Van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2005; Van der Hart et al., 2006).

Nope. She was out of her mind, and I was out of here before I got dragged along on her crazy train.

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.

One might have all sorts of reasons for avoiding people. It's none of our business.

Outdoor sunlight avoidance for several months is recommended after receiving abnormally high radiation exposures.

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

People spend entire lifetimes trying to avoid the things that have already happened.

Russian Dolls: One excellent thing about being human is that we're fast learners. When we find a trick that works, we practice it, even if the skill means being better at avoiding karmic homework than facing or resolving it.

RIVETING TORPOR It is remarkable how far I am prepared to go In order to avoid doing the one thing that might Provide satisfaction, and it is remarkable to consider What I will do instead of it, purely for the pleasure Of being dissatisfied. When it is merely a matter Of sitting down for a few hours and dreaming That something of value might eventually arise From this routine of self-enforced boredom.

Russian Dolls: How we hide those parts of ourselves, the ones that we can conceal, is by constructing an elaborate emotional infrastructure not unlike nested Russian dolls. True healing requires going through all the hidden layers.

Shame often causes me to hide my mistakes from others. But really, when I make a mistake, I should make it loud and clear, so I can see that it didn’t work as a strategy, and be able to make a course correction, either by myself or with the help of others.

Smart people avoid smart meters.

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.

The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level of stress, he most absolutely abhors.

Sometimes buried memories of abuse emerge spontaneously. A triggering event or catalyst starts the memories flowing. The survivor then experiences the memories as a barrage of images about the abuse and related details. Memories that are retrieved in this manner are relatively easy to understand and believe because the person remembering is so flooded with coherent, consistent information.

Summer would not last forever; he knew it and Ronia knew it. But now they began to live as if it would, and as far as possible they pushed away all painful thoughts of winter.

The most common emotional defense is avoidance (an ineffective coping skill for any stressor) as expressed through denial (e.g., "That wasn't really bad, I barely remember it").

The more I remember, the more inconsolable I will be, I've told myself. But now increasingly I don't tussle with my memories. I want to remember. I want to know. Perhaps I can better tolerate being inconsolable now. Perhaps I suspect that remembering won't make me any more inconsolable. Or less.

The worst person to get away from is oneself.

There are some things in life that we try to ignore, thinking that maybe if we don't see the problem, it won't see us when in reality, it's only getting bigger.

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

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.

the reality of being here eludes me, I can’t focus, I am dazed. And I want to stay this way. If I have too much clarity, I will be undone, I fear.

We are not entitled to assume or assert that other people should change to make it easier for us to avoid changing ourselves.

This is the problem about thinking about something else to take your mind off something. It works for a little while, but in the end you always come back to the thing you were trying not to think about, only now whatever it was is worse.

Unfortunately, he had no training in the healers' arts. But if he ever encountered the person who had struck Mechanic Mari like that, Alain knew he would use the skills he did have to even the score. He did not know why he resolved to do that, but he did. At least he was fairly sure that his reason was not love. Whatever love was, other than something to be avoided. Master Mechanic Mari had shown clear signs of being concerned when Alain spoke of it, and had denied experiencing love with other Mechanics, so perhaps Mechanics also were warned to avoid love. It must be a very dangerous thing.

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

We live in a society where people are often more offended by those who point out child abuse than by the abuse itself. In other words, society does not view abuse as the problem; the problem is you pointing it out. Society's basic mindset is that "If we don't talk about abuse, then it's not happening." Similarly, children are attacked when they point out the dysfunction around them.

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

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.

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

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

We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day. (p.28)

What you're afraid to think must be the truth.

When has been disappointed for so long, hope becomes the enemy. One cannot be dashed to the earth unless one is lifted first, and I learned to avoid hope.

What is sitting behind your judgments? What fears are you coddling?

With respect to the acceptance of dissociative disorders, as with most issues in life, it is counterproductive to spend time trying to convince people of things they don't want to know.

The avoidance of money is just as psychotic as being attached to money.

But avoidance allows you to believe that you're making all kinds of strides when you're not.

Often life is a frantic avoidance of the truth.

At some point, life starts to pass you by and becomes about avoidance. I want to stay clear from that situation, because I don't like that.

Avoidance doesn’t solve anything; it merely serves as a temporary salve.

I often work by avoidance.

All that effort,” he mused, “merely to avoid me. How gratifying.

When our purpose becomes avoidance, our life becomes a void.