You Already Know How to Be Uncomfortable: Reframing Avoidance

Taiwanese artist Tung Ming-Chin plays with themes of inner emotions and the subconscious mind through his masterful wood art projects

The Discomforts You Already Endure

Avoidance is usually understood as a way to dodge what’s painful, scary, or overwhelming. But the truth is that it’s not a pain-free route. It comes with its own discomforts, many of which are endured for years:

• Loneliness: Avoiding vulnerability or connection often means a life lived at arm’s length.

• Boredom: Staying safe can become synonymous with staying small.

• Incongruence: A persistent unease when your actions don’t match your values.

• Low-grade shame / guilt: The nagging awareness that something is being avoided.

• Anxiety: The thing being avoided doesn’t go away... it lurks; which is stressful!

• Exhaustion: Suppressing feelings takes energy.

These aren’t minor discomforts. They can be quite big & heavy ones.

And you’ve already been living with many of them.

What Skills Does Avoidance Build?

Avoidance isn’t just a reaction, it’s a strategy. And like any strategy, it calls on certain capacities. Here's a few of them... and also some ideas on how you could use them to serve your life, not leak energy away from it.

A Capacity to Tolerate Discomfort

You’ve been living with discomfort for a long time. Not the discomfort of what’s been avoided, but the discomfort of loneliness, inner conflict, or emotional dullness. That’s resilience, even if it’s sideways.

Transferable to: developing emotional stamina, doing therapeutic work, sitting with grief or shame.

Strategic Thinking

Avoidance often involves managing a complex internal world, scanning for threat, planning detours, inventing distractions. That’s creativity and foresight at work.

Transferable to: Positive therapeutic planning, Designing new coping strategies.

Self-Regulation (Even if Indirect)

Avoidance is often a form of emotional self-regulation. It may not be ideal, but it’s an attempt to keep things manageable.

Transferable to: Learning healthier forms of self-soothing, emotional containment, and nervous system support.

Endurance

To live with long-term avoidance is to hold a kind of internal pose for years. That takes grit.

Transferable to: Therapeutic work, Building new habits and pathways.

An Inner Dialogue (Even if Suppressed)

Avoidance often happens alongside an ongoing inner battle: part of you wants change, part of you wants safety. This means you already have an internal system you can get to know.

Transferable to: Working with inner parts, Building a relationship with the voice of self-compassion, and Negotiating inner conflicts.

The Core Reframe Here

You’ve already been living with discomfort. You already know how to be uncomfortable. Yours is a story of someone who has been coping the best way you knew how.

The shift now is not about becoming someone different. It’s about taking the raw material you already have; your strength, your endurance, your strategic mind and letting it serve something new for you. This moves you from “I can’t handle this” to “I’ve been handling it all along—just sideways.”

Some Final Words

As a therapist, I’ve found this reframing to be super-helpful with clients who struggle with self-judgment around avoidance.

When people can see that avoidance isn’t just cowardice but a kind of unpolished courage, something begins to soften. Shame lifts. A different kind of curiosity appears.... and compassion flourishes!

If you’ve been avoiding something important - grief, truth, conflict, a decision... know this: you already have the core skill you need to face it. You know how to be uncomfortable. Now you've got the choice to choose a different kind of discomfort.

One that leads somewhere better.

goodTherapy August 2025