are you really coping, or just avoiding?

science and psychology of emotional amputation

i lived a lot of my life half a step removed from my own feelings. filtering them through logic, self deprecating humour, and the constant need to be doing something. this continual pressure to never be relaxed within myself. the older i got, the more disconnected i felt. and after a while i just stopped questioning it. but there’s a thin line between healing and hiding. and when avoiding yourself turns into habit, it becomes hard to tell the difference. i grew comfortable in not wanting to know myself too well. it felt like a threat to the equilibrium, to ask questions i was not ready to answer.

but distance has a way of expanding. what begins as self protection slowly morphs into personality.

we learn to see our emotional numbness as this clever shortcut towards healing. avoiding parts of ourselves the way you would avoid cracked pavements, by carefully stepping over them. or more often, pretending they aren’t there at all. we trade long term growth for short term comfort, believing that shutting down pain somehow fixes us. and you can get pretty good at it. you can build a life that looks stable, successful even, all the while withering away on the inside from what you refuse to face.

in dulling our pain, we also dull our joy. the neural pathways that carry hurt and fear are not isolated from the ones that carry joy. they share circuits, travel the same currents within us. and are intertwined in ways we don’t feel until we try to cut one away.

we call it protecting our peace, but half the time what we are doing is choosing to avoid reality. we have turned avoidance into a form of self-care. anything that stings is seen as a sign that something is wrong. and this “wrongness” is something we must immediately scrub and bandage up. cutting people off, labelling them toxic. convincing ourselves that we have evolved. as if we are here to continuously edit our lives until only comfort remains.

the kind of avoidance i mean isn’t only about shutting others out. it is what happens when you start to turn away from yourself. when you know you are quick to anger but say you’re just intense. when you tell yourself you’re an introvert but really, you are scared of being hurt again like you have been before. when you decide you’re just not a disciplined person, because trying feels like failure in advance. and failure always came with punishments it never deserved.

it starts small, these tiny moments of self protection that make sense at the time. but it compounds. the more you refuse to look at the thing. the more shape it takes in the dark.

but stripping it down to the bones, you can see that the act of avoiding is just a nervous system doing its best to protect you. psychologists call this experiential avoidance. your brain treats discomfort like danger and gets translated into get out. psychologists call it experiential avoidance, the impulse to escape inner experiences that feel unsafe.

so you scroll. you distract. you tidy your inbox. you keep yourself busy enough that reflection never catches up. avoidance starts as an act of mercy, protecting yourself from what you don’t yet have the capacity to feel. in doses, it is a clever tool. in repetition, it goes from tool to paralysis.

this gets projected outwards. we praise the people who don’t “overreact.” commonly seeing emotional flatness as the pinnacle of maturity. and so we learn to measure worth by how much you can suppress. but the unfelt lingers. in your short temper, your exhaustion, the constant feeling of restlessness you just can’t quite name. the avoidance that began as a blissful safety, turns into a cage so familiar you forget you were the one who looked yourself in there to begin with.

industries are built on keeping you within that loop. instant happiness, constant distraction. we are trained to soothe discomfort before you can even name it. we are trained to expect responsiveness from machines. and then we start demanding it from ourselves. then, from each other. until our default operating mode of consciousness becomes impatience. the mass effect being this feeling of constantly living in a state of overstimulation. always just a few seconds ahead of ourselves.