On Avoidance, Pain Management & The Willingness To Change

One of the first Youtube videos I ever made played on the metaphor of avoidant attachment being akin to the experience of being on ibuprofen all of the time.

If one were on a constant, steady dose of painkillers (but unaware of this fact), it would be easy to develop a superiority complex about one’s resilience. The average person, walking around complaining about muscle soreness and headaches on a near-daily basis, might seem weak and overdramatic. Sure you feel those things occasionally, but certainly not from the activities others are claiming their pain stems from. And certainly not to the same extent.

This is also what it feels like to have one’s emotional pain receptors dulled. To be avoidant is, in many ways, to be walking around the world confused about why everyone else is feeling so affected by the regular trials of living, which simply don’t register to you (at least not as often or to the same extent). Sure you’d feel sad if someone you love died or if some major trauma occurred - you’re not a sociopath, after all - but day-to-day life just doesn’t feel all that unmanageable to you. You’re not sure what all the distress is about.

Healing from avoidant attachment is akin to weaning oneself off the advil.

It takes a very long time to resensitize oneself to everyday living: to the regular pains and vulnerabilities that arise within it. At first this might seem like a pointless task: why make life more difficult than it has to be? And yet the more the desire to have healthy, reciprocal relationships sinks into one’s bones, the more it becomes clear: life is that difficult, actually. And other people - healthy people, who we might want to form intimate connections with - feel the difficulty all of the time. It’s the reason their worlds are more colorful.

The daily aches and pains of our emotional system serve a purpose. They’re there to alert us to our ‘No’s while the ‘No’s are still subtle. Before they blossom into full-scale depressive episodes or irreparable relational rifts. Paying attention to them - the better we get at doing so - can start to feel like we are being handed a cheat code. We can course-correct before things get terrible. We can find out how to make the good stuff last.

And yet, hyper-attunment to them has its own failure mode.

An interesting question I find myself sitting with lately, after years of intentional sensitization work, is the question of whether I’ve become too soft. Emotions stop me now, in ways that they never used to. I sleep for ten hours when depressed. I cry openly every time I’m hurt. It feels in some ways as though I’ve become so attuned, so interested in, every passing ache and pain my system presents me with that I can forget my system is also wired for doing things - for standing up, facing challenges and making change. This is not a problem when the conditions of my life are good, as they were for a solid few years. Work was enjoyable, so I produced it. My relationships were nourishing, so I persisted at them.

But a unique problem I’ve been finding myself facing this year is what to do with a sensitized system and an abundance of genuine pain.

I’ve had a lot of things go wrong in the past several months. Things even my avoidant self would have conceded are dogshit (and then dissociated from, in order to keep up with my daily demands).

I don’t want to disconnect from my pain. I imagine there is signal within it. But it strikes me that just as the average person does sometimes take advil to cope with an abundance of muscle soreness, securely attached people must also occasionally compartmentalize or dissociate from their emotional pain in order to keep their lives from going off the rails while they adjust to the damage.

And so the inquiry I find myself left with is: What is the appropriate amount of growing pain to let ourselves feel? How long should we linger on our symptoms before deciding that it’s time to stand up and keep moving despite them?

When conditioning our muscles, we need discernment about whether the muscle pain we’re feeling is regular soreness or an injury accrued from bad form. Emotionally, we need something similar: discernment around whether our pain is an appropriate reflection of our circumstances or an indication that we are carrying it wrong.

And the longer I sit with this inquiry, the more I suspect something new: That the answer to ‘What does a secure person do with an abundance of emotional pain’ does not have only two answers. It is not only ‘Numb out’ or ‘Admit defeat.’ I am thinking there is a secret third option I haven’t been aware of and it’s one I’m being increasingly called to realize.

The third option is letting pain change you.

Picking up a new weight in the gym requires an attunement to the weight itself but also a willingness to adapt our form in order to safely lift it.

In the same vein, trying to approach the new problems of our lives with the same attitude we’ve used in the past (whether that’s dissociation, hyper-fixation or any other childhood tactic) is going to give us repetitive emotional strain injuries. Our systems will ache and splinter under the weight of what we do not yet have the capacity to support.

We need to attune to these pains for long enough to pinpoint where they are. But then we need to learn to flexibly change form. If we don’t, we get stuck in patterns of either enduring and dissociating from the pain (causing much bigger injuries down the line) or languishing over it endlessly (making ourselves steadily weaker over time).

People with secure attachment systems are like good emotional weight-trainers. They don’t shy away from pain, but they don’t withstand it longer than necessary either. They work flexibly and interdependently within the conditions they’ve been dealt.

Our environments are adaptable things, after all, but so are our self-concepts. It’s healthy for them to update. They need to be able to change form.

Lately, I’ve been noticing that a lot of the things that have felt distinctly and simply like ‘Me’ for several decades of my life don’t feel so much like me anymore.

Forming relationships with people around avoidant, hyper-intellectual ideals doesn’t feel so much like ‘me’ anymore. Structuring my life around a series of high-powered goals doesn’t feel so much like ‘me’ anymore. Finding my identity in running away from anything I deem ‘beneath’ me to attend to doesn’t feel so much like ‘me’ anymore; doesn’t feel like the person I’m becoming.

The person I’m becoming is still struggling to get her form down right. But she’s experimenting. She’s listening to the feedback of her environment. She’s trying.

And so the answer to my own inquiry becomes clearer the longer I sit with the question: How long do we hold onto the pain? Until we hear it and receive its message clearly. Then, it’s time to try something new: some new way of arranging our lives, channeling our energy, expressing ourselves.

We find new ways of asking for connection, ones that balance out reason with feeling. We find new goals to set our ambitions on: ones that are lofty but deeply aligned. We find ways to persist through confusion, without losing ourselves in the rubble. We do this over and over again, until we find the form that best suits our conditions.

To be securely attached, it turns out, does not mean to grow hopeless and stagnant in the face of adversity. Rather, it means to be engaged in the never-ending process of humbling ourselves enough to be changed. While rising persistently enough to new challenges to watch ourselves grow steadily more agile, and strong.