The Survival Skill of Avoidance

Love without true intimacy is not sustainable

“For a while it was necessary to look back and come to terms with what happened to me as a child. In my family there was a lot of emotional abuse and neglect shrouded in denial and minimizing. I still needed to face the truth and climb out of my own denial, which convinced me I would get a chance to relive my childhood and make a better past.

“A wise person said in Courage to Change that it’s necessary to ‘look back without staring.’ As long as I kept staring at my past without experiencing my feelings about it, I stayed mired in fear, resentment, and self-pity. So I continued to root out those defects that kept me from being serene. I couldn’t let go of something I didn’t possess. Only after I stopped long enough to feel my anguish, bitterness, and emptiness could I let them go and move ahead.”

-Hope for Today Jan. 2

Avoiding true intimacy is a survival skill. We so want and desire the kind of relationship that is long-lasting and sustainable, and yet when we get too close, we run. We find reasons why we cannot stay—why it just won’t work. Sometimes we tell ourselves it just wasn’t going to work out, that we don’t have enough in common. Sometimes we make ourselves believe that our partner doesn’t really like us, love us, or really want to be with us. So we get together, everything is pretty good for a few or several months—and then it is over.

As a teacher, I am used to avoidance. School avoidance is a practice of quite a few students. These students miss school a lot. I can always count on the fact that certain students will be the ones who pop up on the attendance list again and again. They avoid school like the plague. It is easier to avoid than to face all of the work missed—just much easier to stay away.

Relationships, like school, means work. And avoiding the true intimacy of allowing a relationship to grow and flourish means I am avoiding the work. I like it when it’s easy and not so much when faced with a real human being with flaws—both my partner’s and, more importantly, my own.

I had originally planned to write about all of the men in my life who have walked away after a few months of easy dating—definitely avoiding any kind of growing love between us. Avoiding out of fear—fear of real love, fear of commitment, fear of the possibility of having found a real partner to share their lives with. But this is how I always think: that it’s them instead of me with the problem. Yes, maybe they do walk away, but there is something else with avoidance going on here.

And it has to do with choice—my choice of partner. I am choosing men who practice the survival skill of avoidance. For me, the kind of girl who loves alcoholics and addicts, I am responsible for choosing men with all of the -isms of the disease of alcoholism. First and foremost: selfishness and self-centeredness. While I have chosen real recovery for myself, the kind of recovery in which I am constantly looking into myself in order to grow and change into the woman God created me to be, I am not choosing this same kind of man as a partner. In this way, I too can avoid any kind of meaningful, long-term, growing relationship with another human being. I can stick with my magical thinking of the ease and comfort of the fun first few months of a relationship and work on absolutely nothing within myself.

And then I want to blame them.

Blame them that he showed an interest in me and I thought absolutely zero if this would be a good fit for an intimate experience with another human being. My thinking is the problem here. Because when it comes to choosing a partner, I am usually reacting 100% on emotion, excitement, and the thrill of attraction. Logic, rational, and realistic considerations do not come to the forefront of my mind at all.

I learned the art of avoidance as a child. I witnessed my parents’ hatred of each other, listened to night after night of fighting and verbal abuse, and then suffered as they separated, divorced, and met other people. They dated, remarried, and even once re-divorced. The message I received as an impressionable girl of twelve was that staying in relationships resulted in heartache and hurt. No good came out of a relationship and certainly not out of a marriage.

I am lucky enough to have many valuable friends in my life who have experienced serious childhood trauma as well. In fact, some of their experiences were much worse than mine. At least I always knew that my parents loved me. I received a lot of positive messages as a child and can therefore express my love to all of my friends. It comes natural to me. But I have a tendency to compare my childhood with that of close program friends and sponsees and then decide that my childhood “was not that bad” compared to theirs—and so I minimize my own experience.

I am grateful to a Higher Power that has opened up my heart and memory to what really happened to me as a result of my childhood. I have been using the survival skill of avoidance my entire life and it has been a very painful lesson to learn. As I now venture to unwind all of the tangles of broken belief systems about love, I know for certain that God has something much better, even magical, in store for me. And for that I am very grateful.