RATHER THAN AVOID, MEDITATE: Phase 5

Interrupting Maladjusted Coping Modes

Fear driven behavior validates what we fear. This is typically true when we use avoidance to cope with our irrational fears, and strong emotions. This means, for fexample, that the phobic person, who avoids flying, aggravates his fears; the shy person, who avoids social contacts, intensifies her social anxiety. That is why maladjusted schema are called Life Traps.

On the adaptive side, avoidance, as a coping mechanism, is built into our psyches to help sustain us under the harshest realities. Avoidance forms in several ways:

Burying Thoughts,

Evading,

Anesthetizing,

and Staying Distracted.

Burying Thoughts can allow us to function for limited time, under extreme adversity. In the heat of combat, for instance, it is important to remain functional, even when an allied friend, or family member falls to the violence. Burying grief and terror in this case sustains our ability to proceed with our objectives. This type of coping may require that some dissociating occur. In other word, we don’t let the mind’s natural ability to associate occur, because it potentially lowers the capacity to function. It is similar when we are exposed to other horrors like domestic violence, or street crime.

Getting sick is sometimes an expression of the “dis-ease” in our minds. This is not making believe your sick, it is actually becoming ill. Richard. a young man, had recurrent hives. The condition waxed and waned paralleling his levels of distress. This meant that the mental distress was manifesting as a physical condition. The hives, though tenatious, were at last brought under control after he was able to mindfully focus his attention on the condition and relax. Prior to that time he would avoid thinking about his hives, because he was terrified that focusing on the condition would cause it to spread. Meditation is a form of radical acceptance that supplants the maladjusted avoidant coping. Richard used an assimilation procedure in which he would focus on his fears, then shift his attention on to his body. This allowed him to adjust, and reduce the dread associated with the skin condition. This is exposure therapy, an adjustment to what is.

In another case, Norma suffered a brutal betrayal of trust as a youngster, enduring serious acts of abuse from her caregiver. The resulting fear and confusion created emotional wounds that she learned to avoid through thought suppression. Norma buried these painful memories, and attempted to proceed with her life denying their existence. These same emotional wounds later involuntarily erupted. The repressed anguish associated with her grim past surfaced like a nightmare that intruded itself into her waking life. This phase of her anxious symptoms was the most difficult and the most disorienting. She was in a sense taken by surprise. In the very early stages of her recovery she would confuse symptomatic feelings for facts. “I felt frightened,” she disclosed, “so I assumed that there must be someone conspiring against me.”

Norma conceded: “I didn’t get it at first. I recall that when my therapist suggested that my feelings about being harassed were mostly in my mind, I thought she was saying there was something wrong with me. The idea that I had mental problems was insulting.” Norma could not readily identify persecutory feelings as symptoms, however she was able to talk about, and visualize her past abuse. Talking about the experiences that wounded us provides us with the opportunity to adjust to, and assimilate, the disappointments and the horrors. Norma’s willingness to speak and write about her suffering helped to measurably reduce her reactive shame and guilt. She also recruited her contemplative training to visualized herself confronting her abuser, which reordered her internal images. She replaced images of helplessness, and confusion with images of personal power and order.

Consequently, burying thoughts became less necessary, and the suppression was slowly supplanted by acceptance, as well as self-expression. With less self-condemnation, there were less and less feelings of persecution. “I never had a major breakthrough,” Norma noted, “I adjusted my thinking a little at a time” Norma now sees how our imaginal life influences and even forms our outer experience. “I can now observe my defectiveness and shame schemas,” she states. “I regularly make distinctions between my symptom and myself. I don’t buy into my negative thoughts that easy any more.” Indeed, knowing that we are under the spell of our maladjusted schemas provides us the option to be "self led," rather than "symptom led."

Anesthetizing:

Anesthetizing as a coping mode, can work effectively as a short-term way of dealing with potentially overwhelming feelings. Alcohol, sedatives and other drugs have the ability to anesthetize painful feelings, and pacify unsettling thoughts. Thus, we may acknowledge, that substances can help regulate our affective (emotional) states. Habitually anesthetizing our feelings is, of course, ultimately dysfunctional. However, it is important to recognize that some survivors of abuse have very serious emotional wounds that carry a great deal of emotional pain on a day-to-day basis. Some survivors of abuse have survived, secondary to anesthetizing their distress, until they entered supportive environments that helped releave their distress.

If your emotional wounds are especially painful or horrific, you are, indeed, more susceptible to becoming chemically dependent. It is important to recognize that avoiding pain by anesthetizing comes in multiple forms: Over-smoking, overeating, compulsive gambling, and sexual addictions are also attempt to anesthetize feelings. Mindfulness Based Anxiety Reduction provides an alternative method of coping with emotional pain.

Evading:

Evading is a common form of avoidance. Some people for example who have social phobia will severely limit the amount of time they spend outside the safety and privacy of their homes and workplaces. This is coping through evading. Unfortunately hiding out only aggravates our unrealistic fears. Habitual withdrawal aggravates our phobias and anxieties. If the withdrawing behavior is not recognized, one can feel hopelessly trapped and depressed. Mindful Relinquishment of Maladjusted Coping Modes begins the exposure to living without troublesome forms of security.

Distraction:

Distraction, as a coping strategy, has positive and negative aspects. Sometimes getting out and recreating is exactly “what the doctor ordered.” Staying Distracted is another story entirely. People who habitually practice Distraction replace what has to be done with another activity. For example: “You need to find work, but end up playing chess all day. You need to address your marital issues, and decide to join an expedition to Nepal. You need education, but spend most of your free time in the gym.” This is how this avoidant coping style works.

The long-term use of coping through Staying Distracted, inadvertently maintains our fears. We need to “enter” our fears and our sorrows to heal up and move on. Thus, we see that the maladjusted beliefs that were born of our misfortune act as if they want to survive, resisting our efforts to counter, or avoid, them. When we become reactive to our emotional wounds, they are sustained. Avoidant behavior that is driven by anxiety, validates and sustains the very thing we dread. It is by facing and entering our fear that we can break free from this mind-boggling trap. Mindfulness Based Anxiety Reduction harnesses meditation to liberate us from fixed ways of being that confound and oppress us.

Recommendation: Watch “Interrupting Maladjusted Coping Modes.”

Also, Continue to expand your insight. Information that is repeated sinks in. So, invite repetition, and practice non-conceptual meditation regularly.