When we avoid emotions, we fail to hear their messages, meaningful communications from our authentic self.

Emotional avoidance can negatively impact our mental health, social relationships, and physical health.

We first need to develop skills in resilience to fully engage with our emotions.

To some extent, most of us have learned to avoid fully experiencing and embracing negative emotions such as sadness, grief, loss, anxiety, and shame. At times, we may similarly try to ignore positive emotions–especially if they are associated with feeling vulnerable or anxious.

Anna Freud identified some key “defenses,” strategies practiced in an effort to support emotional avoidance. These include “suppression,” “projection,” “denial,” and others. Each of these defenses is a kind of mental sleight of hand whereby we avoid experiencing the raw, painful sting associated with our emotions. When we suppress our emotions, we may have a momentary awareness of them but quickly bury them as we redirect our attention elsewhere.

When we engage in projection, we attribute to others feelings that we have evaded. For example, suppressed or denied anger may be expressed as, “I’m not angry; you’re the one who is angry.” Denial, considered developmentally a more primitive defense, entails denying reality. A child with chocolate icing on his face may simply deny that he touched the cake on the counter.

Defenses evolve in an effort to protect us from harm. And while this isn’t constructive in the long term, they can at times be quite helpful. Being a witness to or a victim of bodily injury due to a car accident arouses great emotional trauma. In response, certain defenses may shield us from feeling overwhelmed by the feelings that such an event can trigger. Similarly, an individual going through the heartache of divorce needs to have the flexibility to, at times, intentionally shelve her........

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