10 Clues that You Are Avoiding Yourself
Are you avoiding yourself and the knowledge that you are the true source of your problems? Are you pointing everywhere but back to yourself?
The only way to solve most of our mental and emotional problems is to look inward. But we’ve been trained to avoid self-reflection and focus on others. Most of us only turn inward when the pain of avoiding ourselves becomes greater than the pain of finally facing our demons and doing the inner work.
How do you know if you are avoiding yourself? Here are 10 clues:
1. Blame – Rather than take personal responsibility for things that goes wrong in life, you blame everyone and everything else. There’s always a reason (other than you) causing your unhappiness and suffering.
2. Distractions – You never sit still long enough to dwell on your part in the problem. You’re off and running to the gym, a show, errands, or anything else, really, than looking at your thoughts, feelings, and actions in relation to the situation that is bothering you.
3. Gossip – You’d much rather talk about how THAT PERSON did this or that, can you believe it?? You’re focused on the drama of other people, fascinated with observing, commenting, and judging their lives. Compared to that mess, your life is a breeze.
4. Obsessions – You get into the nitty gritty of anything – relationship drama, political discussions, your rock collection – because those topics are far more fascinating than the dry, draining, and dreary work of looking at yourself.
5. Addictions – The emptiness inside has driven you to actual addiction to a substance or process, and you are no longer in control of your choices. Recovering from an addiction is a process in and of itself and must be tackled before really buckling down to look at the underlying mental and emotional causes that resulted in the addiction in the first place.
6. The Pursuit of More – Oh, there’s a shiny object, let’s go chase it. And I have more toys than you do! I’ve achieved my goals, but now there are more to go after! The pursuit of more never ends, and is an excellent hideout from the work that leads to actually ending the endless loop of more.
7. Unresolved Feelings – If you find yourself triggered into overreactions by small things – like that person talking loudly behind you in the grocery check out line or the child who is taking forever to cross the street – you might be reacting out of repressed and unresolved feelings. If long-standing problematic relationships that you can’t or won’t work on healing, they might be a clue that you have work to do.
8. Depression – Depression sucks motivation and joy from your spirit, making it very difficult to concentrate on or care about digging down below into the causes below the condition. It’s so much easier to go back to bed than get to know and love yourself.
9. Chronic Anxiety – Living in fear all the time makes it very difficult to focus on sustained self-reflection. Anxiety is a function of a hyped up amygdala that is focused on immediate survival, not the deep, measured work needed to explore and understand yourself.
10. Unrelenting Stress – When the pressures of the day push us beyond our ability to manage, who has time for self-reflection? There are always going to be challenges in life, often on a daily basis, and if we succumb to stressing about them, we’ll never have time to do the inner work.
So, do any of these clues ring a bell? Are they keeping you from self-exploration and digging down to understand the sources of your suffering? Which one of these behaviors are you willing to address, let go of, do something about?
Many of these behaviors become compulsive, repetitive, habitual. It’s very hard to break free. Deciding to make a change takes a huge inner commitment, and a concerted refusal to engage in compulsive, obsessive, and habitual avoidance behaviors.
Most of us only choose the path of change when the pain of avoidance becomes greater than the pain of changing. How about you – are you ready to make a change?
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
