Avoidance Quotes

I worry about you. You’re good with people, I’ve seen it. You like them. But there’s a limit for you.” He opened his mouth to protest but she held up her hand to silence him. “I know. You do care. But inside the framework of a project. Right now it’s your studies. Later it’ll be roads and bridges. But people around you—their lives go on outside the framework. They’re not just tools to your hand, even likable tools. Your life should go on, too. You should have more than roads to live for. Because if something does go wrong, you’ll need what you’re feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.

Kij Johnson

He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

Michael Chabon

You get hit the hardest when trying to run or hide from a problem. Like the defense on a football field, putting all focus on evading only one defender is asking to be blindsided.

Criss Jami

One sure way I can avoid facing myself is by refusing to look into the face of God.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Avoidance is paying forward that which I would be much wiser to pay off.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.

Anna Funder

Sometimes buried memories of abuse emerge spontaneously. A triggering event or catalyst starts the memories flowing. The survivor then experiences the memories as a barrage of images about the abuse and related details. Memories that are retrieved in this manner are relatively easy to understand and believe because the person remembering is so flooded with coherent, consistent information.

Renee Fredrickson

With respect to the acceptance of dissociative disorders, as with most issues in life, it is counterproductive to spend time trying to convince people of things they don't want to know.

Warwick Middleton

This is the problem about thinking about something else to take your mind off something. It works for a little while, but in the end you always come back to the thing you were trying not to think about, only now whatever it was is worse.

Marcelo Figueras

Many of us learned that keeping busy…kept us at a distance from our feelings...Some of us took the ways we busied ourselves—becoming overachievers & workaholics—as self esteem…But whenever our inner feeling did not match our outer surface, we were doing ourselves a disservice…If stopping to rest meant being barraged with this discrepancy, no wonder we were reluctant to cease our obsessive activity.

Maureen Brady

Shame evokes anxiety about what will happen if someone really knows is, but, because it is impossible to for anxiety and anger to be felt simultaneously, we can dream our anxiety by employing anger or rage in the form of contempt... Contempt, because it feels more powerful has always helped us feel safer and more powerful than the anxiety we feel when we experience shame. [3]

Wendy J. Mahill

Conflict avoidance often causes greater conflict.

Bryant McGill

Even with the desire for a better life, we can be reluctant to do the work of boundaries because it will be a war. The battle falls into two categories: outside resistance we get from others and the resistance we get from ourselves.

Henry Cloud

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

Margaret Atwood

This world today makes one by the day a recluse

Siân Lavinia Anaïs Valeriana

No, what's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics--the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working concensus to tackle any big problem.

Barack Obama

Being satisfied with the little we have; academically, spiritually, financially, ecumenically or otherwise will prevent a lot of problems from coming to us, and our dependence in our abilities and talents will go as far as bringing us satisfaction in life.

Michael Bassey Johnson

In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top.

James Baldwin

We say, "It wasn't that bad. It was all my fault. I’m making all this stuff up. "All my life, I spoke bitterly of my mother's treatment of me as a child.Friends asked, “What did she do to you?“ I couldn't really describe it, and in frustration would say, “Well, she didn't lock us up in closets." in fact, my mother behaved much worse than that, but by focusing on the empty closet, I avoided looking at what waited beyond it.

Sarah E. Olson

You cannot avoid what you fear because what you fear is inside of you.

Bryant McGill

Fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thinking that there is something to be avoided manifests something to avoid.

Vironika Tugaleva

Running was not always the coward's route; it was a matter of survival. The fewer violent encounters one invited, the longer the life.

Marjorie M. Liu

My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that is to say, Joe and I were going.

Charles Dickens

Collision avoidance systems are the next big radio frequency (RF) toxin to hit the USA general population as they become standard safety equipment in most new cars.

Steven Magee

But such is the nature of man that as soon as you begin to force him to do a thing, from that moment he begins to seek ways by which he can avoid doing the thing you are trying to force upon him. A man with malaria parasites in his blood is a danger to his companions. To kill all the parasites, he was then required to continue doses of quinine a week or ten days after his fever. When the convalescing men were given their daily dose of quinine they would manage to throw their tablets out of the dispensary window. The old turkey-gobbler pet of the hospital gobbled up all the tablets he could find. He became so dissipated he finally developed a species of blindness caused by too much quinine. I cannot vouch for this, but I was often twitted with this story as an illustration of how the men were treating prophylactic quinine.

William Crawford Gorgas

We want to 'write in' our plan and 'write out' the consequence. When we do that, we're headed 'right back' to what we foolishly thought we could 'write out.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

Alain de Botton

Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.” (p.97)

Bessel A. van der Kolk

Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life - to be tame or to be wanton. to be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life.And extremes - whether of dullness or fury - successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies - unconscious strategies- to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too - sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.It takes courage to feel the feeling - and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing all the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable?I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.

Jeanette Winterson

Tilly screamed. Anna’s shocked brain only registered annoyance at the sound. Really, when had someone screaming ever solved a problem? She recognized her fixation on this irritation as her own way of avoiding the horror in front of her, but only in a distant and dreamy sort of way.

James S.A. Corey

The reason placing blame repeatedly fails to work is that I repeatedly place it on everyone else instead of where it actually belongs.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The only way to avoid failure is to sit in a corner and do nothing.

Kevin Leman

My mother's mouth drops. 'Emmy...don't say those things Emmy. Remember, we don't talk about those things.''Yes Mom. I remember. That's why I'm here, looking like this.'An orderly knocks on the door and announces that visiting time is over.My mother and I look at each other awkwardly, and hug.'I love you,' she says.'I love you too, Mom.''You aren't telling them too much are you?' she asks, afraid.I sign. 'No Mommy, I'm not.'She's visibly relieved. She leaves the room.The orderley comes back and escorts me back into the main room.I just sit and laugh to myself." (after Emmy's suicide attempt) ~ The Finer Points of Becoming Machine

Emily Andrews

The problem with trying to find your happiness through avoidance is the nature of reality. Reality simply does not allow us to evade unwanted experiences. Sure, we might be able to escape a few {...] but the evasive life often comes at a cost, like having to live your life in terror. Even if we can successfully ward off some terrifying experiences, we can not advert them all. Particularly, the most unpleasant ones: sickness, old age and death. If our strategy has been to flea unpleasant circumstances, when they come to meet us - as they surely will - our suffering will be great indeed.

Mark W. Muesse

Well, it is true. Sometimes avoiding something can give it more and more meaning rather than less and less.

Tom McNeal

We numb our minds and heart so one need not be broken and the other need not be bothered.

Peggy Haymes

Alterations in regulation of affect (emotion) and impulse:Almost all people who are seriously traumatized have problems in tolerating and regulating their emotions and surges or impulses. However, those with complex PTSD and dissociative disorders tend to have more difficulties than those with PTSD because disruptions in early development have inhibited their ability to regulate themselves.The fact that you have a dissociative organization of your personality makes you highly vulnerable to rapid and unexpected changes in emotions and sudden impulses. Various parts of the personality intrude on each other either through passive influence or switching when your under stress, resulting in dysregulation. Merely having an emotion, such as anger, may evoke other parts of you to feel fear or shame, and to engage in impulsive behaviors to stop avoid the feelings.

Suzette Boon

Changes in Meaning:Finally, chronically traumatized people lose faith that good things can happen and people can be kind and trustworthy. They feel hopeless, often believing that the future will be as bad as the past, or that they will not live long enough to experience a good future. People who have a dissociative disorder may have different meanings in various dissociative parts. Some parts may be relatively balanced in their worldview, others may be despairing, believing the world to be a completely negative, dangerous place, while other parts might maintain an unrealistic optimistic outlook on life

Suzette Boon

I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.

Fernando Pessoa

Laws of silence don't work....When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant....

Tennessee Williams

At the end, a journey based on my imagination will leave me imagining that I should have engaged the very thing I used my imagination to avoid.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

People were freaked out, but they showed it in weird ways. Back home, people would have been weeping and doing a lot of very public group hugs. At Wexford people just aggressively pretended nothing had happened.

Maureen Johnson

In the grief that comes with recognizing what happened to us, we often feel there is nowhere to turn for solace…We do things to keep it away, such as becoming overly busy or using drugs or alcohol to numb our feelings. When we are caught up in resistance, we do not feel hope, but when we surrender to our sadness fully, hope trickles in.

Maureen Brady

To live a lie may allow us to avoid the truth, but the real lie lays in believing that we can avoid the truth in the first place.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

It wasn’t until I slowed the car and rolled down the windows that I realized I spend most of my days driving ‘through’ life without driving ‘in’ life. So, I’ve decided to walk because the pace is slower and the windows are always down.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Business crises energize me. Personal crises devastate me. The doctors call it an avoidance tendency. (Mirena to Eve)

J D ROBB

The scientific study of suffering inevitably raises questions of causation, and with these, issues of blame and responsibility. Historically, doctors have highlighted predisposing vulnerability factors for developing PTSD, at the expense of recognizing the reality of their patients' experiences… This search for predisposing factors probably had its origins in the need to deny that all people can be stressed beyond endurance, rather than in solid scientific data; until recently such data were simply not available… When the issue of causation becomes a legitimate area of investigation, one is inevitably confronted with issues of man's inhumanity to man, with carelessness and callousness, with abrogation of responsibility, with manipulation and with failures to protect.

Bessel A. van der Kolk

The most common emotional defense is avoidance (an ineffective coping skill for any stressor) as expressed through denial (e.g., "That wasn't really bad, I barely remember it").

Brian Luke Seaward

The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level of stress, he most absolutely abhors.

Criss Jami

Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

Stefan Molyneux

The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. “I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.

Stefan Molyneux

The clash is born of the fact that the child within me sees with undiluted clarity what the adult within me is incessantly working to deny. And in these most vexing moments, to be the adult is to defer to the child.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

I am often guilty of expecting the worst so as to avoid disappointment and welcome surprise.

Criss Jami

There are some things in life that we try to ignore, thinking that maybe if we don't see the problem, it won't see us when in reality, it's only getting bigger.

Caitlyn Paige

What I’ve yet to realize is that each time I work to avoid that which I fear, I have in that very same action forfeited the blessings that my fear blinded me to. And I’ve yet to realize that with God, the blessings will always and forever eclipse whatever I fear despite how absolutely imposing those fears might be

Craig D. Lounsbrough

There is no avoidance in delay.

Aeschylus

We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day. (p.28)

António R. Damásio

Too often fantasy is not a rich elaboration of life designed to enhance our existence, rather it is our pell-mell escape from life with the intent of exiting this existence. And the most imaginative fantasy of all is to somehow think that I can do that in the first place.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

To live a fantasy is to avoid a life.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

I knew that suffering can purify, that it's a kind of fire that can be worth enduring, but there were degrees of it to which I chose not to subject myself.

Dean Koontz

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Avoidance Quotes

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