Worry is Emotional Avoidance

Robert Leahy, Ph.D., writing in Anxiety Files, suggests that worry is all about language rather than images. We prefer thinking over feeling. We do that to avoid emotion.

Now, I’m a visual person. That doesn’t mean you can see me – although you can. It means that my primary way of gathering information is to see it. I do best by reading, watching – my eyes are sponges.

I had a class long, long ago where we learned the three primary ways people learn and communicate – visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Do you know someone who argues a lot for no apparent reason? They are probably auditory, and need to keep data coming into through their ears in order to get the information they need. Or perhaps they’re just being difficult. Who am I to judge?

Anyway, for someone like me who gets the majority of his information through his eyeballs, it would stand to reason that it should be a rather easy formula for me to follow – if I don’t see it, it’s probably not there. Right?

So why do I spend so much time worrying about bad things that could happen? It’s almost like I can diagram it out on a flowchart. I can take a bad scenario, think about all of the ways it could happen, and then spend my time figuring out how I can avoid each of those problems. Ahhh!

When I’m doing this plotting and planning, I’m thinking, not feeling.

Leahy writes:

When you are engaged in the endless “what ifs” of worry, you are dredging up predictions and thoughts about how bad things can happen and then you come up with other thoughts about how to solve problems that don’t exist. You are temporarily suppressing your emotions. When you run out of worries-by exhausting yourself or by finally deciding, “I’ve covered all I can for now”— you find that your emotional arousal bounces back as free-floating anxiety. This is the tension that you feel in your body, the sweating, the rapid heart-beat, and the insomnia. Your emotions incubate as you worry and these emotions bounce back later. And then you will worry about your emotions: “What’s wrong with me?” or “Am I sick?”

One of the reminder tools that I used when I first started struggling with this concept was a polished little stone with the word “feel” engraved on it. I kept it in my pocket, and when I pulled out some change to buy a soda, or reached in for my keys, I had a gentle reminder that it was ok to let myself feel.

It was part of a broader exercise that involved embracing feeling instead of pushing it away, letting it wash over me and through me, sometimes speaking the name of the feeling out loud to make it real and present. When I was able to do that, it soon became apparent that feelings, like most things, are impermanent. They come, and they go. Rather than taking the long way ’round the barn to avoid them, it was actually faster and easier to just let them pass through.

Sure, reality can be a pretty frightening thing, and feeling the emotions that often accompany events can be draining and unpleasant. But other than a couple of times in my life – when my daughter died, or when my parents passed away – the awful situations I worked up in my head were never more painful or hard to deal with than the actual events that I eventually needed to face. And no amount of advance planning prepares you for the horrific agony of losing your child.

So you feel.

It doesn’t make any sense at the time, and it’s terrible. But then you realize that feeling badly is exactly what you are supposed to do. Bad things sometimes happen.

Learn to let yourself feel things. If you keep avoiding emotion, you’ll miss feeling all the good things, too. And there are a long more good things than bad.

How to use your emotions rather than worry about them