204 Quotes About Avoidance

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

I must stop remembering... The more I remember, the greater my agony. These thoughts stuttered in my mind...I must be more watchful, I told myself. I must shut them out. I couldn't always keep this up.

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").

I can't talk about my childhood at all, because cannot say "I" when I mean "we," and if I say "we" it leads to a conversation about how I have a dead sister, instead of what I want to talk about. I found that out in the summer. So I don't talk about it.

The fear within me is not the enemy. Rather, the enemy within me is the cowardice that refuses to face the fear.

Her life was one endless loop that she raced around, with steep banked curves so she could never change or slow down. It just delivered her back to herself, over and over and over.

It was as if a lifetime's worth of emotional chutes and trapdoors installed for self-protection decades ago had malfunctioned in a spectacular way.

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]

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.