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Do you confuse healing with avoidance?
Most self-care advice is about removing whatever in your life doesn’t feel good right now.
It often looks like enforcing a boundary, protecting your peace, or cutting off a person or thing from your life.
The advice is popular because it works. The issue is, if that tactic works right now, it might stop working later. Keep reading to understand why.
The Boundary Problem
Stating “I set a boundary” rarely tells the full story about your experience. Sometimes a boundary is a boundary. But sometimes it means you’re avoiding someone who challenged you, and you’ve relabeled it as boundary-setting so you don’t have to think about it.
Here’s the real difference between the two:
Boundary → helps you move towards something you want
Avoidance → helps you move away from something you feel
If you can’t figure out if you’re confusing the two, ask yourself: If I create this distance and still feel awful, would I keep it up?
Let’s suppose a friend told you something true but unpleasant about yourself over dinner, and since then, you’ve left three of her text messages unopened.
If you would have still gone quiet on her even if the conversation didn’t sting, fine, that’s your choice. But if your honest take on the situation is that you’re not engaging with her because doing so will stir up uncomfortable emotions, then it’s avoidance dressed up as a boundary.
This pattern is called “experiential avoidance.” It means being unwilling to stay in contact with your own difficult thoughts, feelings, and memories, and organizing your behavior around getting away from them.
In this case, avoidance isn’t an effect of feeling bad. It’s part of why you keep feeling bad.
Behavior Translator
“What you're doing” | “What it really means” |
|---|---|
Overthinking a decision for three weeks | Rehearsing the decision feels like progress, so you never have to actually make it |
Working an 11-hour day even though no one asked you to do that | You’re staying busy to avoid a lonely life |
Letting a date’s voice note sit unopened for two weeks | Letting silence deliver the answer you don't want to say out loud |
Muting someone on Instagram rather than blocking them—andyou’re still checking their stories anyway | Maintaining contact without actual exposure to the person |
Being especially gracious with your sister-in-law, doing her favors, keeping things smooth | Managing interactions with a person so you never have to get too close |
Booking a two-month trip the week after the breakup | Changing your time zone instead of feeling the loss |
Proclaiming “I don’t need anyone” | “I don’t want to risk getting hurt again” |
Saying yes when you mean no | Buying a few minutes of peace by abandoning what you actually wanted |
Leaving when something gets hard, or when it gets good | You’re getting out before it can cost you anything |
Avoidance isn’t an easy pattern to break, partly because it usually comes with a reasonable-sounding explanation attached. You’re protecting your peace, or you’re too busy right now, or you're being the bigger person by not responding. Any of those can be true and still be the thing keeping you away.
Part of what makes this tricky is that the hard things other people can see aren't usually the ones costing you anything.
Running a marathon looks hard. Sitting still with nothing to distract you is harder, and nobody claps for it.
It’s easier to do a hard thing people can see than a hard thing nobody will ever know about. If your life is full of the first kind, that’s worth a look. Avoidance is good at looking like ambition.
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