Chapter 7: From Avoidance to Approach Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” — Søren Kierkegaard Avoidance A big component of anxiety is avoidance. It makes sense that you would want to avoid something that feels terrible, like anxiety does. Avoiding situations where you tend to be highly anxious leaves you feeling like your world is getting smaller, but it does lead to a short-term relief. The big challenge with avoidance over time though is that you end up making the anxiety stronger. In a way, it is like you confirmed the theory the anxiety had about something being dangerous by avoiding it. For example, imagine that you are anxious about public speaking so you avoid all public speaking. You feel better in the short term as you don’t have to face an uncomfortable and challenging situation, but you strengthen your anxiety over time. It is almost as if your anxiety had a theory that public speaking is scary and dangerous and you will be unsafe if you do it. By avoiding public speaking, you told your anxiety, “see, it was really scary and I am only safe if I avoid this”. This in turn makes your anxiety stronger for next time. Approach The antidote is to approach the situations that tend to elicit an anxious response. So, continuing with the public speaking example, you will need to practice public speaking. The key to being able to do this is to start with a situation that is only mildly uncomfortable and work your way up to bigger challenges. You can only do this if you have strategies to manage and shrink your anxious response. This is why we are only talking about avoidance, approach, and challenges at the end of the workbook. A couple of things will really help you be able to engage in approach behaviour. You will need to be able to build a challenge ladder and you will need to be able to imagine future success. Challenge Ladders Building a challenge ladder is a kind of exposure to challenging situations. Essentially, you choose a situation that is only mildly anxiety inducing to start with and build up to a challenge that is more difficult over time. The main point here is to move from avoidance of all situations that tend to fuel your anxiety to being able to approach them, as this is an essential part of being able to manage your anxiety. On the next page, I will show you an example of what a completed challenge ladder might look like for the person who struggles with public speaking. I will also include a blank ladder so you can fill in your own. You won’t necessarily climb up the ladder in a linear manner, there will likely be some up and down. That is normal, just keep considering what your next challenge is that will keep you moving up the ladder. Also remember that your 3A Toolkit will help you manage your anxious response so you can keep moving up the ladder.
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