Avoidance in psychotherapy and why it’s important

Avoidance is one of the most misunderstood things that happens in therapy. It tends to get framed as a problem to overcome, a sign that someone isn’t ready, or isn’t trying hard enough. That framing is wrong, and it does real damage. Avoidance is a signal. When it shows up in therapy, it’s usually communicating something accurate: this is too much, too soon, or not yet safe enough. The nervous system learned, often very early, that certain feelings or subjects carried a cost. Avoidance developed as a response to that learning, and a sophisticated one. Getting curious about it, rather than trying to push past it, is usually where the more useful work begins.

What Avoidance Actually Looks Like

Part of what makes avoidance tricky is that it doesn’t always announce itself. It rarely looks like resistance. More often it looks like productivity, or carefulness, or being a very good helper to everyone except yourself. You might recognise it as reading extensively about trauma without quite turning toward your own. Listening to every podcast about emotional healing while keeping your particular version of it at arm’s length. Arriving at sessions articulate and well-prepared, covering a lot of ground, while staying just above the feeling layer. Talking at length, filling the space, because silence might let something through that you’re not sure you’re ready for yet. These are all intelligent strategies. They keep things manageable. And they make complete sense, because at some point, keeping things manageable was genuinely necessary.

Why Avoidance Belongs in the Room

When I notice avoidance in a session, I’m not looking to expose it or press through it. I’m curious about what it’s protecting, and whether the conditions between us feel safe enough to get a little closer to that. Sometimes that question takes a whole session. Sometimes it takes months. The question underneath avoidance is rarely why won’t you feel this? It’s closer to: what would need to be true for this to feel safe enough? And sometimes the honest answer is: not yet. That’s a real answer, and it deserves respect rather than pressure. A session that feels unproductive, where you talked around things rather than through them, where nothing seemed to shift, isn’t necessarily a session where nothing happened. Avoidance that’s been noticed and held without shame often allows something to move the following week. The work isn’t always visible while it’s happening.

When Life Interrupts the Work

Therapy doesn’t happen in a sealed environment. You’re doing this while the rest of your life keeps moving: a difficult conversation, a date in the calendar that carries more weight than you expected, a message from someone who still takes up space in your head. These things land in the middle of the therapeutic process and change what’s accessible in a given session, sometimes opening things unexpectedly, sometimes pulling the shutters back down. That’s not a setback. It’s just life doing what life does. And often, the thing that shows up from outside the room is pointing directly at what needs attention inside it.

What I Try to Offer

In my work, avoidance is always treated as communication rather than obstacle. We get curious about it together, at a pace that your nervous system can actually tolerate, paying attention to what conditions allow it to soften and what becomes possible as trust builds over time. If you’ve been in therapy before and found yourself stuck, circling the same material without being able to get closer to it, that experience is worth bringing directly into a new therapeutic conversation. It’s often exactly where the useful work is waiting.

If this resonates, I’d be glad to talk it through. Get in touch at samanthamerry.co.uk/contacts.

Resources worth exploring:

• The Drama of Being a Child by Alice Miller, on how emotional avoidance develops when direct feeling is unsafe, and what it costs across a lifetime
• It’s Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel, which maps the relationship between defences, inhibitory emotions, and the core feelings they protect, useful for understanding why avoidance is so persistent
• Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller, for understanding how avoidant attachment shapes the way people approach emotional closeness and vulnerability in relationships and in therapy
• Therapist Uncensored podcast, with episodes on avoidant attachment, emotional suppression, and what actually drives change in therapy
• The Attachment Project on YouTube, for accessible explanations of avoidant and dismissive patterns and what shifts them

Samantha Merry is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist in private practice in Bromley, South East London, and a doctoral researcher at the University of Chester.