Chapter #1 — AVOIDANCE
(excerpt)
What Happened
So many of us want to believe that if we just ignore the uncomfortable thing long enough, it will somehow solve itself. The TV star was hoping this same approach would work for her.
When the first email came into her in-box, the TV star thought it was from someone she knew. What she found when she opened the message was nothing like what she was expecting. The video began to play all on its own. She could hear the man pleasuring himself to an array of her videos and photographs that he had opened as individual windows across his oversize computer screen. She couldn’t see his face, but she could see the outline of his reflection in the monitor as his arm moved up and down in a violent gesture. She could hear his voice moaning in pleasure. She told me when she heard him first moan out her name, she slammed the laptop closed so hard she was afraid she’d shattered the screen. The next day, another email arrived. Another one the day after that. By the end of the week, she had at least a dozen. She left all of them unopened. She didn’t want to see what they were. She didn’t want to have to deal with yet another creep who had somehow managed to learn her personal email address. So she just left them unopened—a blue dot next to a bold font causing her more and more anxiety every time she checked her mail. By the middle of the next week, there were at least twenty.
When her assistant came into work the next morning, she asked her to delete them. She also asked her to create a rule so that they would be automatically deleted without her ever having to see them. Her hope was that by simply ignoring them, the issue would somehow resolve itself. So that was what she did. For her, out of sight was out of mind. And she was right. As she would later reveal to me, within a few weeks, she had completely forgotten about the incident in its entirety—for a while, anyway. Six weeks later, the TV star was filming a scene on a downtown city street in Lower Manhattan. There was a man lingering behind the yellow caution tape that separated the film set from the public street. She didn’t know what it was about him. Maybe it was the way he was standing there all alone. She felt he was looking at her, and she couldn’t be sure, but when their eyes met, she was almost certain he was motioning for her to come over.
Between one of the takes, a production assistant came up to her saying that a man said he knew her and had brought her “that thing that she asked for.” The TV star was confused. She’d met so many people in this line of business that she honestly couldn’t remember whom she had met and whom she had not. Still, she didn’t want to offend anyone. When she asked the production assistant which man she meant, her stomach turned to knots when the PA pointed to the man she had been weirded out by all morning. She made the mistake of looking over at him, because he was definitely looking at her now. He could see the production assistant had just pointed him out. And now he was waving, energetically waving, as if he had something of utmost importance to tell her.
The TV star began to slowly walk over to where the man was standing behind the tape. She could tell that he was pulling something from a messenger bag he had slung over his shoulder. It was an envelope. A large envelope.
When I asked her later why she had decided to walk over to him, she told me it was the envelope. She thought he was a process server, and she thought it better to be done with it here and now rather than having this guy try to track her down for the rest of the day. But as she got closer, she realized she had made a terrible mistake.
I was able to watch the rest of the encounter thanks to the TV star’s assistant. Her assistant was used to filming interactions with fans to use as content on the TV star’s social media accounts, so when the assistant noticed the TV star walking up toward the crowd, she quickly came up behind her and started filming.
“Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!” the man said as the TV star approached.
“Hi,” she said. “So good to see you.”
You could see in the video that the TV star’s entire demeanor changed as soon as she realized this man was definitely not a process server. She literally stopped in her tracks a few feet from the yellow caution tape. She wasn’t being sued after all. This was something else entirely—she just didn’t know what it was.
“I made this for you.” The man was jittery with excitement. Watching the video, you could see he was nervous. His left hand was clutching the envelope, a tight grip more than a light hold. His right hand was up by his chest. He kept wiping it on his sweatshirt. The man let out an exasperated sigh as if he were building up the courage to say what came next. “I knew you would want me to find you here.”
The TV star stood there confused. “I’m sorry…?” she said with a bit of exaggeration in her voice. She had clearly misread this entire situation, and her mind was racing to figure out a way to get herself out of this awkward engagement.
The man was now holding out the envelope over the tape for her to take it from him. But as her hand reached out to take it from him, he pulled it back.
“But I don’t understand why you’ve been ignoring me. Why did you stop reading my emails?”
I watched the tape as her face flushed white. She froze. It was at this moment she realized this was the man from the reflection on the computer screen. This was the man who had sent that disgusting video. And then just kept sending … and sending.
The man’s demeanor had also changed. It had escalated from one of excitement to one of agitation. He was aggressively shaking the envelope at the TV star. “Is it so I would bring you this? Is that what you wanted me to do?”
Her assistant stopped filming and tried to make eye contact with the security guard who was pouring himself a soda at the craft services table. When she was unsuccessful, she keyed her radio and asked for assistance.
But her boss was frozen. Unmoving. And she hadn’t been the only one filming. Others in the crowd had been filming this too.
So the PA did the only thing she could think to do.
As the security guard began to make his way over to where they were standing, the assistant walked up and grabbed the envelope from the man’s hand, with a very polite “Thank you!” She took her boss by the waist, turned her around, and began walking her back toward the set.
My phone rang a few hours later.
The solution phase began almost immediately. It didn’t take long to discover that everything needed to prevent this from happening in the first place had been there all along. The TV star had simply chosen to look the other way. She had hoped that ignoring the problem would make it disappear. Regrettably, she was wrong.
Fortunately, the assistant didn’t set up the email filter rule the right way. Instead of the communications being forwarded for deletion, they were sent to a junk mail folder. Which meant that, with her permission, we were able to retrieve and review all the communications she had decided to deny were being sent. Some of them were more of what we expected to find: graphic and explicit. Others were confessional. Some were delusional admissions of personal beliefs.
Equally as expected, each new communication escalated in intensity and ideation. The more recent ones clearly communicated his investment of time, effort, and energy to stage a confrontation. He had purchased new clothes. He had bought a plane ticket. He knew where she was going to be filming, and he very clearly communicated he was making the trip to see her so they could finally move forward with being together.
Was this the TV star’s fault? Did she ask for this? Did she want for this to happen? Of course not. No one ever asks for these kinds of things to happen. But could this concern have been de-escalated months earlier? Could this entire interaction have been managed toward a much more favorable outcome that would have all but prevented a one-on-one confrontational encounter? Yes. Unquestionably, yes! Was the crisis involving the TV star able to be resolved? Yes, of course it was. The TV star’s entire crisis could have been averted had the initial concern been confronted instead of avoided.
So what is it about our individual proclivity for making things worse? Why is it that we sabotage our own success? Why do we choose these self-defeating strategies? And more importantly, how can we learn to retrain our brains so that we can recognize when we are choosing to avoid our concerns and instead face them head-on?
PROTECTIVE TAKEAWAY
If you choose to ignore today’s concerns, you will be forced to confront tomorrow’s crisis.
PROTECTIVE AWARENESS
Avoidance Impacts All of Us
Let me be clear: avoiding concerns is not something unique to the rich and famous. Avoidance is employed by all of us. How many of us have seen the blinking light flash on our dashboard warning us that we need an oil change or that our tire pressure is low? How many of us then simply mute the warning and hope it either never comes back or—at the very least—comes back at a “more convenient” time?
Why do we do this? Why is it that we choose to avoid those things that make us uncomfortable? Why is it that we almost always choose to defer present pain for future torment? Part of the reason is that we never learned to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. We never learned how to accept the reality of adverse conditions and then work through them. Part of the problem stems from how we were socialized. Avoidance served us well when we were children. Back when we didn’t have the skills or the experience to properly address a concern, when we didn’t have the power to change our predicament, we avoided confrontation because we wanted to wait until our parents were there to help. We believed we couldn’t do it on our own. And in doing so, we were convinced we required someone bigger, stronger, and smarter than we were to arbitrate on our behalf. Why? Because our life experience had not yet provided us with the confidence to realize that we were smarter than we knew and had more resilience than we realized.
Unfortunately, this practice stayed with us as we got older. In doing so, we trained our brains to believe those things we’d learned to avoid should always be avoided. Then our brains began to believe that we should be afraid of these things. We should avoid them because we feel incapable of confronting them. But this is wrong. This is false. You can confront them. You are capable. Even if you don’t have the skills on hand right now, you will be surprised by how quickly you can learn them along the way.
We have a choice! We can cling to the problem-solving strategies that helped to make us feel safe as children, or we can choose to confront the concerns as they come to us. We can wait until someone either makes us contend with our concern or holds our hand as we baby-step our way through the solution phase, or we can choose to confront these concerns on our own terms, when they are first presented and most manageable to resolve.
Avoidance Behaviors
Avoidance behaviors are any actions a person may take to escape difficult thoughts and feelings. Which is not to say that all avoidance is bad. More often than not, I would argue that avoidance is a good thing. If used correctly, avoidance is nothing more than a temporary safeguard that helps us to get past the point of an unwelcome discomfort, shock, or insight, which—if given the choice—we would much rather not be forced to endure. It is only when we use avoidance to deflect dealing with the impact of the real-world influences that we do the most damage to not only ourselves but to those around us as well.
No One Fears That Which They Do Well
It is also important to take note of the difference between having anxiety and feeling anxious. The moments just before a performer takes the stage or an athlete takes the field may have the same initial physiological symptoms of anxiety: elevated heart rate, increased breathing, irritability, sweating—but these are just the mind preparing the body for performance. These are survival stressors that any of us would feel before going in front of any large audience. The very same symptoms are very likely to be felt by any of us just before giving a toast at a wedding or a speech in front of our peers.
The difference between being anxious and having anxiety is that when we are anxious, the symptoms subside once we find our flow, once we realize that we know what we are doing. That we are qualified. That we are prepared. That we are doing it well. That the audience in front of us is accepting of our contribution, and in turn, we feel a certain sense of gratification. We may even feel a sense of satisfaction from applause—the reward we receive by providing the function we have been called on to perform.
The anxiousness subsides because we have accepted the reality before us, and we worked hard to hold on to the power that those fears would have otherwise tried to steal from our grasp. But instead of turning away from the challenge, we turned to stare it down. We made a choice to accept and to act. Choosing instead to cut off the fuel that would have otherwise allowed that anxiousness to grow into anxiety.
Avoidance Behaviors Prevent Us from Learning New Skills
One of the reasons we all love scary movies so much is because we get to experience the rush of adrenaline that comes from feeling fear without any of the consequences of harmful action. When we are in the movie theater, our subconscious minds know that we are safe and turn off the fight-or-flight response. But in doing so, it still allows for our conscious minds to have a physiological response to external stimuli—to what we are seeing on the screen.
This is what I like to refer to as protective projection. Protective projections allow our minds to play out how our bodies will perform. It is a safety strategy that the mind does all on its own when it realizes that we may someday find ourselves in a similar circumstance—regardless of how likely that scenario may actually be. The practice is not dissimilar to how sports psychologists train athletes to “visualize the win.” When athletes create a mental image of how they want to perform in reality, they can then use this technique to “intend” a desired outcome. Protective projections are very similar. It is the mind mapping out the actions the body will need to perform to ensure our own safety. With each new protective projection we allow our minds to perceive, another safety strategy is added to our problem-solving tool kits. But if we close our eyes, if we look away, if we avoid those very experiences at the very moment we are supposed to be having a lifesaving takeaway, we have just sabotaged our own success for handling a future concern.
You may believe it is perfectly fine to avoid looking at the movie screen when the bad guy enters the house on-screen, because the stakes of doing so are so low. And you may be right. But would it also be fine to avoid the bad guy who had just entered your house in the real world, when the stakes are now so high? I’m sure you would say it was not.
What if instead of turning away when the movie got scary, you enjoyed the moment for what it was but also allowed for your mind to learn what to do, and what not to do, based on what the characters did on-screen? What if instead of closing your eyes, you reflected upon what you would do in that situation?
Understand the Difference Between “Gut Instinct” and “Anxiety”
Gut instincts are how we feel right now. They are based on our highly evolved survival strategy of pattern recognition, which helps us to predict outcome. Pattern recognition is about interpreting, recognizing, and employing those pre-incident indicators of good, those pre-incident indicators of bad, those pre-incident indicators of concern …
Because once you know what to look for, they become impossible to miss.
Think about the pattern of occurrences that happen just after a toddler falls but before they belt out their scream of pain and shame: a little child, just learning how to walk, then hits their head. You hear the thud as they plop down to the ground. Then they go quiet. But then they look up at you. They see your face is concerned as you rush over to them. But before you can get there, their eyes go wide, and their bottom lip begins to quiver. Then their face wrinkles. They raise their fist. They breathe in deeply. Their eyes close. Their head tilts back, and then …
Did you hear what came next? Did you hear their scream inside your head? Did you recognize that it was coming? Of course you did. We all did.
But you were not born knowing this. These insights were learned. These recognitions had to be realized. Those pre-incident indicators had to be programmed into your brain. Those safeguards had to be accepted, practiced, and employed in their proper place so often that they became second nature. Just like when we learned to drive a car, where once, we had to consciously tell ourselves there was a stop sign up ahead and move our foot from the accelerator to the brake. Give yourself enough time to slow down. Years later, those same step-by-step practices are realized and implemented as second nature. They happen on a subconscious level. But if you’re the passenger in the car, and you see the stop sign up ahead, and the driver isn’t taking the necessary precautions, it’s very likely you’ll have a gut instinct you are going to crash.
The difference between this gut instinct and anxiety would be if every time you saw a stop sign, you had the feeling you were going to crash because of that one time the driver didn’t slow down their car on time.
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