PTSD Avoidance: Is It Grounding Your Recovery To A Halt?

I have a client (we'll call him A.) who said to me yesterday, about an action he needs to take to move forward, "I just don't want to do it. It's too painful, so I avoid it."

While avoidance is typical in PTSD recovery here's the problem: Nothing in recovery happens unless you make it happen. So what will happen if you continue to avoid? Nothing.

What to do when PTSD avoidance grounds your progress to a halt?

PTSD: Avoidance: Getting Back on Track

As you already know, avoidance is one of the three main categories of PTSD symptoms (along with re-experiencing and arousal) that define the diagnostic criteria of PTSD. When you've been through something horribly traumatic it makes absolute sense that you wouldn't want to revisit it in any way shape or form. Fear around the subject begins to drive your behavior: fear of the memory, fear of your feelings, fear of what will happen if you face the memory and your feelings.

The list of fears that drive avoidance coping strategies go on and on -- and are very legitimate. In survival mode, you will do anything to preserve your ability to function, even by doing so with dysfunctional behavior.

A. has been stuck in the same place in his recovery for several months and he's annoyed about it. He comes into our sessions snarly, snarky and disagreeable to both himself and me.

What I've learned about trauma and PTSD recovery is that when one direction yields a road block you can make progress by simply turning in another direction. There is no "how-to" or "should" magic when it comes to healing. The most important thing to trust is how you feel. If you feel you can approach a specific part of the healing work, then you're ready for it and will often find some aspect of success if you approach it.

Likewise, when one path of work places an enormous obstacle it can be a sign that you're not ready for that element yet, in which case moving on to something else and bookmarking where you want to come back to can often be exactly how to achieve a breakthrough in your process.

A. will not do any of this. Instead, he insists each week on bringing up the subject he wants to avoid, only to continue avoiding it. When I gently suggest we turn in another direction he refuses. Due to this resistance, A. has been stuck in the same place in recovery for several months.

The problem is that the work A. is avoiding is a double-edged sword: He wants to retrieve a part of his life before the trauma. In order to do so, he has to face the harm someone else inflicted upon him. A. is simultaneously driven by what he wants (to go back to a time before anything bad happened) and to avoid the bad thing that happened. You can see how it's easy to get so stuck.

In order to move through this place, I suggested A. renegotiate his approach to the painful topic. There's no rule that says something painful has to be faced all at once. You can, in fact, break it down into many small pieces and face each of the smaller, more manageable parts one at a time so that you can reach a comfort level with the individual elements before attempting to tackle the whole.

In your own recovery, listen to your internal reactions. Let them guide you in the work you do. Trust the feedback your internal self gives and find ways to take the information and apply it to your recovery in ways that ease the process rather than make it twice as challenging.

Michele is the author of Your Life After Trauma: Powerful Practices to Reclaim Your Identity. Connect with her on Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and her website, HealMyPTSD.com.