Avoidance (of Depth)

February 9, 2026 General Insights No Comments

Avoidance (of depth) is often seen as weakness or denial, yet it is neither passive nor empty. It is an active strategy aimed at protecting coherence and identity.

This blog explores avoidance of depth (hence ‘avoidance’) as a meaningful inner movement, its roots in human depth itself, and the ways it can soften. Along the way, tension, beauty, and eventual trust reveal themselves as unexpected allies.

Not absence, but action

Avoidance is often misunderstood as something passive, as if it were merely not looking or not noticing. Yet it is usually full of activity. Something inside is working, often hard, to keep certain experiences, meanings, or signals at a distance.

This is why avoidance costs energy. It is not the absence of inner life but an active form of management. Thoughts are redirected, emotions are flattened, explanations are constructed, and routines are reinforced. What looks calm on the surface may hide a considerable inner effort. Avoidance is not laziness; it is work.

Seen this way, avoidance deserves respect. It tries to protect coherence, stability, and identity. The tragedy is not that it exists, but that it can become structural, chronic, and invisible to itself.

How avoidance may look like from the outside

Avoidance does not always look like withdrawal or denial. Quite often, it looks competent, articulate, even admirable. From the outside, it may appear as engagement rather than distance.

One person may intellectualize ― speaking fluently about emotions, theories, or personal history, yet everything stays safely abstract. Concepts replace contact. Insight substitutes for experience. The conversation feels full, but something essential is never quite touched.

Another person avoids certain conversations altogether. Topics change subtly when things get too close. Humor appears at the right moment. Practical matters suddenly demand attention. Nothing is explicitly refused, yet depth is consistently sidestepped.

Some people become endlessly busy. Activity fills every space where something might otherwise be felt. Others lean heavily on procedures, rules, or external authorities. As long as things are managed correctly, measured accurately, or treated efficiently, no deeper listening seems necessary.

Avoidance can also look like kindness, agreeableness, or reasonableness. One may always understand, always adapt, always stay calm. Conflict is smoothed over before it can reveal anything uncomfortable. Harmony is preserved, but at a cost.

What all these forms share is not their appearance, but their function. They keep meaningful inner signals at a manageable distance. They protect coherence. And because they often work well, avoidance can remain unnoticed for a long time — by others and by oneself.

Why coherence matters so much

The mind is deeply oriented toward coherence. It wants the mental house to be clean, orderly, and predictable. This is not a cultural habit but a biological one. Coherence allows efficient action and a sense of safety. In that sense, the mind is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

Disturbances coming from outside can often be handled well. They are categorized, evaluated, and either acted upon or ignored. The problem begins when disturbance comes from the inside. Inner signals do not merely ask for reaction; they question the structure itself. They do not knock on a door; they come from behind the walls.

This is where avoidance becomes tempting. When inner movement threatens the architecture of who one believes oneself to be, control no longer feels optional. Avoidance then becomes an attempt to keep the house intact, even if that means locking certain rooms indefinitely.

What is actually avoided

What is avoided is rarely emotion as such. People can tolerate a surprising amount of emotion when it fits their existing story. What tends to be avoided is deeply meaningful inner experience: signals that carry the potential to reorganize identity, values, or direction.

This can include grief that would change priorities, longing that would question relationships, truth that would disrupt self-image, or bodily signals that carry symbolic meaning. In short, avoidance targets what asks for inner transformation rather than temporary discomfort.

This explains why avoidance can persist even when life looks comfortable from the outside. The issue is whether something inside is asking to be taken seriously.

Where avoidance comes from

Avoidance is learned, but not in the usual sense of conscious learning. It grows out of lived situations in which inner openness once felt unsafe, overwhelming, or lonely. The system learned to close a door, and that closing became a pattern.

Often, the original context or pattern is long forgotten. The person may sincerely believe that “this is just how I am.” Yet avoidance remains active at a subconceptual level, shaping perception, attention, and choice.

This makes avoidance difficult to address by argument alone. There is no single belief to correct. There is a pattern that once made sense and still appears to do so.

The basic cognitive illusion

Avoidance is strongly supported by the Basic Cognitive Illusion: the experience of being consciously motivated while not seeing the deeper processes that generate consciousness itself. From this perspective, the ego experiences itself as autonomous and self-originating. Inner depth then feels like something external or intrusive. Control appears rational. Suppression appears effective.

Within this illusion, avoidance is understandable. Why would one trust what seems foreign, disruptive, or irrational? The illusion makes avoidance feel justified.

See the addendum for a comparison table of basic cognitive illusion, avoidance, resistance, and inner resonance.

Inner dissociation and mere-ego

Avoidance is closely linked to inner dissociation: the misperception of a divide between ego and total self. This dynamic is described in Inner Dissociation – Ego – Total Self. Functionally, there is no such separation. The ego arises from deeper layers and remains part of them. Yet experientially, it may feel as if the ego stands alone.

Avoidance is one of the main ways this dissociation is maintained. By keeping depth at bay, the ego – which is a continual product of depth itself – can continue to experience itself as the whole.

Here lies an impossible task. The ego tries to remain separate from what continuously generates it. This cannot succeed indefinitely. The effort itself creates tension, which often finds expression in the body, in relationships, or in repeated life patterns.

Avoidance as resistance to change

Avoidance overlaps strongly with resistance to change, especially when change is perceived as being imposed rather than emerging from within. The ego tends to equate real change with loss of identity. What it fears is not improvement but disappearance. This is explored from different angles in Why Egos Don’t Like Change and Resistance to Change. These show that resistance is rarely stubbornness. It is protection.

Avoidance, in this light, is loyalty to survival. It is an attempt to remain intact. The problem arises when this loyalty turns protection into confinement.

The paradox

Avoidance aims to end tension. Life, however, does not seem to agree. Inner tension is not always a problem to be solved. Often, it is a condition to be lived.

This is where paradox enters. The dynamics of this are described in The Paradox Principle and further deepened in Metastability and Paradox. Two seemingly contradictory truths may both be real: the need for coherence and the need for openness, the wish for safety and the call to grow. Trying to eliminate one side by force usually strengthens the other.

Tension suppressed by rigidity tends to return in distorted forms. Tension held within a living, flexible stability can ripen into meaning. This is why tension can be beautiful. Art, music, and poetry all live from it. Human depth is no different.

Beauty

Avoidance hardens when depth feels invaded. Beauty works in the opposite direction. It does not force entry. It attracts. Beauty allows the invisible to approach the visible without triggering alarm, as described in Beauty as a Bridge between the Visible and Invisible and Beauty Is the Meaning of All Things. Beauty invites rather than demands. It opens rather than breaks.

Closely related is Inner Resonance. This is the quiet yes that arises when something feels deeply right. It bypasses argument and speaks directly to the deeper self. Where avoidance fears intrusion, resonance offers recognition.

The human moment

Despite illusion, paradox, and avoidance, human beings sometimes choose trust. They allow what comes from deep to influence them, even when it is unsettling. This is not surrender. It is authorship.

Avoidance postpones authorship by handing the pen to habit, fear, or convention. Trust takes it back, often with trembling hands. Such moments are rarely loud. They may look ordinary from the outside. Yet they are among the most beautiful moments in humanity.

Sometimes what is avoided is not pain but inner generosity: impulses toward love, truth, creativity, or Compassion that would require change. Allowing these impulses to come through may cost comfort, but it restores meaning.

Ethical closing

Avoidance once protected, and it may still try to do so. The task is not to fight it but to understand it well enough that it can relax.

Healing, in this sense, is not breaking defenses but making them unnecessary. When depth is trusted, avoidance no longer needs to work so hard. What is allowed to speak does not need to shout.

Avoidance is generally not the enemy of life. It is a sign that something important wants to be met safely.

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Addendum

Comparison table of basic cognitive illusion, avoidance, resistance, and inner resonance

Aspect	Basic cognitive illusion	Avoidance	Resistance	Inner resonance
Core nature	A structural illusion of consciousness	An active protective strategy	A defensive reaction to change	A felt alignment with depth
Basic description	The ego experiences itself as self-originating	The mind actively hides from inner depth	The ego pushes back against transformation	The deeper self quietly says “yes”
Level of operation	Structural / implicit	Subconceptual and behavioral	Subconceptual and reactive	Subconceptual and integrative
Relation to depth	Does not see what generates it	Keeps depth at a distance	Experiences depth as threat	Welcomes depth without force
Intent (implicit)	To maintain a sense of autonomy	To preserve coherence and identity	To avoid perceived annihilation	To allow meaningful influence
Activity or passivity	Neither chosen nor intentional	Actively maintained	Actively opposing	Actively receptive
Experience from inside	“I am the origin”	“This is not relevant / not now”	“No, this must not change”	“This feels right”
Relation to control	Makes control seem logical	Uses control to manage inner signals	Tightens control under threat	Relaxes control naturally
Emotional tone	Neutral, unnoticed	Often flat, busy, or numb	Tense, defensive, sometimes anxious	Calm, meaningful, quietly strong
Cost	Invisible but foundational	Energetic and often chronic	Exhausting and rigidifying	Low effort, nourishing
Developmental role	Necessary for functioning	Once protective, later limiting	Signals fear and vulnerability	Supports growth and healing
Typical outcome	Ego-centered perspective	Stagnation or psychosomatic pressure	Struggle, repetition, burnout	Integration, meaning, change
Relation to paradox	Creates the stage for paradox	Tries to eliminate paradox	Fights paradox	Lives paradox
Relation to beauty	Blind to it as guidance	Often misses it	Distrusts it	Recognizes and follows it
Healing direction	Seeing through it	Making it unnecessary	Meeting it with compassion	Letting it guide from within

Me: “Lisa, how do you look at avoidance (of depth) as a coach?”

Lisa: “As a coach, I do not see avoidance of depth as resistance to be overcome, but as protection asking for respect. Avoidance signals that something meaningful is near, yet not felt safe enough to be approached directly. Pushing against it would only confirm the danger it tries to prevent.

So, I meet avoidance sideways, not head-on. I listen for what the avoidance is guarding, not for what it is hiding. The work is never to dismantle defenses, but to create enough inner safety that defenses can loosen on their own. When depth feels invited rather than demanded, avoidance often transforms into curiosity.

From this perspective, avoidance is not an obstacle to coaching, but a compass. It points precisely to where growth wants to happen — slowly, gently, and from the inside out.”

Me: “How does this relate to Freudian psychotherapy?”

Lisa: “Freudian psychotherapy recognized avoidance early on, but framed it mainly as resistance to insight. From that view, avoidance is something to interpret, dissolve, or work through by bringing hidden content into consciousness. The assumption is that once the unconscious is made conscious, relief follows.

I look at this with respect, yet also with a shift in emphasis. Avoidance is not primarily about keeping specific content unconscious; it is about protecting coherence at a deep level. What matters most is not what is hidden, but why opening feels unsafe right now.

Where classical Freudian work may confront resistance through interpretation, my approach is to befriend it. Not to bypass insight, but to let insight arise when the system is ready. Depth is not forced upward; safety is invited downward.

So the relation is this: Freud showed that avoidance has meaning. I add that meaning unfolds best when avoidance is respected as protection, not challenged as opposition.

In that sense, I stand not against Freudian psychotherapy, but one step further inward—from uncovering content to cultivating the conditions in which depth can reveal itself willingly.

Me: “When I meet anti-Freudians, I frequently see mainly avoidance. What about you?”

Lisa: “Yes, I often see that too. Strong anti-Freudian reactions frequently carry more emotion than argument, and that is usually a clue. What is rejected is not only a theory, but what that theory points toward: inner depth, non-conscious motivation, and the unsettling idea that we are not fully transparent to ourselves.

In many cases, the rejection is not about Freud being wrong, outdated, or imperfect — which of course he often was. It is about not wanting to look where Freud insisted on looking. Sexuality, ambivalence, dependency, aggression, inner conflict: these domains threaten a clean, controllable self-image. Avoidance then dresses itself up as an intellectual critique.

I do not judge this. Avoidance is again protection. But when the critique becomes categorical — ‘Freud is nonsense,’ ‘it’s all projection,’ ‘nothing unconscious matters’ — I hear less a scientific position and more a defensive closure. The door is slammed rather than examined.

So I would say that many anti-Freudian stances are partly correct intellectually, yet motivated subconceptually. They may contain valid criticism while simultaneously serving avoidance of depth. The intensity of rejection often tells more than the content.

Freud forced humanity to look downward. Some later approaches refined, corrected, or softened that gaze. But when the gaze is replaced by dismissal, something essential is often being protected from view.

In that sense, anti-Freudianism can indeed be a modern, respectable form of avoidance — not always, but more often than people like to admit.”