Avoidance

“Thaaaat’s right, keep going, keep going” I thought to myself, as his campervan moved slowly along the curved exit road of the campground that led past my van. I was willing him to keep going, to not stop and talk to me.

I’d first met him the day before, on a Saturday in mid April. I was staying at the Lake Mahinapua DoC campground just south of Hokitika, a beautiful big campground with a central block of toilets and a centrally located set of benches and sinks under a large gazebo.

I was walking over to the toilets, and that’s when I noticed him. He was standing in front of a large camouflage sheet which was strung up so that it faced the morning sun. He was dipping a paintbrush into a battered old tin that was sitting on a gas stove, and its contents were smouldering or steaming, I couldn’t tell which. My curiosity was piqued, but I continued on to the toilets.

Whilst in the toilet I thought about how this was a good opportunity to build my courage with meeting random strangers. I imagined how easy it would be to strike up a conversation by asking him what the heck he was working on – curiosity is one of my core values, after all.

After washing my hands and exiting the toilet block, I was halfway back to my van before I realised that I’d “forgotten” to talk to him – a neat little mind-hijack by my fear, I suspect.

“Oi! Make a u-turn, buddy”, I thought to myself. You see, I’ve recently discovered that I do this a lot; shy away from seemingly low-stakes social situations. And when I pick up on this, I take that as a sign that I need to turn around and go do the thing I just avoided.

So I turned back and walked over to him, said “Hi”, asked him what he was doing. He was more than happy to explain – in an English accent – that he was applying beeswax to the camouflage sheet in order to waterproof it. I’d never seen this done before, so his answer just led to more curious questions from me, and before I knew it we’d spent an hour or so talking, getting to know each other.

We had a few things in common – it turns out that we’re doing the same kind of thing, a one-year life-reboot whilst travelling the country. It was a pleasantly surprising and easy conversation, and by the time it was over, we’d agreed that we’d swap Facebook details before either of us departed from the campground.

And then right on cue, my avoidance arrived on the scene. Ah, avoidance, my old friend – or should I say nemesis?

Neurotic and strange behaviours arose. I felt like I couldn’t walk across the campground to use the toilets, in case I bumped into him or his girlfriend – my mind seemed to imagine that awkwardness would somehow ensue. I didn’t want to drive into Hokitika to get groceries, “because they’ll think I’m leaving without saying goodbye”. I ended up just pottering around in my van tidying things up, holding my full bladder, and generally failing to do anything constructive. I was confused about what the hell was going on, whilst feeling like I couldn’t work out what I wanted to do, let alone take any action. And despite the fact that I had complete freedom of movement, I even started to project blame onto him and his girlfriend because their presence “prevented” me from being able to move around the campground freely. This was George Costanza level stuff; I could imagine this kind of thing playing out in an episode of “Seinfeld”. But this isn’t a sitcom, and although I can laugh at the absurdity of it, it’s also serious.

Avoidance tries to unconsciously sabotage my human desire to have close relationships in my life. It typically kicks in after I’ve reached a certain level of connection with someone, manifesting in insidious little ways that control the distance in a relationship or connection. I hold back in interactions, I dread bumping into people, I procrastinate replying to their texts, I suddenly find them slightly undesirable or I find little flaws about them. Those flaws get fed into the avoidance machine as “evidence” of the person’s unsuitability for me. Interpersonal attraction starts to wane. This often starts happening as soon as my mind sees that there’s a possibility of a friendship developing.

And so here I was the next morning – Sunday – sitting inside my van eating breakfast, watching behind its one-way tinted windows as his van crawled at the mandated 10 km/h speed limit towards the exit of the campground. I was willing his van to just keep rolling past mine without stopping, to leave without saying goodbye so that I could be off the hook, so that it would be his fault and not mine. But weirdly I was also primed and ready to feel disappointed and bitter if he did leave without stopping; primed and ready to think “Yeah, typical – it just proves that people are arseholes”.

Then his van pulled up next to mine. My shoulders slumped. “Shit”, I sighed. “What do I do now?”

I watched him walk around the side of my van, and knock on the window. “Well, I guess I don’t have much choice”, I thought to myself. Perhaps a much younger version of myself would’ve ignored the knocking and hoped that he’d think the van was empty and give up, but would’ve violated honesty amd courage, two more of my core values.

I slid open my van’s side door and stepped out. And as I saw his smiling face greeting me, something surprising happened: I felt my feeling towards him completely change, I was pleased to see him, I was glad he’d stopped by, and this sentence went through my mind: “He’s a good guy and he just wants to be friends”.

As we chatted and swapped phone numbers, every trace of the aforementioned avoidant thoughts about him evaporated, wiped out by reality. It was as if the avoidant bullshit just didn’t stand up in the face of reality (and this gives a clue about how to deal with avoidant tendencies, which I’ll get to soon).

Like many folks, I have an avoidant attachment style. This manifests as an unconscious aversion to intimacy, to authentic emotional connections with others. It’s a fear that others will depend on me, oblige me, restrict me, even smother me. It’s deep-seated and it’s mostly hard-wired into us during our first few years of life. Avoidance is the reason that despite having enjoyed spending time with this guy, I later started thinking negatively of him, dreading bumping into him, creating mental fiction about how his presence at the campground restricted my movements, and even projecting blame and resentment towards him for “making” me feel restricted.

And it was complete and utter bullshit. That concept of him didn’t exist in the real world; it existed only in my own head. And so on Sunday, when I got out of the van and came face to face with him, the real evidence – that he’s just a good guy who wants to be friends – trumped the bullshit, the avoidant fiction in my head.

Avoidance makes up a lot of bullshit assumptions about what’ll happen if I build a friendship or relationship with someone, if I let them get close. It projects into the future – which does not exist – and predicts all manner of ominous outcomes. It tricks me into thinking that I’m entering into a lifetime binding contract, when in actual fact I’m always free to leave at any time. But when I push through it, when I continue to spend time with that person, these bullshit assumptions are overridden by much more reliable information: my experience of reality. This leads to something that my coach Dan Munro taught me – when my mind is spending time predicting, thinking about future outcomes, it’s likely that this is fear talking.

Most people naturally crave real, authentic, deep connections with others, and I’m definitely no exception to that. Yet at some point after a connection has developed with someone, my avoidance tends to show up, and it operates against that natural craving. Unconsciously my mind will come up with some compelling reason to lose interest or find fault in them, some reason why they’re a bad fit for me. And I’ll tend to control the intensity of the connection using distancing tactics. Let phone calls go to voicemail. Delay replying to text messages for no logical reason. None of this behaviour is conscious, malicious or deliberate – at the time, I genuinely believe that there’s some rational and valid reason to act this way. But over the last couple of months I’ve realised how effective my avoidance has been. It’s been good at keeping me alone, and I don’t actually want that for myself.

What Dan has helped me to learn, is to recognise when my avoidance is playing up, and to “walk into the fire” – just gently push through it. I acknowledge my avoidant urge, I feel what it’s telling me to do, but I choose to proceed anyway – that’s the power that each of us has in the face of any emotion; it’s the core value of Responsibility.

So I try to lean in. I continue with the friendship, I respond to the text message, I answer the phone call, and most importantly, I try to prioritise real live experience with a person vs. trumped-up fictional ideas about them. I do this until my mental concept of them is solid. I’ll even explain my avoidance to them.

I’d like to say that with this guy, I deliberately walked into the fire. But I can’t take any credit for that one – he took that choice out of my hands by knocking on my van. And I’m bloody glad he did.

These photos are from the remainder of my time on the West Coast, from April 6th to 18th: