Ever notice two very different reactions that come from the same root?
“My stomach does backflips every time I try to set a boundary… so I freeze and end up letting them have their way.”
“I get so frustrated that I yell, complain, and threaten—but nothing changes. They treat my words like background noise. And honestly, so do I.”
What’s happening?
Avoidance.
When the emotional load feels too big to face cleanly, we default to a familiar strategy:
we shut down… or we surge.
Either path hurts—especially if you’re the dependable one. The reliable one. The one people count on.
And the hardest part?
Most of the time, they heard you. They just didn’t adjust.
This isn’t about diagnosing narcissists. And it’s not a motivational speech about “standing up for yourself.”
This is about how you became the one who negotiates with avoidance—and the real cost of that self-abandonment.
Let’s go there—slowly, steadily, no hype. Just clarity, responsibility, and choice.
JUST ONE MORE TIME
A few years ago, I worked with a client—let’s call her Dr. Irene.
She ran a small medical practice staffed entirely by women. She joked that it was her own version of Grey’s Anatomy—minus the glamour, plus a constant stream of conflict.
Employees showed up late.
Protocols were ignored.
Instructions she had spent hours documenting were interrupted, bypassed, or dismissed.
Irene spent her days doing damage control. She didn’t take vacations. She never considered bringing on an associate to reduce the load. Every session included a familiar line:
“Just one more time—and that’s it.”
Except one more time became two. Then three.
And eventually, it was never addressed again.
Here’s the contradiction Irene lived inside:
She was competent, decisive, and respected—
everywhere except where avoidance was allowed to linger.
She could lead a medical practice.
But when it came to confronting emotionally avoidant behavior, she waited for insight, guilt, or consequences to do the work for her.
This isn’t because Irene was weak.
It’s because over-functioning had taught her a quiet rule:
If I carry it long enough, maybe it will resolve itself.
That rule keeps everything “above ground.”
And it slowly teaches you to disappear underneath it.
How We Got Here
These patterns didn’t appear because you lack insight.
They didn’t disappear once you gained knowledge either.
They hardened—because they once worked.
At some point early on, you learned that stability depended on you.
So you adapted.
Not by collapsing.
By becoming capable.
You learned how to read the room quickly.
Anticipate problems before they escalated.
Manage emotions—yours and everyone else’s.
Keep things functioning, even when they weren’t healthy.
You don’t need a dramatic backstory for this to apply.
The common thread is simpler than that: learning early to carry responsibility you didn’t have the power—or permission—to resolve.
For many, it showed up as:
Surrogate responsibility — becoming the dependable one for siblings, or even for a parent
Peacekeeping — learning that staying pleasant was safer than being honest
Conditional belonging — being assigned a role and learning that love required precision
This wasn’t perfectionism for achievement’s sake.
It was rigidity in service of belonging.
Those adaptations didn’t dissolve when life became more stable.
They evolved.
In adulthood, they often look like:
being the “strong one”
over-functioning to keep everything above ground
mistaking emotional restraint for maturity
waiting for insight, guilt, or time to motivate change in people who benefit from staying the same
By then, this no longer feels like fear.
It feels like patience.
Professionalism.
Being the bigger person.
But what it quietly trains you to do is negotiate with avoidance instead of naming it.
And over time, that erodes something essential:
Your expectation that responsibility should be shared—not absorbed.
The Cost of Negotiating With Avoidance
Emotional caretaking of avoidant people doesn’t just stall change.
It reshapes your nervous system.
One common escape is emotional numbing.
Not dissociation in a dramatic sense—
but a subtle dampening of anything that signals friction.
You stay calm.
Neutral.
Reasonable.
“Above it.”
It looks like maturity.
But research tells a different story.
A study published in JAMA Network Open examined emotional state transitions in trauma-exposed individuals and found something critical: emotional numbing doesn’t create stability. It raises the threshold for emotional response—making people less responsive to mild stress and more reactive once that threshold is crossed.
In other words, containment doesn’t make you regulated.
It makes you brittle.
So you tolerate too much for too long.
And when something finally breaks through, it comes out fast, sharp, and disproportionate.
This is why avoidance produces two familiar outcomes:
long stretches of endurance
sudden spikes of anger, threat, or shutdown
Neither reflects who you actually are.
Both are symptoms of a system forced to hold what should have been shared.
It is functional – until it isn’t
For leaders, this cost compounds.
You start mistaking endurance for strength.
Stoicism for professionalism.
Self-erasure for maturity.
The body keeps score anyway:
jaw tension
migraines
chronic tightness
exhaustion that doesn’t resolve with rest
Leadership without integration doesn’t look dramatic.
It looks functional—until it isn’t.
And by the time it collapses, the price has already been paid internally.
A Sober Reframe — Not a Solution
Awareness creates a moment of exposure.
And when that exposure isn’t grounded, most people reflexively reach for their familiar survival strategy—just with better language.
For some, that means turning insight into explanation.
For others, it becomes patience framed as maturity.
For many leaders, it turns into restraint disguised as professionalism.
Nothing actually changes.
Because awareness, by itself, doesn’t reorganize behavior.
It only reveals it.
If we don’t name where not to go next, awareness quietly funnels you back into the same pattern—only now it sounds more reasonable.
Avoidance doesn’t disappear when you see it.
It just becomes easier to justify.
You tell yourself:
I understand why this is happening.
This isn’t the right moment.
They’ll get there eventually.
None of that is dishonest.
It’s just incomplete.
The cost isn’t ignorance.
It’s delay.
And delay keeps you tethered to systems, people, and roles that depend on your silence to stay intact.
This is why insight alone can feel oddly unsatisfying.
It shows you the truth—without yet giving you a place to stand inside it.
So if this section feels unfinished, that’s intentional.
Because clarity isn’t meant to soothe you.
It’s meant to orient you.
And orientation always comes before choice.
The First Adult Emotional Step
The first adult step isn’t confrontation.
It isn’t explanation.
And it isn’t getting the wording “right.”
It’s recognition.
Specifically, recognizing your role in sustaining what you now see clearly.
Not with shame.
Not with self-attack.
Just precision.
At some point, negotiating with avoidance became familiar.
Not because you agreed with it—but because you learned how to survive around it.
That doesn’t make you weak.
It makes you practiced.
The adult shift begins when you stop treating avoidance as something to manage and start seeing it as something you’ve been compensating for.
This isn’t about forcing others to change.
It’s about no longer organizing your nervous system around whether they will.
Adulthood, emotionally, isn’t marked by stronger boundaries or better language.
It’s marked by the moment you stop waiting for insight, guilt, or time to do the work of responsibility for someone else.
Not aggressively.
Not dramatically.
Just cleanly.
You stop asking, “How do I get this to go differently?”
And start noticing, “What am I sustaining by staying here as I am?”
That question doesn’t demand action.
It demands honesty.
And honesty is the first thing avoidance can’t negotiate with.
A Leadership Truth
Leadership isn’t proven by how much you can endure.
It’s revealed by what you stop carrying once you can see clearly.
Negotiating with avoidance doesn’t fail because you lack courage or clarity.
It fails because it quietly asks you to keep abandoning yourself so others don’t have to grow.
That trade-off always looks reasonable in the moment.
And it always extracts its cost later.
Maturity doesn’t mean staying longer, explaining better, or holding more calmly.
It means recognizing when responsibility has become one-sided — and refusing to call that patience.
Not everything that feels stable is healthy.
Not everything that looks calm is integrated.
And not every situation requires more effort.
Some require less negotiation with what you already know.
