Emotional Avoidance Quotes

I just want you inside, baby, we don't need to talk about promises.

Arrogance is a way for a person to cover up shame. After years of arrogance, the arrogant person is so out of touch, she truly doesn't know who she is. This is one of the greatest tragedies of shame cover-ups: not only does the person hide from others, she also hides from herself.

Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to - alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person - you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.

It doesn't matter if the truth is right there out in front of your eyes. You will find a way, a mechanism, in order to keep your own system of denial. So as I always say it, denial is a river that runs in the - in Egypt. So we became very good in that.

I think, on both sides of the camera or the novel: Distraction. I'm obsessed with: Can I get this actress or my third act to work? I'm distracted. I'm interested in that so I don't sit home and think, "Gee, life is meaningless. We're all going to die. The universe is pulling apart at breakneck speed."

Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away. That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.

Mostly in life people are trying not to have emotions.

Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.

'Crazy-busy' is a great armor, it's a great way for numbing. What a lot of us do is that we stay so busy, and so out in front of our life, that the truth of how we're feeling and what we really need can't catch up with us.

A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.

But... what about us? What about the past?" she asks blankly. "The past isn't real. it's just a dream," I say. "Don't mention the past.

Our tendency is to run from the painful realities or try to change them as soon as possible. But cure without care makes us into rulers, controllers, manipulators.

We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.

Someone who does not run toward the allure of love walks a road where nothing lives.

People would rather be deceived than have the truth cause them anxiety

I have a tendency to check out when the stakes are too high in a movie.

People couldn't bear to go on living if they faced every cold truth about themselves.

In American culture we are supposed to take a pill when we're depressed or in grief as opposed to actually feeling.

Whatever I thought might hold me back, I avoided. I crossed girls off my list, except as tools for my sexual needs.

When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

If something's stressful I've always tended to just find ways of avoiding it rather than rising to meet it or try to change it.

For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.