Avoidance rarely looks like fear. It looks like caution, loyalty, and waiting for the right moment.
Imagine a man climbing toward a summit. The trail has been hard but manageable — and the peak is visible from where he stands.
Then he reaches a stream.
It's wide. Moving fast. He can't tell how deep it runs.
So he does what seems reasonable. He makes camp on the near bank and waits. He waits for the water to slow. Waits for someone to show him a better crossing. Waits until he feels ready.
He is still waiting.
Here is the hard truth about avoidance — and I've watched it operate for more than thirty years of clinical practice: camping doesn't drain the stream. The water is exactly as wide and exactly as swift whether you've been camped next to it for a week or for years.
Time passes.
The summit doesn't get closer.
And the only thing that reliably changes is that you get older on the wrong side of the water.
The Pattern
Most people who remain camped at a stream don't describe it that way. They call it sensible caution. Loyalty. Prudence. Waiting for the right moment.
And, of course, all those qualities that mask avoidance and stagnation are valuable when appropriately deployed. But when they are recruited in the service of justifying putting your life on hold, they become little more than escape routes.
Underneath each of these masks is a common pattern: making the decision to not make a decision about moving forward. What looks like waiting is actually a decision, and that decision is quietly shaping the course of their lives.
Psychologists have a name for this: experiential avoidance — an unwillingness to stay in contact with uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and the effort to arrange one's life so as to escape them. It shows up across a wide range of psychological struggles (Hayes et al., 1996).
What makes this pattern so hard to see — in ourselves and in others — is how well avoidance disguises itself. It frequently is masked by reasonable alternative explanations.
The Woman at the Threshold
She is thirty-five years old and still lives with her parents. She works as a nurse, is good at her job, and tells me she has no life outside of work. “I’m just a homebody” she confessed. Someday, one day, she would like to get married and have children. Earlier in life she wanted to be a scientist, but decided that the STEM field was super competitive, and the chance of failing was just too great. “Nursing is a great middle ground” she said with a laugh and smile.
As we spoke of her present dreams and goals she confided that the thought of intimacy with a man her own age fills her with dread, so she doesn't date. That much she freely admits, but then adds “and besides, I just haven’t found the right guy yet. There are so many losers out there you know. I don’t want to kiss a thousand frogs in order to find a prince.”
When we first began working together, she described her life using words like comfortable and content. What I heard underneath was someone who had found a position just close enough to adulthood to avoid the accusation of having failed to reach it.
She wasn't at the summit. She wasn't on the trail. She was on the near bank. And she had been there long enough that the camp had started to look like home.
The summit she is avoiding is not marriage itself. It is the version of herself who has a life — a partner, a future, a self that has been tested and is therefore real. That version of herself that could fail. Whatever the roots of her dread, it had become a reason not to try. It felt safer not to push, not to attempt to create this sort of life for herself.
The Man Society Called Devoted
Reggie is now fifty years old. He was raised by a single mother, one of five children and the youngest. Growing up he dreamt of travelling the world someday. After that he would become a wildland firefighter in Wyoming or Montana, own a little cabin and spend his free time doing what he loved most… hunting and fishing.
By the time he graduated from high school all of his siblings were out of the house and living in other states. His mother was capable and independent, but she made it clear that his staying close would mean everything to her. Perhaps he didn’t even have to move out of the house.
So he stayed, and ‘temporarily’ put life on hold.
The temporary stretched into years.
The travel, firefighting, his own home and other dreams were pushed aside by this temporary hold on life. Instead he bounced around from one odd job to another, finally landing a gig as a manager in a telemarketing firm.
Many people call him devoted, and they are correct, but that is not a complete description.
What he had also done is find a reason to hold himself back. A reason no one can criticize. His loyalty is genuine, but did it require a life put on hold in this way?
The Man Who Waded In
Mike came to therapy in his early thirties feeling empty and vaguely depressed. He was living with his parents — both accomplished professionals who had spent years pushing him toward a prestigious career. He'd dropped out of college after two years. He told himself he was free.
No demanding job. No pressure. No risk. His parents covered housing. He spent his time on video games and business schemes he never acted on. "I've got everything you could want," he told me. "I'm not stuck in a cubicle — I've got freedom."
What he had was a camp. A comfortable, well-furnished camp, with two parents keeping the supply lines open. The freedom he described was the freedom of a man who had arranged his life so that nothing was asked of him. He couldn't fail. He also couldn't grow. He was protecting himself from a test he might not pass, and from a discovery he feared more than he knew: that he might be ordinary.
What first pushed him toward the water was not steely resolve. It was circumstance.
One summer he asked his parents to fund a trip to Costa Rica — surfing, friends, a few months of exactly the freedom he claimed to already have. They said no. A friend who ran a framing crew offered him work for the season instead. He took it not out of courage but because he needed money and nothing else was available.
During that summer working as a framer something shifted. Watching a structure take shape from a pile of lumber, he felt something stir inside. Something he had not felt before, or if he had it had been forgotten and buried — how much he had loved building things as a child.
The work reawakened these feelings. It wasn't ambition. It was recognition that this was something he loved. Something worth doing.
That epiphany was real. But here is the part of the story that's easy to overlook: when the summer ended, Mike had a choice. He could have taken the pay, booked the Costa Rica trip, and after upon returning go back to his parents' house and his undemanding life.
Although a spark had been lit, there was nothing outside himself requiring that he act on it.
Mike chose to move forward. He stayed in construction. He pursued his contractor's license — a process that required sustained effort and the real risk of public failure. He started a remodeling business, which meant having skin in the game: his competency was on trial.
When his parents said that this sort of work was beneath him, he kept going. When customers showed joy at what he had built, he let that matter more than his parents' disappointment.
The spark was necessary. It showed him there was something on the other side of the stream that made it worth the risk of crossing. But the crossing itself required resolve, courage, and tenacity — chosen and re-chosen at every step.
"I thought I wanted the freedom of not having a job," he said near the end of our work together. "I didn't realize what I really wanted was the freedom of being my own man — even if that meant I might fail in the effort."
That is the sound of someone who has crossed the stream.
What If You've Never Felt a Spark?
At this point a reasonable reader might say: that's Mike's story, not mine. I haven't had a moment on a framing crew. I haven't felt anything stir. What am I supposed to do while I wait for an epiphany that may never arrive?
The first answer is harder than it sounds. Look more carefully at what you've already dismissed.
Most people, when pressed, can identify moments when something caught their attention in an unexpected way. A task that absorbed them. A problem that felt genuinely worth solving. Work that left them tired but not depleted. These moments tend to arrive quietly and then get filed away quickly.
Acting on them seems ridiculous. Risky and potentially costly.
Mike deserves real credit for not dismissing what he felt on that framing crew. He could see immediately what following it would cost — disappointing his parents, risking failure, years of hard work learning a craft. He didn't look away. That choice, small as it seemed in the moment, was the hinge on which his life turned.
The discipline most of us need is the same: notice these moments rather than dismiss them. When something unexpectedly catches hold of you, ask whether there is something there worth examining — rather than assuming it's a passing feeling not worthy of your attention.
The second answer requires something different. It requires you to do your best to soberly look at your future.
When you are sixty or seventy years old, looking back at the life you built — will you be glad you took the safe path? Will the fact that you never fully entered the arena, never tested yourself, never found out what you were made of — will that feel like wisdom? Or will it feel like loss?
The research on regret points in a clear direction. In the short run, people regret what they did more than what they failed to do. Over the long run that reverses, and the things never attempted become the regrets that linger (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995). The most enduring of all involve falling short of the person we hoped to become — not the person we felt obligated to be (Davidai & Gilovich, 2018).
A man I worked with had spent much of his life in dangerous pursuits: a combat veteran, followed by years working in the US and abroad to rescue victims of sex trafficking, all while while finding time to pursue a passion for rock climbing.
When I met him he was in his late 50s and I asked him what was behind this extraordinary drive to push himself. He responded:
"I always wanted to know how far I could be pushed. To what extremes I could be subjected to before I reached my limits."
I asked whether he had found the answer.
"I did," he said with a smile. "And I can live with what I discovered."
That sense of peace came to him at the price of risking failure. In fact, to find that peace he had to fail, to come to the point where his knees buckled, and in doing so discover his limits. That is not something you can reason yourself into. It does not come from ‘camping by the stream’, but instead by taking the risk of wading into its depths.
What Wading In Actually Looks Like
For the thirty-five-year-old woman, wading in means moving out of her parents' home. It means agreeing to dinner with a man her own age and tolerating the anxiety that produces rather than canceling and calling herself selective. It means allowing the possibility of a real life into her actual life — not all at once, not without difficulty, but allowing it.
For the fifty-year-old man, it means committing to work that requires something of him because it means something to him. It involves letting his life become something that has more risks than he has been willing to shoulder.
For most people camped at a stream, the water is not as deep or as swift as it looks from the bank. The thing feared is rarely as fatal as your fear would have you believe.
If you recognize your own stream, start smaller than you think you need to. Name it plainly — not "I've been busy" or "the timing isn't right," but the actual thing you have been avoiding. Then identify the smallest real step into the water: one phone call, one application, one honest conversation. Put a date on it. The point isn't to cross in a single stride. It's to stop treating the campsite as home.
You already know which stream you've been camping next to. The question is whether you're going to take up the challenge of crossing over.
Take the plunge. If you fail, it’s not fatal. If you succeed, life opens up in ways you never imagined.
The individuals described here are composites drawn from many years of clinical practice. Names and identifying details have been changed.
References
Davidai, S., & Gilovich, T. (2018). The ideal road not taken: The self-discrepancies involved in people's most enduring regrets. Emotion, 18(3), 439–452. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000326
Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1995). The experience of regret: What, when, and why. Psychological Review, 102(2), 379–395. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.102.2.379
Hayes, S. C., Wilson, K. G., Gifford, E. V., Follette, V. M., & Strosahl, K. (1996). Experiential avoidance and behavioral disorders: A functional dimensional approach to diagnosis and treatment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(6), 1152–1168. https
