When Your Go-To Is Avoidance: What to Do Instead After Trauma
Written by Elizabeth Bird, PhDOne of the core features of PTSD is avoidance.
People who have experienced trauma often cope by avoiding:
Internal experiences like emotions, memories, and body sensations
External situations that feel unsafe, anxiety-provoking, or reminiscent of what happened
This makes a lot of sense. Avoidance is a form of self-protection. It’s an attempt to experience less distress and to stay safe.
In the short term, it often works.
In the long term, it usually comes at a cost.
How Avoidance Shrinks Life Over Time
Most people eventually notice a painful pattern:
even though avoidance can bring temporary relief, life starts to get smaller.
You can continue avoiding — and many people do for years — but often there’s a growing awareness that:
This isn’t how you want to live
The cost is starting to outweigh the relief
Something needs to change, even though that idea feels scary
Breaking out of avoidance is scary. It involves risk. You might worry:
That your anxiety will spike
That something bad will happen
That you’ll become overwhelmed and never feel better again
These fears are very common — and understandable.
The good news is that psychologists have decades of research and clinical experience showing that people can move from avoidance to approach, and that doing so is one of the most effective ways to reclaim your life after trauma.
From Avoiding to Approaching: How Change Actually Happens
Stopping avoidance doesn’t mean jumping into the deep end or forcing yourself into unsafe situations.
This work is done:
Gradually
Collaboratively
With support
A therapist will never ask you to do something that is objectively unsafe. What does happen, though, is a process of re-tuning your danger radar.
Trauma teaches the brain and body to overestimate danger. Therapy helps recalibrate that system by gently testing your fears and observing what actually happens — not to prove that nothing bad could ever happen, but to update the nervous system about what is likely happening now.
Often people discover that:
The experience is not as bad as anticipated, and/or
The feared outcome doesn’t occur
Over time, the brain learns to better balance realistic risk with the ability to stay engaged in life.
A Concrete Example: Avoidance After a Car Accident
Imagine someone who has been in a car accident.
Afterward, they might avoid:
Driving altogether
Riding as a passenger
Having others in the car
Certain roads, neighborhoods, or highways
Driving at night, in the rain, or in traffic
They might also:
Feel anxious when seeing cars that resemble the ones involved in the accident
Avoid TV shows or movies that include crashes
Engage in “safety behaviors” like gripping the wheel tightly, constantly scanning, or restricting when and how they drive
You can see how, over time, this can seriously interfere with daily life.
By the time someone seeks therapy, there’s often a quiet realization:
“I’m nervous to do things differently, but I don’t want to keep living like this.”
What Approaching Looks Like in Practice
Approach happens step by step, with repetition.
For example:
Sitting in the parked car in the driveway
Driving around the block during the day
Driving the same route at dusk or in the rain
Gradually increasing distance, complexity, and conditions
Eventually driving with others or in more challenging situations
These practices are usually done frequently — often daily or close to it — so the brain has repeated opportunities to learn something new.
The goal isn’t to convince yourself that driving is perfectly safe. It’s to help your nervous system relearn how to tolerate uncertainty without shutting your life down.
Over time, the internal message shifts from:
“I can’t do this”
to
“I can do this — even knowing there’s some risk.”
That shift is powerful.
Who This Kind of Therapy Helps
This approach works whether:
You experienced a single traumatic event
You had multiple traumas
You lived through a prolonged period of unsafety
This work is not about promising that trauma will never happen again. Therapy can’t — and shouldn’t — offer that kind of guarantee. Instead, it helps recalibrate the balance between acknowledging that difficult things can happen and allowing yourself to fully live your life anyway. PTSD pulls that balance sharply toward danger; therapy helps bring it back toward reality.
The goal is to help your brain and body recognize that the trauma is over and you are now safe enough to live, even in a world that will never be entirely risk-free.
The Bottom Line
Avoidance is an understandable and protective response to trauma — but it often keeps people stuck.
You don’t have to force yourself.
You don’t have to do it alone.
And you don’t have to live forever in a world shaped by what happened to you.
Healing is about teaching your brain and body the difference between then and now, so you can live fully in today. Learn more about therapy for trauma.
