I coach people on their relationship with their bodies, their habits, and their avoidance, and I'd be misrepresenting myself if I let that sound like I've finished working on my own. I haven't. Some of what I understand about avoidance, I understand because I've watched myself do it, repeatedly, in ways that took a long time to notice.
As an athlete, training was never something I questioned. More sessions, more discipline, more output, all read as unambiguously good. It took years after competing to notice that some of that discipline had been doing double duty, keeping me fit and also keeping me too occupied to sit with things I didn't want to look at directly.
That's the pattern I see most often now, in clients and in myself. Not laziness, not lack of discipline, the opposite. A fitness practice, a work schedule, a habit of constant self-improvement, all genuinely good things, arranged in a way that leaves no room for a harder question to surface. Busy enough that you never quite have to ask how you're actually doing.
I don't say this as someone who has solved it. I still notice, more often than I'd like, that I reach for a workout or a task list on days when what I actually need is to sit still with something uncomfortable. The habits that make me good at coaching are sometimes the same habits I use to avoid being coached myself.
What's helped, slowly, isn't willpower. It's getting more precise about naming what's happening in the moment. Not "I'm avoiding my feelings," which is too vague to act on, but something closer to "I'm choosing this task right now because sitting with that conversation feels harder." That level of specificity doesn't make the avoidance go away, but it makes it visible, and visible avoidance is at least a choice rather than a reflex.
I think this is part of why I don't present myself as an authority who has arrived at some settled place with his own body and habits. I'm a fellow traveler in this, further along on some parts of the path than others, and still catching myself mid-avoidance more often than I'd like to admit publicly.
I don't think avoidance is a moral failing, in myself or in clients. It usually made sense once, as a way of coping with something that felt too big to face directly at the time. The work isn't to shame it out of existence. It's to notice it earlier, name it more specifically, and every so often, choose the harder, quieter thing instead of the busy, familiar one.
I don't always choose it. Some weeks I still let the busyness win. But I notice sooner than I used to, and that noticing, imperfect as it is, has been the most honest progress I can report.