The One Thing You Avoid

Linda Villines 0:00

You have a list of 20 things you’re working on right now. Your sleep schedule, the 30-day vagus nerve reset, finishing that generational trauma book. But there’s that one thing, and you know what that one thing is. It causes you dread, that makes you cringe, that feels like too much, too shameful, too overwhelming, that you just avoid, avoid, avoid, and you turn your back on. And you tell yourself that you’ll just deal with it later. When you have more time, more resources, you feel stronger, feel more ready. And you’ve done enough healing or self-improvement to no longer be in denial about the thing, but you still keep it at bay. And your reasoning seems sound. Do you think going there, opening the door, facing it, saying the thing out loud, talking about it or dealing with it now would destabilize you or be too stressful or open something you’re not ready to face or you don’t want to face. And so you just think you’re protecting your piece by avoiding it, or just calling it not worthy of your time and your attention this season. Well, the truth is your peace isn’t being protected by putting off the thing or calling it too much or insignificant or labeling yourself not capable of handling it. When you refuse to look at something that influences you in your life, it doesn’t just vanish. It doesn’t disappear because you turn your back on it. It actually gets worse because the energetic, emotional, mental, and physical cost of avoidance and self-rejection just accumulates. And the thing that you think doesn’t actually matter because you’re not seeing it ends up being the thing that’s running your life anyway. I’m Linda Villines. Welcome to the Simple Source, where we go beyond surface level self-help to show you how to actually heal with joy and ease as your highest and sore self. And by the end of this episode, you’re going to understand why all the myths that reinforce the lie that you are not capable of facing the uncomfortable or tough thing, or that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, they’re not serving you, but they’re stunting you. And you’re gonna know why the thing you think you’re protecting your peace from is actually the only thing that can free you and cultivate the kind of peace that you don’t have to constantly manage.

Myth One: Ignorance Feels Like Peace

Linda Villines 2:17

So let’s start by unpacking that myth that ignorance is bliss, that if you don’t look at it, it can’t hurt you today. And so many people live by this. Don’t tell me, don’t show me. I’d rather be deaf, blind, dumb than involved or honest or accountable to my whole self. And you think avoiding the thing that you think will stress you out is freeing your energy when in fact, avoidance is an active daily behavior with a real cost. It’s not free, it’s not passive. Because to avoid something, you have to steer conversations, you have to redirect your focus, you have to sense the topic approaching, and then you have to change lanes. Or you keep yourself busy, right? At that exact hour of the night when you know that that thought or feeling or memory is likely going to get activated. And all of that is work and labor and stressful. So that’s not free or peaceful to your mind or to your nervous system. And every time you root around that thing that you’re avoiding, you’re sending a signal of confirmation to your system that something is wrong. Because when there is truly nothing wrong, you don’t need evasive tactics. Your energy is used for restoration, not vigilance. So you may think that avoidance is allowing you peace, but it’s actually creating tension, friend. I spent most of my life in avoidance of my true feelings, of my true needs, my true desires, of my deepest hurts, of my shame and my shadows and my trauma and my guilt. And it was just distract, deny, focus on something else, right? Pretend you’re fine, pretend you’re happy, pretend you’re healthy, pretend you’re not struggling or suffering. And when I turned 30, my body just collapsed because the cost of suppressing all of that for decades was just too great, and my body had had enough. For some people, it’s chronic neck tension or persistent digestive issues or anxiety or depression or an injury that never fully heals or insomnia or skin issues or the inability to cry or a temper that rages at everything, or workaholism, or addictions to alcohol, or mood-altering substances, to shopping, to food. But the thing you’re avoiding never disappears. It just becomes the thing that’s silently running your life because the energy of what you’re avoiding still has to move somewhere because energy’s nature is movement. And so it then transfers to your mind, to your body, to your habits, to your choices, to your lifestyle.

Myth Two: Time Does Not Heal

Linda Villines 4:51

Now, here is the second myth that makes avoidance so alluring. Time heals all wounds. We’ve all heard that everywhere, all the time. And it comes off as wisdom, but really it’s ignorance. Okay. People say, give it time, give it distance. And then you believe that if you just leave it alone, it’ll eventually be a non-issue. That’s false. Just ask your subconscious, ask your nervous system, your body, your soul if they have forgotten because they haven’t. They’ve just adapted, but never forgotten. The truth is the issue, the feeling, the trauma, the memory that you are avoiding hasn’t gotten any smaller. It has not shrunk into invisibility with time or distance. It’s just become part of your lifestyle, part of your mental patterns, part of your emotional patterns, part of how you hold your body, part of how your body holds itself, how it braces, part of how your nervous system operates with and without stress. It shows up every time that you get irrationally irritated by something small or the reaction that’s just out of proportion to the thing and you know it, right? When you’re exhausted by mid-afternoon on days when nothing has really happened, when you fill every silence, when that conversation lulls, when the room gets quiet and then you get bored and a podcast comes on, a reality TV show goes on, when your weekends are just scheduled down to the hour, an opening pops up, you fill it immediately. Or when you wake up with neck tension for no reason, or when you’re still constipated after all of that fiber. And because you’ve been trying to heal, you’ve been trying to grow, you sense that something is amiss. Even though you’re taking the right supplements, you’re taking the right classes, you’re reading the right books, you’re quote unquote doing the work, and still you can sense that something is missing, something’s off. And then you have that thought, right? You don’t say it out loud, but you feel like an imposter. You think everyone else is just further along than you are when you’re still quietly dealing with digestive issues or sleep issues or anxiety or perfectionism or irritability or anger issues or relationship issues, or you’re just, or you’re just simply not as healthy and happy as you want everyone else to believe that you are. That sense that something is off, that sense of being an imposter because you feel like you’re not where you should be after all the effort and growth comes from the fact that you are tired. Your body is tired, your mind is tired. You’re running an enormous amount of background processing to keep that one thing that you’re avoiding out of your sight, that one truth, that one feeling, that one symptom from reaching your awareness. And background processing, of course, requires energy, whether or not you ever look at the thing that you are hiding from. Suppressing something doesn’t turn off your system’s monitoring. It actually turns it up. The part of your brain that tracks your safety stays on alert, specifically because you’ve forbidden it from looking into that room, right? So that room that you think becomes invisible because you ignore it actually has this like giant internal sign on it that reads danger, mega important stuff in here. Treat with vigilance, keep managing, do not forget, regardless of how much time has passed or distance has accumulated. And that’s the layer under the time heals all wounds myth. You may think that avoidance is a character flaw, is you being lazy or weak, but avoidance is actually an active trauma response that was formed when you lacked the safety and support or capacity to process what was happening. So then avoiding it was intelligent. Your system was doing exactly what it needed to do for your survival at the time, but the responses outlived the original conditions that created it. And time cannot resolve that because time was never the thing that your system needed for resolution, for release, for liberation. Love is, you know, I had insomnia for decades. I rarely slept as a child, as a teenager, and slept terribly when I became an adult. Like every night when sleep was supposed to come, anxiety would surface, dread and fear would surface, depression would surface, looping thoughts and awful thoughts about myself would surface. Shame and guilt and anger and resentment would surface. Restlessness would surface. And so I became a night owl to distract myself from all of that. Year after year, decade after decade. Instead of sleeping, I would distract myself with creativity, with art, with television, HGTV, the Food Network, 3 a.m., 4 a.m., with experiences brought on by mood-altering substances. Anything to not feel my feelings and see myself. And then during the day, I would pretend that I was fine. But the depression and anxiety and fear and dread and negative thoughts and shame and guilt and anger and resentment and restlessness would just show up anyway. It showed up in my friendships and how I treated myself and how little patience I had with strangers and every choice I made and habit I formed. It was all actually rooted in everything that I was avoiding. And then by the time I turned 30, like I said, not only did my body collapse, but perfectionism was a daily driver, and overachieving was a daily driver, and deep dissatisfaction with myself and my life was a daily driver. My relationship with food was not healthy. My relationship with myself was so not healthy because the state of my mind and my body was strained, overcompensating, stressed all the time, and unconsciously trying to manage all of the things that needed to be resolved, even though I was consciously refusing to resolve it. When you spend your energy keeping your truth out of sight, your nervous system doesn’t register that as peace. Not at all. It registers as unresolved stress, which is essentially a threat to your system and something that it has to manage on its own because you’re not supporting it. And what it does is the reason everything feels 10 times worse in your head than it ever really is in reality.

Myth Three: Avoidance Doesn’t Affect Your Health

Linda Villines 11:21

So here’s the third myth: 3A and 3B. Your body stays silent while it manages your health. And what you refuse to look at doesn’t affect your body. So then it doesn’t impact your daily life. Now I say this a lot on my show because it’s true, but your brain runs on prediction and it doesn’t wait around to discover what’s happening before it engages. You know, that’s not a great tactic for an ancient organ designed for survival first. So it forecasts like continuously, using whatever information is immediately available in your environment. And your primary environment is you, by the way, your feelings, your thoughts, your beliefs. So when you actively avoid something, when you distract yourself so you don’t have to face a feeling or a thought or a physical symptom or a problem, you essentially shut down that current data stream or the environmental cues. And a predicting brain, rerouted away from data, doesn’t just, you know, sit around with his feet up and go blank. A predicting brain predicts and it will predict the worst case scenario because its primary job is keeping you alive and safe. So the catastrophic version seems like the safest assumption because fear will hopefully mobilize you towards safety. But fear is rarely based on present moment facts. Fear is often born from that space that you create by turning away from the true thing and giving your brain that loves to predict the worst just to keep you safe, a reason to fear. And so then there’s that ongoing scary story in your head, right? That’s connected to the thing that you’re avoiding that just makes you want to avoid it even more. Not based on reality, but based on conditioned survival fear. And you cannot resolve what you refuse to notice. And you can’t honestly notice what you are actively bracing against. So this is why I created an app called Finally Paying Attention. And for seven days, finally paying attention just taps you on your shoulder a few times a day with one question. What’s actually happening in your body right now? So it’s not like a complicated program. There’s no practice that you need to keep up with because each check-in just takes seconds, literally seconds, inside your real day. And by day seven, you’re not guessing anymore. Your own data is going to show you what your body has been carrying, what your body has been trying to tell you, where your truth is, because your body is your most honest instrument of truth. So instead of guessing the worst, finally paying attention brings to light what’s really true. So you can meet your reality with facts and not assumptions. And when you finally turn toward your truth with accurate, unimagined signals, your brain finally receives honest and exact sensory information. And its predictive model then updates instantly. That catastrophic story doesn’t have to arrive because there’s no need. There’s no need to mobilize you to safety. It has real facts. There’s no need to tangle with your anxiety or your fears because direct observation makes all of the imagined worst-case scenarios irrelevant. How many times have you made assumptions about people, right? About that odd blemish and you went down the Google and Reddit rabbit hole and just like saw pictures burnt into your memory that you wish you never saw. And then someone with some expertise looked at it and was like, oh, you know what, that thing, that’s actually just totally normal. Or you realize that person wasn’t ghosting you at all. They were just busy with valid life shit. We’ve all done it. We’ve assumed the worst without ever holding it up to the truth. And you live with that assumption as if it’s your reality. You get upset with that friend or your coworker for two days while you’re silently telling them off in your head, silently fuming with anger or hurt or resentment, avoiding them because you think they’re avoiding you, or you hold off on that dermatologist appointment because you don’t want to be told the worst. You just tell yourself, don’t think about it. But internally, you’re so stressed about it for days, weeks, months, longer because the assumption is ruling you, not the truth. And then time passes. And as we know, time doesn’t make it better, it makes it worse. And eventually you develop a new belief, which is that you don’t have what it takes to face it. And this isn’t the last myth that we’re going to unravel.

Myth Four: Facing the Truth is Too Much

Linda Villines 15:55

That belief that facing the truth is gonna destroy you. Your composure, your stability is gonna crack, your sense of self will shatter, your relationships will end, the grief will swallow you whole, and you won’t recover. And you tell yourself you lack the strength, you lack the courage, you lack the will, but that’s just more fear speaking for you like it actually knows what it’s talking about, but it doesn’t. Your wounds do not define you, they do not limit you. They are not your personality, they are not your character. The truth is you’re holding the full weight of the thing that you’re avoiding right now. Whatever you’re avoiding is already in you. It’s a part of you. It is a part of your patterns and your reality and your choices. You have been living with it every single second of every day, regardless of how much you have suppressed it and tried to ignore it and make it not a big deal. But avoidance never erased the weight and truth and reality of it. Avoidance just forces you to carry it blindly, right? Without conscious direction. So it’s in your sleep, it’s in your neck, it’s in your reactions, it’s in your patterns and your habits and your outbursts and your short temper and your afternoon slump and your 2 a.m. still awake in bed, doom scrolling. Facing the thing doesn’t actually give you any new weight or more heaviness. It gives you freedom from blindness, from worst-case scenarios, from anxiety and unfounded irritability and irrational fears. When you face your truth, there’s actually a specific biological mechanism that happens. So when you meet a feeling or a memory while present and resourced and feeling safe, your brain reorganizes that memory. It re-registers that feeling or that experience without that original survival alarm because you survived the contact. And so your brain goes, great, this is not dangerous then. We can file this one differently. That’s how memory physically operates, like completely separate from positive thinking, okay? The emotional charge is never going to discharge through time or strategic management, like your avoidance. It only discharges through contact, meaning through feeling, through acknowledgement, through acceptance, through saying the thing out loud without flinching from it, through honoring the experience by choosing to learn something meaningful and positive from it. I was so ashamed of my past because of all the trauma and all the self-hatred that arose from it. My parents were invalidating in every way. So I did not develop self-worth or the type of confidence you gain from being unconditionally loved, no matter what you did or said. And so my confidence was performed. It was armor, it was defensive, and I didn’t really talk about how traumatic my childhood and upbringing was for a long time because I just wanted everyone to think I was normal, happy. And when I would share bits and pieces of my past, it was selective and it never felt clean because the sharing didn’t come from peace with my past or peace with myself. It came from the wound, from the shame, from the guilt, from the pent-up rage or resentment or hatred, or you know, the wanting to make it seem worse or not as bad for whatever reason served my defenses at the time. And then I would just ruminate on what I revealed about myself. I would pick it apart, and that would cause more anxiety, more fear. What do they think of me now? Will I still have a friend or a lover? And all of that happened because I had no relationship with the thing I had been avoiding. It had become this thing in my mind that I had separated myself from. So when it would surface, it just came out mangled, right? Not clean, distorted, not authentic, not satisfying. And it didn’t provide me any peace. So then that was just more fuel, just to keep avoiding, denying. But what 15 years of healing taught me is, is the thing that you avoid the most is the thing that needs your love the most. That’s all it needs. It doesn’t need you to fix yourself because you’re not broken. It doesn’t need you to be the strongest person you know or the smartest or the bravest or the wisest. It just needs your love and everything I used to avoid, all the shame and guilt and anger, resentment, all the trauma, all of it. When I simply turn toward it with love, that was always the most healing thing. Every time. Just loving it. Because loving it automatically makes the rest of it easier. Because when your body feels seen, when those parts of you feel seen, then they no longer have a reason to shout through symptoms, through addictions, through irrational fears, through a short temper, through unhealthy attachments and your relationships because your subconscious and your consciousness are finally aligned, right? Your subconscious doesn’t need to recreate the wound because you’re looking straight at it with love. You’re not going to collapse by facing your shadow and your darkness. You’re going to rise, friend, because they give you your spine back. When you stop rejecting yourself, your whole self comes back online. That means the strength that you didn’t think that you had, the courage that you thought you lacked, come back online because your wholeness is no longer distorted by self-abandonment. All the 20 things that you’re managing right now, your sleep schedule, that 30 day Vegas nerve reset, finishing that generational trauma book, all of that is real effort. But they’re not resolving the thing that needs you to love it the most. I hope that now you can see what that single item that you leave off your list actually represents. That one thing isn’t an exception, standing in the way. Of your healing. It’s the exact center of it. Everything that you have maneuvered around it so that it stays hidden was an attempt to establish a picture of healing that isn’t really possible if you are not operating from your true wholeness. Because avoidance doesn’t cohere your system, it distorts it. Every time you turn away from a feeling or a trauma or a physical signal, you send a message to your subconscious. This part of me is unlovable and dangerous to see. That’s why you’ve been on a healing or self-improvement journey for years or more. And you’re still not feeling like your most badass highest self 24-7 every day. Because you can’t truly integrate what you’re healing while you’re actively abandoning a part of yourself to that forbidden corner where thee shall never look. Self-abandonment and healing are not friends. They do not cohabitate. They don’t take the same bus to school because they don’t lead to the same destination. If you’ve been doing the work but still feel stuck, like no matter how much healing, manifesting, or personal growth you invest in, or spiritual practices you try, something just isn’t clicking. You’re not alone and you’re not failing. The truth is, most teachings and approaches are outdated and only scratch the surface. My book, Unconditional, You Are Perfect as You Are, helps you understand exactly why things haven’t been clicking and how to resolve the root of why you’re struggling. Unconditional self-love isn’t just a nice idea if you truly want to be free. It’s the missing piece and the foundation for everything you desire. And you don’t have to do or figure everything out on your own. You deserve clear, comprehensive, and empowering step-by-step guidance in self-love, self-healing, and spiritual growth. The Source Membership gives you daily support and transformative tools to actually start living your healthiest and happiest life today and every day. 100% of members who follow the program improve their mental, emotional, and physical health by over 50% in one year alone. Real mind, body, soul transformation is possible, and you can achieve it with joy and ease instead of stress and struggle. So, as a thank you for being a listener, you can get 75% off your first month of membership with the code podcast promo. Your links are in the show notes. Now, let’s get back to the episode.

Why Unconditional Self-Love Heals

Linda Villines 24:36

We have been taught that avoidance is wise, is a viable, even healthy way to manage life, but your life doesn’t need management. It needs you whole, self-sourced, self-loving, accountable to the parts of yourself that need you to turn to them, to see them and say you deserve love too. Trauma responses are so normalized and we don’t question them enough. We turn them into anecdotes and generational warnings. And that’s why when someone shows up in the world as their whole self, unapologetic, flawed, and real, people feel awe, inspiration, and envy because your wholeness is being mirrored back to you. Unconditional self-love is being mirrored back to you. And your soul recognizes its own truth and then just nudges you, right? Goes, This is true for you too, dear. There’s nothing in your past, no feeling, no memory, no trauma, no event that will not give up its tension when you love it. The tension, the repeating issues, the anxiety, the sleepless nights, the faking happiness is all your body, your subconscious, your own being communicating to you that what you don’t want to look at is still looking at you. And when you return that attention with love, that’s when the healing that you have been seeking in that course and in that book and in that practice can actually begin. The more you avoid your truth, the more you avoid your healing. You can’t choose to turn away from yourself and heal yourself at the same time. Thank you so much for being here today. I hope this episode awakened you, inspired you, and reminded you of what’s possible when you love, heal, and free yourself and reclaim your highest truth and power. If this show has transformed or enlightened your self-love, growth, and healing journey, please like, save, and share this episode and leave a positive review on Apple or Spotify. And subscribe to be reminded of new episodes. Your support is deeply appreciated and truly helps this show so much. And if today’s episode resonated with you, don’t stop here. Go deeper. My book, Unconditional, You Are Perfect As You Are, expands on these teachings and gives you the missing framework about self-love that no one is talking about. So get your copy today to start reading and loving yourself more. And if you’re ready for the ultimate healing journey with daily instruction and guidance from me, I’d love to see you inside the Source membership. The only holistic and comprehensive step-by-step self-healing program that is proven to work. Remember, you were never meant to struggle or wait for what is already yours. It’s time to claim everything you want and more. All the links are in the show notes. I’ll see you next time.