Hi there everybody. How was your week? It's been a bit hot, isn't it? I'm glad it's cooled down a bit now so that we can maybe sit outside in a beer garden or something with our friends and not worry about catching fire or some burning a shiny, baldy heads if you've got one of those as well. But of course, that's with the proviso that meeting up with friends isn't too anxiety-provoking.

I mean, it's a lot of quite lonely folk who do actually have plenty of friends. They just avoid seeing them.

But for some people, feeling lonely might seem a more preferable emotion than the fear of judgment, which comes out as social anxiety.

And that's the same for other emotions as well. If you feel resentful, or if you'll take an advantage of and underappreciated,

it could be you're avoiding confrontation of some sort. So it's a good idea to look underneath what's going on sometimes,

because avoidance is the foundation to pretty much every phobia that you can put a name to.

The more that you avoid something, the more your instincts learn that it needs to be avoided.

And our instincts really only have one way of telling us what to

avoid and what to approach. And that's with the fight or flight response. We see a lot of that

with clients who have so-called anger problems because there are multiple layers to our emotions

and without some emotional intelligence, when you ask, how did it make you feel when your

wife said you couldn't go on that stag weekend, all they might see is anger?

When actually the reason they were angry was because of something else.

The anger was a response to feeling hurt, controlled, the disappointment that she doesn't trust him.

That's the initial emotion and anger is the response.

And when we can see that, we can hopefully tone it down a bit so that we can sit and have the conversation about trust and love and faith in each other rather than storm out of the house in a hoof.

But if we don't open up about how we feel, then we avoid it all because we fear judgment or maybe maybe see any other emotion, except anger, as some sort of weakness.

But of course, it isn't.

But if we have this cultural association between emotion and vulnerability, then as a society we learn that emotions must be dangerous and need to be avoided. But avoiding things makes our world smaller and smaller. When we avoid things that poke our anxiety, not only does that fuel the fear of the things, but it also reduces our comfort zone until the only safe place we've got is under the duvet.

So there are a couple of things you can do once you acknowledge that you might have this tendency,

and you've maybe identified some lower down, deeper emotions that have fuelled it.

Some things need breaking down then into bite-sized pieces.

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