Joe outlines a three-part method for recognizing when you’re caught in a repetitive emotional pattern:
Step 1: Notice any emotion you’re avoiding. When you reach for your phone, judge someone, or feel guilt — ask what emotion is underneath. There’s always a deeper feeling being avoided.
Step 2: Notice how you avoid that feeling. Joe uses his own example: to avoid emotional abandonment, he would either get hard and defensive, or make people dependent on him so they couldn’t leave.
Step 3: Notice how that avoidance actually brings the emotion to you. Getting hard and defensive pushes people away — creating more abandonment. Making people dependent means always being the helper, never being able to depend on anyone — creating the isolation of abandonment.
The avoidance strategy always creates the very condition it’s trying to prevent. Once you can see all three parts clearly — the avoided emotion, your avoidance strategy, and how that strategy invites the emotion — you have the awareness needed to break free.
Related Concepts
- Emotional avoidance creates the very pattern it fears
- The pattern is happening right now
- Seeing a pattern means you’re halfway through
- Fully falling in love with the avoided feeling is the quickest way to stop a negative pattern
- We engineer heartbreak to avoid the heartbreak we haven’t felt