#2 The Affect Avoidance Model

Our second episode highlights the Affect Avoidance Model, a universal and nondenominational way to look at the problems treatable with psychotherapy.

Key Points

• The affect avoidance model views any psychological dysfunction that can be addressed through psychotherapy as the result of the mind’s automatic tendency to avoid the conscious experience of negative affects.

• Avoidance of affects appears to be a guiding principle in the mind’s built-in strategies for adapting to life. This leads to unhealthy avoidance but also leaves opportunities for facing and detoxifying painful feelings long held out of consciousness.

• Avoidance patterns in the form of EDPs are triggered by recognition of a circumstance associated with anticipated negative affect. The emotional approach to resolution is to prevent this system from activating avoidance strategies.

• EDPs embody three types of avoidance strategy: dysfunctional patterns of behavior, helpers aimed at biasing free will toward implementing the dys- functional behavior, and involuntary symptoms like anxiety and depres- sion, that also serve to avoid affects. The behavioral approach to treatment seeks to change these patterns of thought and behavior.

• Helpers include primary emotions like fear, conscience-based emotions including shame and guilt, automatic thoughts, and impulses.

• In addition to dysfunctional behaviors designed to avoid affects directly, the mind may seek to implement childlike plans to influence the therapist in the hope of solving unfinished business from early life. In doing so, the aim is to avoid the pain of disappointment.

• All therapies exhibit the same structure consisting of tension between the desire to change in positive ways and the nonconscious problem solver’s efforts to avoid change. This tension becomes the backdrop against which issues are revealed and affects come to the surface where they can heal.

• The affect avoidance model unifies different therapies by focusing on change processes. In doing so, methods from different therapies can be chosen pragmatically and put to work in a cyclical alternation between emotional healing and behavior change.