Experiential Avoidance Is Stealing Your Joy
Accepting the bad parts of life will let you have the good parts too.
Posted May 6, 2026 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
This post is part one of a series.
The phrase “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” is an oft-said phrase used to diminish or thwart the inevitable torrent of disappointment in a situation where one must accept a really unpleasant truth if they want to get something they want. The phrase grows from the idea that you cannot have a cake, meaning continue to have a whole cake, while at the same time eating it. Obviously, as you keep eating the cake, the cake disappears, unfortunately. Of course, you can have a slice of cake and still have cake left over for another day, but that’s not the point. Maybe a better way to say it is “You can’t go to Disneyland without it breaking the bank and waiting in crazy long lines” or “You can’t drive the freeways in Los Angeles without getting stuck in traffic.” Neither is as catchy as the original. Either way, if you want one, the other is going to be there whether you like it or not.
Life, and anxiety recovery, is no different. If given the choice, we humans will always want to have all of the good without the bad. All paycheck, no work. All cupcake, no calories. But for those in anxiety treatment, like for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and Phobias, people struggle with this sticky reality in ways that amount to a road block toward recovery. The unavoidable part of the human experience is that a life worth living, and goals worth pursuing, will always be accompanied by struggle, hardship, emotional or physical pain, failure, and concerted effort. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) acknowledges this concept and calls it “Experiential Avoidance.”
What Is Experiential Avoidance?
Experiential avoidance describes the compulsive gymnastics and emotional battle to avoid the inevitable hard parts of something. It is the way you strain your emotions and body so that you don’t feel anxiety in a situation that naturally and understandably would make someone (or at least you) anxious. It is the mental tap dancing you do to make sure you only have “right” thoughts when a mix of “right” and “wrong” thoughts naturally come to mind. It is regretfully saying “no” to friends or your job when you have to drive, so that you don’t have to feel anxiety or have thoughts of running someone over. The list could go on.
ACT’s concept of experiential avoidance goes hand in hand with the "struggle switch"; another ACT staple. The struggle switch is the activated effort to go out of your way to fight with a thought or feeling. For many, turning on the struggle switch is a learned response to the urge to get out of feeling pain or acknowledging a hard and unwanted reality.
For a time, maybe a long time, struggling with and against discomfort made you feel like you had control in a chaotic situation. The struggle switch is the effort you go through to edge out a “bad” feeling with something “good”, or is the battle that got you to avoidance and, perhaps, finally to compulsive behavior . Either way, it worked temporarily, but now you’re over the constant emotional side quests and are sick of the disconnected or deferred life that the struggle switch and experiential avoidance have brought.
Living Your Values Means Taking The Good With the Bad
Everything worth doing in life, including OCD and anxiety treatment, will come at some cost. Getting a college degree means spending a bunch of time studying, taking tests, reading, and likely taking out and paying back student loans. Having a great relationship comes with compromise, conflict, communication, picking your battles, and putting up with that weird thing they seemingly do all the time. Overcoming anxiety so that you can do things you want to do, and stop doing the things you do not want to do, will also cost you in the form of intentionally and repeatedly enduring uncomfortable moments with open arms. To expect to receive only the good parts without the bad parts, is not truly practicing acceptance, but is experiential avoidance and the struggle switch all over again.
For example, to try out for your high school track team means you could win a shelf full of trophies and get the admiration and respect of fellow students! But you could also be exhausted every day, have to go to school early and stay late, and possibly lose every race and have nothing to show for it. Both are possible outcomes, and unless you are a superhuman athlete and win without trying, I promise you will at least feel exhausted and have your school and weekend schedule in a tizzy for the season. But you can’t earn the trophies and glory without it.
When on the front end of therapy, especially exposure and response prevention for OCD, or ERP for anxiety and phobias, many people freeze or return to their compulsive safety responses, like checking, rumination, or avoidance, to not feel the overwhelming, painful feelings. They want the progress without the hardship.
Doing this prevents you from learning the two vital lessons of ERP treatment, that 1) your worst-case scenario is really unlikely to happen, and 2) that you can handle the feelings if you are willing to let go of them and simply let yourself experience the moment for what it is; both the good and the bad.
Every phase of recovery includes some battle with experiential avoidance. Said in another way, true acceptance is not something that happens one time, but instead is a checkpoint to routinely step through with greater confidence and faith in yourself that good will come from your efforts.
Now that you know a little about what experiential avoidance is and how it negatively impacts your anxiety recovery, check out part 2 of this post that offers a few helpful tips on how you can continue your recovery journey with as much honest acceptance, and as little experiential avoidance, as possible. With a little bravery you might give acceptance a try, and with a little practice, you might find a better life on the other side.
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Kevin Foss is a licensed therapist and the founder of the California OCD and Anxiety Treatment Center in Fullerton, CA.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.