Escaping Pain Often Deepens the Suffering
The attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain. — Gabor Maté
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
Where does this idea show up in your life right now?
The Paradox at the Heart of Avoidance
Gabor Maté’s line points to a painful paradox: the very strategies we use to outrun discomfort often become the engine of ongoing distress. At first, avoidance looks like relief—turning away from grief, numbing anxiety, or refusing to feel shame—but that relief is typically short-lived. Soon enough, what was avoided returns with added force, now accompanied by the consequences of suppression. From there, the quote invites a shift in focus. Instead of treating pain as an enemy to defeat, Maté suggests we examine how our resistance to it amplifies suffering, much like struggling in quicksand makes sinking more likely.
How the Mind Learns to Fear Feeling
Once avoidance becomes a habit, the mind starts pairing certain emotions with danger. A difficult memory, a tightness in the chest, or a lonely weekend can become cues that trigger immediate escape behaviors—scrolling, working, drinking, overthinking, or shutting down. This creates a feedback loop: the brain learns that the feeling was intolerable because we acted as if it were. In that way, the attempt to escape pain doesn’t just postpone it; it trains the nervous system to sound the alarm faster next time. Over time, the threshold for discomfort shrinks, and ordinary stressors begin to feel unmanageable.
Short-Term Relief, Long-Term Cost
Avoidance works in the short term, which is precisely why it becomes so sticky. A person who feels socially anxious may cancel plans and feel calmer within minutes, but that calm comes at a price: isolation, self-criticism, and the creeping belief that connection is unsafe. Similarly, emotional eating or substance use can mute distress quickly while quietly building new layers of pain—health issues, guilt, conflict, or dependence. As this pattern continues, the original pain is no longer the only problem. The secondary pain—regret, disconnection, and diminished self-trust—accumulates, validating Maté’s warning that escape can multiply suffering.
Trauma, Numbing, and Protective Adaptations
Maté’s broader work often emphasizes that many coping behaviors began as intelligent protections, especially for people shaped by trauma. When a child’s environment makes certain emotions unsafe—anger that provokes punishment, sadness that brings ridicule—the child learns to disconnect from those feelings to survive. Later, the adult may keep using the same strategy, even when the danger has passed. This is where compassion becomes essential: avoidance isn’t merely weakness or lack of willpower. It’s frequently an old survival program. Yet what once protected can later imprison, because numbing also dulls joy, intimacy, and a felt sense of meaning.
What Acceptance Changes in the Body
If resistance fuels suffering, then turning toward experience can loosen it. Approaches like mindfulness-based therapies and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy often work by reducing experiential avoidance—learning to notice sensations, thoughts, and emotions without immediately acting to eliminate them. The goal is not to “like” pain, but to stop treating it as an emergency that must be escaped. As people practice staying with discomfort in manageable doses, the body can discover that feelings rise, peak, and fall. That discovery is transformative: pain may still be present, but the extra suffering created by frantic struggle begins to drop away.
Choosing Responsiveness Over Escape
Ultimately, Maté’s quote points toward a different skill: responding to pain rather than fleeing it. This might look like naming grief aloud, asking for support, setting boundaries, or making room for anger without turning it into harm. In everyday life, it can be as simple as pausing when the urge to numb appears and asking, “What am I trying not to feel right now?” With that shift, pain becomes information instead of a threat. The irony is that when we stop running, we often suffer less—not because life stops hurting, but because we no longer add the extra burden of self-escape on top of what already hurts.