How to Spot and Heal Covert Avoidance

So many people drift through life trying to fix issues of belonging, meaning, and productivity without realizing that they are, in fact, keeping themselves—and the important people in their lives—at a safe distance. I call this covert avoidance. On the surface you may seem fully engaged, but beneath that appearance you’re distracted: you make plans and then withdraw, set goals only to abandon them, and fail to be present with the people around you. As a result, relationships stay superficial, nothing deepens, and you may not even be aware you’re doing it. For many of us who experienced neglect or abuse as children, the capacity to form genuine connections was harmed early on. That’s a major reason so many people move through life feeling isolated, out of place, and unsure they are truly loved. The cause is usually unconscious, but with consistent practice it can be healed.
I’m not presenting myself as a clinician here but as someone who found a way back from that numbing sense of disconnection caused by trauma and the habit of keeping life at arm’s length, even when everything outwardly looked “right.” I now share a method anyone can learn to recover from those symptoms and to connect more fully with others and with life. When people withdraw on purpose, that’s straightforward avoidance. Covert avoidance is different: you may have a stable career, be sociable and interesting, have friends or even a partner, but you slip into subtle patterns that keep interactions brief and surface-level. You keep a foot out of relationships without others noticing—and sometimes without even noticing yourself. If you’ve been trying to improve your connections and nothing much changes, it could be that you are unknowingly sabotaging yourself through covert avoidance.
To be content and reach your potential you need warm, trusting bonds with others. If that idea makes you recoil, know that’s a normal response—especially for people deeply traumatized, who may genuinely be unable to manage close relationships right now. That’s okay; you can still listen and consider what you might do later to reconnect. For people with trauma who become dysregulated, socializing is stressful, and personal growth can only go so far in isolation. If you pretend your connections are real, you’re pretending your life is real. So what can be done?
First: recognize the signs. Here are some common ones:
1) You’re often surrounded by family, coworkers, or friends, yet you keep yourself a little removed. 2) You appear eager about social time but secretly don’t look forward to it. 3) You frequently say you’re too busy or too tired to follow through on plans. 4) Partners or friends complain you seem distant or uninvested even though you say and do the right things to hide it. 5) You cancel at the last minute or arrive late. 6) At social gatherings you steer conversations to be short. 7) In group settings—fundraisers, potlucks, meetings—you contribute less than others. 8) When explaining why you missed or skipped an event, you exaggerate or fabricate reasons—claiming illness, injury, traffic, or overload. 9) You tend to pick unavailable or unsuitable partners and most relationships remain shallow; the pattern repeats even if it hurts. 10) You hate disappointing people but find you do so anyway.
Some people avoid by constantly looking at their phones; others take unfulfilling jobs, delaying the life they imagine they’ll one day begin “for real.” Staying in relationships we don’t love can feel like buying time until we are “emotionally ready” to change. Often what’s really happening is avoidance that keeps dysregulation at bay by numbing or distancing from people who could help, leaving you wondering why you still feel alone.
When you learn how to soothe your triggers and reduce nervous-system dysregulation—which is especially common after trauma—you gain the ability to stay connected. Calm the reactivity and those old wounds lose their power to cut you off from your life. Do any of the covert avoidance behaviors I listed sound familiar? Do you use them to handle dysregulation: feeling clumsy, overwhelmed, spaced out, or socially anxious to the point that gatherings leave you unsettled for days? If so, consider what these avoidance strategies cost you: closeness, joy, achievements, and love. Even a small shift away from avoidance can open your life beyond the narrow box you’ve been living in.
If the idea of opening up makes you flinch, that reaction itself is avoidance and very typical for people who experienced childhood trauma. You may have learned to look fine outwardly—cheerful, competent—but to protect your inner life, you avoid anything that might trigger or drain you. A trigger here is any stimulus—internal or external—that throws your nervous system out of balance. Most people get dysregulated sometimes and can recover, but for those with early trauma it happens more easily, hits harder, and is tougher to recover from. You might notice brain fog, poor concentration, clumsiness, or emotions that feel out of proportion: classic emotional dysregulation. The good news is that re-regulation is learnable. If you master nervous-system regulation, suddenly you’ll have much more room to tolerate uncertain or mildly uncomfortable social situations. You can also learn concrete skills like boundary-setting, which allows you to attend a party or go on a date with the assurance you can exit if things get weird. Re-regulation is central to what I teach and what my courses focus on; it’s what transformed my life from being tossed about by emotions, fog, and health problems after trauma to feeling steady, clear, and able to engage.
Dysregulation can be triggered by a thought, a feeling, or an external event: criticism, exclusion, a loud noise, being left out. For someone wounded by childhood neglect, these woundings can make you feel utterly destroyed and set off periods of dysregulation that impair thinking and functioning for hours, days, or sometimes longer. That persistent disarray isn’t just mental: it’s physiological, affecting hormones, immune function, heart rate, breathing—putting you at higher risk for chronic illness, pain, depression, and other problems. If you live in a dysregulated state, your vulnerability to disease and suffering increases. People who were neglected or abused often pay a steep price because what is ordinary for most—navigating relationships and social life—can become destabilizing and dangerous-feeling for them. In the absence of knowledge, tools, or supportive people, many quietly begin to pull away. They say it’s temporary: “I just need a minute.” That brief respite helps—at first. Saying no to invitations, canceling plans, working from home, not answering phones, or keeping everything casual can give short-term relief. But these buffers ultimately smother a life because each avoided interaction reinforces the belief that social contact is unbearable.
We rationalize avoidance: “I’ll call that person next week,” “I’ll start tomorrow.” Yet the reality is stark: if you do everything possible to protect yourself from how you feel around people, you still suffer. Go in and get crushed by dysregulation, or stay away and feel crushed by loneliness—neither option wins. There is a middle path. Without connection, development freezes: outwardly you might look accomplished, but inside you carry a wounded, unmet child. I call this covert avoidance because, unlike avoidant personality disorder which is plainly noticeable, covert avoidance is subtle; you appear to function and engage while secretly holding yourself apart.
A telling sign of covert avoidance is perpetual busyness or tiredness preventing ordinary self-care—keeping a tidy home, eating properly, regular sleep, or punctuality. When avoidance affects daily functioning, it’s inwardly directed. Outward signs include chronic lateness—arriving predictably a set number of minutes late—or constantly announcing how busy you are as if occupation is a badge that excuses inconsideration. I remember being late to everything during a painful period of my life: arriving ten or twenty minutes after I said I would, joining calls a few minutes late, making people wait in the parking lot. I had plausible reasons—kids, juggling responsibilities—but I also used busyness as a shield, broadcasting it like a status symbol. That busyness was a form of covert avoidance: keeping focus on the outside world so no one looked too closely inside where I was struggling. I was ashamed to let others see my difficulties and failures, so I hid, and in doing so I shut people out. That strategy doesn’t work long-term.
That brings me to the second reason to begin healing covert avoidance now: when you open to real connection, you’ll start to see clearly what you’ve been avoiding about your life—the shame, the things that felt impossible—and stopping the hiding helps you face them. In my own story, shutting people out meant I had almost no support when things went very wrong. After a series of surgeries and complications coinciding with a separation from my kids’ father, I found myself largely alone. I spent a week in the hospital with barely any visitors; when it was time to be discharged I had to find someone to drive me home. Other patients had visitors and family support; I had to make dozens of calls before somebody would help. My meditation teacher, Paul Brown, came three times, brought food, and kept me company for an hour—bless him—but overall I had limited support because my relationships had been superficial for years. That’s the outcome of chronic avoidance: you might manage one crisis alone, but sooner or later another crisis will strip away the illusion that you’ve protected yourself. You need people you can rely on, because in difficult times practical help and emotional care come from a history of mutual connection, and that history cannot be built from superficial, distant ties.
Third reason to act now: when life gets hard you will need people who care for you—and caring relationships require time and reciprocal closeness to form. Many of us, especially those neglected in childhood, prefer to believe we can do everything on our own, but learning to ask for help, to offer it, and to set kind boundaries are ways to create lifelines. You can also support your healing by learning to calm the triggers that make closeness feel unsafe. My free course, The Daily Practice, teaches those re-regulation techniques, and reducing reactivity gives you more freedom to choose how to respond. That might mean less contact with hurtful people and more with supportive ones; as you stabilize, it becomes clearer who supports you and who doesn’t.
Finally, increase your awareness of covert avoidance by noticing when you do it. A friend once told me she brought a camera to parties so she’d have a socially acceptable reason to escape conversations that started to feel uncomfortable—she could pretend to take photos. Another person carried a pen and clipboard to appear busy and thus avoid getting pulled into longer interactions. Covert avoidance often coexists with thin or wobbly boundaries: evenings collapsed on the sofa, automatic, detached exchanges at home, going through the motions with loved ones, or remaining with people you never loved while waiting for the imaginary future moment when you’ll be brave enough to change. Avoidance can also take the form of numbing through food, substances, or screens, with the promise that one day you’ll stop and live for real. Until you develop ways to soothe triggers, trauma symptoms will keep you cut off.
Fortunately, you don’t have to avoid forever, and you don’t need to overhaul your whole life in a single sweep. Orient yourself toward healing and pick one small thing a day—those tiny steps add up. If you want one practical starting point, I have a free PDF that lists signs that past trauma is undermining your present-day connections; you can download it now. I also offer a free course, The Daily Practice, that teaches simple daily tools to calm your nervous system and lower reactivity so you have more choice in how you relate. Take one small action, keep going, and your life can begin to open again. I will see you very soon [Music]