Parallel Perspectives:
Avoidance
The phone rings.
You've been expecting the call.
You know what needs to be discussed. You know the decision that needs to be communicated. You know there is a good chance the person on the other end will be frustrated, disappointed, hurt, or angry.
Your thumb hovers for a moment.
Maybe you'll call back after a little more time to think.
Maybe after you've found the right words.
After you've figured out how to soften it.
Not now. Not yet. Not like this.
The ringing stops.
The voicemail notification appears.
You'll return the call later.
After all, you've worked hard to build this relationship. You don't want to ruin that. Why let this conversation jeopardize months of work. You know how they get. Better to be prepared.
Waiting is the more considerate choice– the kinder choice, right?
A few hours pass.
Then a day.
The conversation waits in the space the silence leaves behind.
Identifying the PD: Research
Avoidance in professional practice is not a character flaw. It is a patterned, largely unconscious, response to the emotional, relational, and cognitive demands of work that regularly asks us to hold what is painful, uncertain, and unresolved.
In the Professional Dangerousness literature, avoidance is not a single behavior — it is a taxonomy. It surfaces across domains, often simultaneously, and often in ways that are virtually indistinguishable from ordinary, reasonable professional behavior.
Relational avoidance (Morrison, 1997)
Reflective avoidance (Weld, 2008)
Cognitive avoidance (Munro, 1999; Helm, 2011)
Emotional avoidance (Ferguson, 2005; Littlechild, 2012)
Organizational and systemic avoidance (Reder & Duncan, 1995; 2003)
What these expressions share is not intention — it’s function. Each one moves the professional away from the felt experience of discomfort, offering something that feels, briefly, like relief.
That is what makes avoidance so difficult to interrupt. Because it works. In the short term, it works remarkably well.
Professional Dangerousness asks us to hold a harder question: Who does it work for?
Avoidance is rarely the whole story. More often, it’s a clue — a glimpse toward something that matters. It reveals not what we are moving away from, but what we have not yet learned how to move toward.
Parallel Perspectives
Jess
For Jess, avoidance wore the mask of care.
She was known for her warmth, her ability to build relationships, and her genuine love for the people she worked alongside. And it was precisely that care — woven tightly together with a deep need for people to experience her as safe — that made the hard thing so easy to soften.
“It'll be fine.”
Her signature move. A reflex so familiar she had stopped noticing it. Said before she actually knew whether things would be fine. Said because the silence felt heavy, the uncertainty uncomfortable, and the family in front of her needed comfort and reassurance. She was someone who, above almost everything else, wanted people to feel okay.
Jess would describe herself as a recovering people pleaser. In the work, she led with warmth, read a room before speaking, and found it natural to love the people in front of her — even when the work made loving complicated. Those qualities were genuine strengths. But for years, her warmth and her pleasing were so intertwined she struggled to tell them apart.
What she was slower to see was that her softening served more than the relationship.
It protected her too.
From their disappointment. From their anger. From the look on someone's face when you say the thing they were hoping not to hear.
She told herself she was preserving the relationship.
But another truth settled quietly beneath it.
Could a relationship feel warm and still leave something essential unspoken — if so, who was left carrying what she could not?
Brë
For Brë, avoidance almost didn't register at all.
Avoidance had been framed as conflict avoidance. And Brë certainly wasn’t afraid of that.
But as it turns out avoidance can wear many hats. It can look like strategy, efficiency, like “the work”. And for certain families, avoidance took the shape of a strategic alter ego for Brë.
The Artful Dodger
If they worked until six — she was pulling up around 5:45. A 6am phone call? Surely reasonable. Nothing says meaningful outreach quite like a voicemail tucked between the blocked spam and the four missed calls from mom they've been dodging since Tuesday.
Close enough to call it effort. Far enough to keep the odds in her favor.
Challenge: dodged. Box: checked. Attempt: documented
And here’s the uncomfortable truth. The system often actively supported and reinforced the behavior.
Colleagues understood the logic. Supervisors rarely questioned it. No one ever slowed down long enough to ask whether meaningful engagement was actually happening — because urgency was the culture, supervision was a reporting exercise, and everyone was moving fast enough that the superficial could pass as sufficient.
There was a kind of collective permission in that.
If no one around you is asking the harder question:
When professionalism is maintained on the outside, what discomfort might it be quietly protecting on the inside?
Common Ground: Clarity in the Contrast
At first glance, their stories don't look particularly similar. And yet avoidance showed up for both of them — not in the same way, not for the same reasons, but present all the same.
Jess arrived through the front door of the relationship — so committed to keeping it intact that the hard thing never quite made it into the room. Brë arrived through the side door of strategy — so focused on the output that the relationship never quite made it into the room either.
Different approaches. Different professional identities. Different narratives carried along the way.
But underneath both of them — the same thing.
Avoidance.
And beneath the avoidance? Something simpler still.
Discomfort.
This is where Professional Dangerousness often hides. Not in malice. Not in neglect. But in the subtle ways discomfort disguises itself as the most reasonable voice in the room — thoughtfulness, preparation, efficiency, protection, professionalism. Until the function of the work quietly shifts from supporting the people it was intended for, to managing the discomfort of the professionals meant to serve them.
Avoidance lives in all of us. Maybe you’re the Jess. Maybe you’re the Brë. Maybe you are neither — but something adjacent, your own brand of avoidance showing up in practice.
Here is what we wish someone had told us earlier:
Discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong with you.
Sometimes, it’s a sign that you are standing at the edge of something you haven't yet learned how to move toward.
The danger is rarely that discomfort exists. The danger is when we stop being curious about what it may be trying to show us.
Reflective Prompts
When you consider avoidance in your own practice, what does it tend to look like?
Underneath the avoidance, what is the discomfort? What might it be pointing toward — about the situation, the relationship, or yourself?
What would change in your practice if you treated discomfort as information?
