Are you drowning in unopened mail and unanswered messages? Let’s talk about avoidance

The interwebs loves to throw around terms for mental health diagnoses all the time and what armchair podcasters think they mean, but a hallmark of every mental health diagnosis is distress or impaired functioning. Impaired daily functioning can take many forms, but one issue that we see on the rise is difficulty opening your mail, email, texts, or phone messages resulting in enormous backlogs of unanswered messages, unpaid bills, and full voicemail boxes that can no longer take messages. 

The end result? Friends and family that are frustrated or feel rejected by the lack of response, which may end up in them no longer attempting to contact you, interpreting your behavior as no longer being invested in the relationship. Or it may result in fines, overdue fees, missed appointments, missed court dates, missed tax filing deadlines which in turn may result in more bad news- losing access to your doctor/therapist/psychiatrist/case manager, losing child custody rights, losing a legal battle, or even eviction. 

Unfortunately, many people who are struggling get caught in a shame spiral and don't disclose what is going on to their loved ones and the problem continues to grow and sometimes involves them too.

Some years ago the movie The House of Sand and Fog came out giving a great example of the perils of not opening your mail after a mental health crisis. The movie begins with the main character suffering a loss and going into a deep paralyzing depression. She has difficulty getting out of bed or functioning and stops opening her mail. As a result, she doesn’t realize that she has stopped paying her mortgage and her home is foreclosed on. She is forced out and another family moves in. In her loss, she ends up pulling the new family into further crisis and tragedy.

Thankfully, most people’s situations aren’t as bad as the film depicts, but variations of this issue show up in the therapy room on a regular basis.

What does this mean?
If you see someone you love, or see yourself having difficulty opening the mail, texts, returning calls - recognize it for what it is, possibly an early sign of a mental health crisis or unmanaged ADHD. The person may be struggling with depression or anxiety or psychosis or substance abuse, a financial crisis, or just generally overwhelmed with the demands of life. Their daily lives have gotten unmanageable. They are overly stressed and under-skilled and under-resourced. They have started to use avoidance as a tactic to manage their distress, only ignoring these demons doesn’t make them go away, it just creates a bigger army of them.

What do you do about it?

• Recognize this as a sign for help and lean into it. Contact your friends, family, doctor, mental health provider, church community, 988 crisis line, united way 311 resource line, or whoever you can for extra help
• Challenge the avoidance- the worst thing you can do for anxiety is to give into avoidance, the cure is always challenging the avoidance and leaning into the discomfort and doing the opposite of what the avoidance is telling you
• Break the project into smaller chunks- force yourself to open a few pieces of mail everyday and toss out the junk mail. Re-open your voicemail. Delete the spam calls. Block any unwanted senders.
• Prioritize opening up anything of high importance immediately and responding immediately.
• Schedule weekly or monthly purging sessions where you go through your inboxes and purge anything you don’t need and make sure you set aside a pile for bills and important things to manage right away. - This may be helpful to have someone go through this with you to keep you on-task and challenge your urge to avoid.
• Schedule a therapy or coaching session to help you work through your anxiety and manage your mental health symptoms by opening your mail together and helping to organize and prioritize life tasks.

If you are needing help, reach out to us at Healing Reflections Therapy. We have therapists who are ready to help.

​Author: Megan Garza, MA, LMFT is therapist and co-owner of Healing Reflections Therapy