Experiential Avoidance

What it is

The idea begins with an observation that is easier to state than to act on. A person who has an unwanted internal state can either have it, or can spend effort trying not to have it. Experiential avoidance is the second of those, and the construct is not about the state. It is about the effort.

The term belongs to the lineage of acceptance and commitment therapy, set out by Steven Hayes with Kirk Strosahl and Kelly Wilson across six specified processes of change. The reason it matters outside a clinic is that a great many ordinary instructions are, underneath, claims about experiential avoidance. Stop dwelling on it. Do not let it get to you. Let them. Each of those instructions presupposes that the trying is the costly part, and each therefore inherits whatever the evidence on experiential avoidance does and does not establish.

What the evidence establishes is narrower than the instructions usually assume, and it is worth separating into two findings that are routinely merged into one.

The first finding is about suppression, and it is the stronger of the two. Told to push a personally relevant intrusive thought out of mind, people largely cannot, and they report more distress afterwards than they did before. That is the closest thing to direct experimental support that any stop-fighting-it claim has, and it points in the direction the construct predicts: the attempt itself carries a cost.

The second finding is about what happens when the attempt is dropped, and it is weaker. In the same controlled comparison, people given an acceptance-based strategy instead reported less discomfort with their intrusive thoughts, and no reduction at all in how often those thoughts arrived. Acceptance changed the relationship to the experience. It did not change the experience. See Psychological Acceptance, where the pooled experimental record on that second half is set out, and where the one outcome most popular claims actually sell turns out to be the outcome on which an acceptance instruction does not beat its alternatives.

The treatment model built on the construct is a different object again, and keeping it separate is the single most important discipline on this page. Acceptance and commitment therapy has a serious pooled record. Andrew T. Gloster and colleagues reviewed twenty meta-analyses covering 100 controlled effect sizes and 12,477 participants, and reported the therapy superior to a waitlist at a mean Hedges g of 0.57, superior to a placebo condition at 0.54, superior to treatment as usual at 0.46, and superior to most other active interventions at 0.57. Against cognitive behavioural therapy it did not differ, at 0.16, which was not statistically significant.

Those five numbers are five different sentences about the same treatment, and the comparison condition is doing most of the work in each of them. A finding against a waitlist tells you that something is better than nothing happening. A finding against the established alternative tells you whether the field has gained a better tool or a second one. On this evidence the therapy is a real treatment that is not better than the treatment it was positioned against, and the largest numbers come from the weakest comparison.

And the limit that governs everything downstream. That record describes a structured, multi-session protocol delivered by a trained clinician, with six named processes of change and an outcome measured before and after. It is not a record about a phrase, a mantra, a podcast segment or a paperback. Any page, article or book that borrows these effect sizes to vouch for a slogan has borrowed the authority of the literature without borrowing any of its conditions, and this site does not do that.

In effect

The suppression and acceptance comparison (Marcks and Woods)

The cleanest research case is a single controlled experiment with three groups. People were asked to nominate a thought that genuinely intruded on them, and were then told either to suppress it, to adopt an acceptance-based stance towards it, or simply to monitor it. The suppression group could not do what it had been asked to do, and reported increased distress. The acceptance group reported a decrease in discomfort and no decrease in how often the thought arrived. The design is the reason it is useful: it measures frequency and distress separately, so it can show that an intervention moved one and not the other. The limits are equally plain. This was an undergraduate analogue sample in a single session at one laboratory, and this site read the published abstract rather than the paper.

Arguing with yourself at two in the morning

Away from any laboratory, most people have a private version of this. A remark from the afternoon returns, and the response is to reason it away: it was not meant like that, it does not matter, stop thinking about it. The reasoning is itself a form of attention, which is why the effort tends to keep the thought in the room rather than removing it from it. Experiential avoidance gives that pattern a name without giving it a diagnosis. It also predicts, correctly, that abandoning the argument often makes the night easier without making the thought any rarer. Anyone treating that relief as evidence that the underlying situation has resolved is reading the construct backwards.

A publisher's promise of less distress

Commercially, the construct is where trade self-help gets its scientific register. A book that tells a reader to stop trying to control another person's behaviour is making an experiential avoidance claim, and the claim is plausible precisely because the suppression half of the literature supports it. What the literature does not supply is the second half of the promise, which is that the reader will feel better. A publisher's jacket is not required to carry a comparison condition, a sample size or an outcome measure, and so the strength of the evidence and the strength of the claim come apart at exactly the point where a buyer would most like them to meet. Testing The Let Them Theory is this site's worked example: three independent search passes of the published and press record found no trial, no registry entry, no pre-post evaluation and no peer-reviewed critique of the method it names, and the book itself presents no outcome data, which is the part any reader holding it can check.

What it does not say

It does not say that an unwanted internal state should never be acted on. The construct concerns rigid, costly avoidance that crowds out action a person values, not ordinary coping, and nothing in it licenses an instruction to stop responding to another person's conduct.

It does not establish that acceptance reduces distress more than the alternatives. The pooled experimental record on acceptance instructions finds them superior for how long an unpleasant state can be tolerated and not superior for how unpleasant it feels, against comparisons that include cognitive reappraisal and distraction. Both of those work, so being no better than them is not the same as being no good.

It does not transfer the therapy's effect sizes to anything the reader can buy. Those figures evidence a multi-session clinician-delivered protocol and are reported here with their comparison conditions attached for that reason.

And the origin is recorded at medium confidence rather than high. This site has not read the paper that introduced the construct; the attribution rests on the construct's standard citation and on the seed book's own bibliography, which names Hayes, Strosahl and Wilson and keys them to no page of its text.

This page reports psychotherapy effect sizes and is handled at the highest tier of care for that reason. The article it supports carries a medical review line, with the reviewing clinician still to be named. Nothing here is advice, and a reader in distress should speak to a clinician rather than to a website.

Who developed it

The construct belongs to Steven Hayes, with Kirk Strosahl and Kelly Wilson, as the account of unwanted private experience underneath acceptance and commitment therapy. The pooled evidence for the therapy built on it is reviewed by Andrew T. Gloster and colleagues, and the single clearest experimental test of the suppression half is Brook A. Marcks and Douglas W. Woods.

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