You let hard feelings in

What this means

Your answers stayed low on all three forms of avoidance this test scores: pushing thoughts and feelings away, distracting or numbing them, and steering around situations that might stir them up. When something unwelcome shows up inside you, you mostly let it show up. You might not enjoy it, but you do not reorganize your evening, your plans or your conversations to keep it out.

The usual name for the opposite of experiential avoidance is psychological flexibility, and it is a useful phrase because it is not the same as calm. Flexible people still feel dread, grief, envy and embarrassment. What they do not do is handle those states as emergencies that must be prevented. The feeling comes along, and the plan goes ahead anyway.

That shows up in small, practical ways. You can sit in a quiet room without reaching for something to fill it. You can go to the event even though your ex might be there. You can have the conversation you have been dreading, more or less on time. Over months those small choices add up to a life that stays wide rather than narrowing around the things that hurt.

Where it can still slip

Avoidance is often topic-specific. A low overall score can sit next to one subject you never go near: a parent, a loss, your body, money. If one of the twelve questions made you pause longer than the others, that pause is worth more than the score.

It can also be seasonal. In a period of acute stress almost everyone leans on distraction for a while, and that is not a failure. It only becomes a pattern when the season ends and the habit stays.

Finally, letting a feeling in is not the same as being able to sit through it at its peak. If the hard part for you is the first ten minutes of a strong emotion, the distress tolerance test measures that more directly.

What to do next

Keep making room on purpose. A few minutes a day with nothing on and nothing to do keeps the capacity in practice, the way any skill stays sharp with use.

Notice the one topic you still steer around, if there is one, and choose a small step toward it rather than a big one. A short conversation, a single photo, one page of a letter.

And use the capacity for others. People who can tolerate their own feelings are often the easiest people to tell hard things to, which is worth knowing about yourself.

If there is a subject you want to start on, Lovon is there to talk it through.