What does it mean that avoiding suffering avoidance?

The attempt to avoid all suffering often creates more suffering than it prevents.

Example: A man receives a difficult medical diagnosis — not terminal, but chronic and limiting. His first instinct is to refuse the information. He cancels the follow-up appointment. He tells his wife the tests were inconclusive. He avoids the friend who had a similar diagnosis because seeing her would make it real. He stops exercising because exercise reminds him of what his body can no longer do. He drinks more in the evenings because alcohol numbs the anxiety that surfaces when the house goes quiet. Within six months, the avoidance has produced a secondary crisis larger than the original one: a deteriorating marriage built on deception, a friendship abandoned without explanation, a body weakened by inactivity and alcohol, and an untreated condition that has progressed because he skipped every follow-up. The diagnosis would have required adaptation and grief. The avoidance required the destruction of nearly everything that could have helped him adapt.

Try this: Identify one form of suffering you are currently avoiding — a difficult conversation you keep postponing, a health concern you refuse to investigate, a grief you distract yourself from, a professional reality you will not examine. Write down three specific avoidance behaviors you use to keep this suffering at a distance: what you do instead of facing it, what situations you engineer to avoid encountering it, what stories you tell yourself to justify the avoidance. For each avoidance behavior, write the cost it has imposed so far — not the imagined cost of facing the suffering, but the actual, observable cost of avoiding it. Then choose the smallest of the three avoidance behaviors and commit to suspending it for one week. Not confronting the full suffering — just stopping one avoidance strategy and observing what happens when that particular escape route closes.