By: Camden Baucke MS LLP
There are risks to avoiding risk.
While safety is crucial for our mental health, it can limit our perspective and fulfillment. Safety is about avoiding pain or loss, which creates feelings of comfort.
No, this isn’t LinkedIn and you’re not about to get schooled on why comfort is failure, but risk comes down to control, something inherent in most mental health conditions.
If you struggle to be vulnerable, you might close off your home, your heart, or your mind. Risk means losing some control. If you can’t lose control, you might shut out opportunities and people until your world gets too small.
Love, connection, fun, expression, and delight are all risks – healthy ones we need to take.
In this article, I’ll cover why risk is necessary and provide some steps to become more comfortable with it.
Why is Risk Necessary?
In reality, risk is vulnerability at a point of transition.
While you learn to walk, you run the risk of falling. While you learn how to throw a baseball, you run the risk of embarrassment. Risk is the necessary transition you must endure to get from where you are to somewhere more fulfilling.
When you learn to walk and throw a baseball, your mind realizes that you were able to make it through the transition point of risk. That means that something in you is capable and you can feel more confident in your ability to make it through challenges.
Confidence is the product of having enough risky experiences turn out well and attributed to your effort. Your mind learns to discern what is damaging and what is uncomfortable. You learn the difference between what pain is telling you to stop and what pain is from the transition point of risk.
With enough successful risks, you learn how to grow in a healthy way.
If you want fulfilling relationships, you need risk.
If you want to write, sing, or dance, you need risk.
If you want to pursue your passions, you need risk.
To try anything new and wonderful, you need the discomfort of risk to get there.
What is Risk Avoidance?
Risk avoidance is steering clear of most opportunities that involve risk.
These opportunities involve lack of control, discomfort, or failure.
Unfortunately, when risk is avoided, so are the wonderful things it provides. Not wonderful things like promotions or college degrees that impress others – but gratifying experiences such as love, expression, and enjoyment.
In psychology, we see this in avoidant behavior. This is a coping mechanism for individuals under high stress, with anxiety, or even trauma.
Avoidance comes from fearing the transition point of risk. You fear what direction failure will take you rather than where success will.
If you avoid risk you will find immediate relief from that fear, but it doesn’t go away. The fear remains, and you start to do less to prove to yourself that you can manage it.
All of sudden, there’s a change in the actual word “risk“. When risk becomes associated with “bad“, it makes sense you would avoid it. As you can see in this article so far, risk is not inherently bad, it’s just a point of transition.
But if you see risk and think “bad”, then that mental connection is all I need to know that you don’t fear risk for risk’s sake.
You likely fear risk because you fear failure, and you might fear failure because of the consequences.
Because our past teaches us what consequences we need to fear, we need to go back and find out what the true cost of risk was.
The Stacking Fears of Risk Avoidance
Identifying the reasons you avoid risk is the first crucial step, and these reasons are all fears that stack on top of each other in this order:
– Fear of Risk
Fear of risk is what leads to avoiding it. Risk itself might appear “bad” and thus you wouldn’t want to do anything bad.
Risk is inherent in everything we do. Avoiding risk is akin to avoiding life, because life is the accumulation of our life experiences, efforts, relationships, and expressions of yourself.
If you fear risk, chances are you might limit it in everything you do. You might not take any financial risks and save all your money. You may not take career risks and not apply for the job you’ve dreamed of.
If you fear risk, you don’t fear what overcoming it would give you. You fear what it would mean if you failed.
– Fear of Failure
Failure is an outcome.
It’s where a standard is not met and we fall short. If you do not pass a test, your efforts simply don’t succeed.
Risk provides the option of outcomes, one of which is failure. If failure is so consuming, it can become directly tied to risk.
If you fear risk because you fear failure, chances are you fear what failure leads to.
– Fear of Rejection
You don’t fear failure for failure’s sake, but for the consequences.
Crime is meaningless without a sentence.
Rejection is a painful sentence, where we are shoved aside or thrown away.
Any part of us can be rejected. It could be our thoughts, our actions, our behaviors, or just us as a person. Rejection has the potential to confirm something we think is wrong with us.
If we fear risk, we fear failure and the possibility of rejection.
– Fear of Shame
Shame is living out the perceived consequences of rejection.
There’s shame for what you do, then there’s shame for who you are.
If you fear risk, you likely fear the true consequence of shame.
It’s a dark and sullen place to be. Feeling ashamed of your existence makes you feel like you’re not good enough to belong to anyone, anywhere.
There is a healthy level of shame, but that’s not the type that develops a fear. Unhealthy shame feels like regret that you are inescapably broken and unwanted.
What Teaches These Fears?
Fear is often learned. Here are some of the common experiences that teach that risk is bad.
– Fear is Taught
When we grow up, we have two ways of learning. One is direct learning, where someone teaches you something. The other is vicarious learning, where we learn by watching others.
If you have a parent who struggles with risk, chances are they taught you that risk was bad. You also may have witnessed them practice that belief in their own lives.
If you come from a family background of risk avoidance, it might be all you know. If your childhood home did not provide enough opportunities to overcome risk, chances are you never developed confidence.
If you never developed confidence, you might avoid risk while continuing to believe you would fail. That inherent belief you’re not enough lies deep in your self-image.
– Low Self-Esteem
Low self-esteem plays a large part in risk avoidance.
When facing a challenge, there are two questions at play: (1) how difficult is the challenge & (2) how capable am I?
If you constantly believe you’re incapable, almost any challenge, no matter how small, will seem like a threat for failure.
Self-esteem is developed in late childhood and early adolescence. If any negative experiences could be liable for creating a negative image of yourself, it’s in that time.
– Traumatic Experiences
Trauma results in a dangerous pairing of symptoms: Inappropriate guilt & avoidance.
Essentially, trauma has the ability to convince our brains that the tragedy we experienced was really our fault.
It also associates any reminders of traumatic events with feeling unsafe. That means that any reminder of a trauma (thought, people, or place) can elicit a fight-flight-freeze response. As a result, you would likely avoid anything even resembling the risk of your past.
Oftentimes, risk itself can be associated with (1) your fault & (2) danger. It makes sense that someone would avoid risk whatsoever to avoid the danger that risk has posed before.
Trapped Between Fear & Isolation
If you avoid risk, but hate feeling alone, it would seem that you’re stuck between two equally awful options.
On one end you have loneliness and isolation. You might never try to connect with someone on a deep level or try to express your inner wants and passions.
However, there is also the other extreme to consider. The one where you try to leave no room for failure if you do take a risk.
Perfectionism
Perfectionism is a typical response to a fear of failure. However, it’s really an attempt to avoid risk, failure, rejection, and shame.
It’s the neurotic attempt to achieve something that doesn’t exist. You can never live outside a life filled with errors and risk.
However, perfectionism focuses on the outcome. It might not fully prevent risk, but it can try and wholly prevent failure. However, perfection is impossible, thus rejection is an inevitable risk.
Controlling Behavior
If you can make your world smaller, you can control more of it. You might not run the risk of renting a three bedroom apartment, so you might settle for the control of a studio.
An unhealthy need for controlling objects is harsh enough, but it gets much worse when it comes to controlling others.
Turns out, people don’t like to be controlled. Personal freedom is an essential component to emotionally-healthy living.
However, other people’s freedom may be a threat to your fear of rejection because they have the option to do it.
As a result, people might not want to stick around. If you can’t achieve perfection and can’t control others to finally feel safe, what do you do?
Rewrite the Story
To overcome risk avoidance, you need to look at your story. Your fear will be embedded in your lived experience.
However, there is a layer of what happened in reality, then a layer of meaning we applied at the time.
Fear of risk comes from a fear of meaning, which is what we can change if we look at your story.
Reframe the Past
If fear is taught, it’s time to learn a different lesson.
Look back at your life, uncover who or what taught you that risk is “bad“.
Once you can clearly identify who taught you what about risk, it’s time to view that as a perspective.
Then, create a more accurate, realistic perspective of what risk actually is.
Risk is a natural transition point between you and what you want. Life might have taught you differently, but it’s time to reframe what you are avoiding.
Reinvigorate your Current Self
Once you reframe the challenge, it’s time to discover your confidence.
Taking effective risks comes with practice and self-affirmation.
You need to take small bite-sized risks to remind yourself that you can do hard things to get the outcomes you want.
Take control of what your efforts and outcomes MEAN.
Failure doesn’t lead to shame if you don’t believe it’s anything worth being ashamed of.
Re-examine your Expectations
Look at your schedule and look for opportunities to take risks.
More importantly, search for what you want that would necessitate some risk.
If you can see a risky future as a potentially better one, then you might be more willing to try.
A future full of risk is not a bad one. It’s you trying to forge a path to what you want in this life.
Final Thoughts
Risk is the cost of the ticket to the things worth living for.
Vulnerability is the risky ticket to a joyful relationship.
Expression is the risky ticket to a fulfilling hobby or career.
Trying is the risky ticket to the pleasure of doing.
I hope you find what you love and want, and find the courage to buy the risky ticket.
Reflections 
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