The Quicksand Problem: Why Fighting Your Emotions Makes Them Worse
Nearly every client I work with has the same story, told in different words: "I've tried everything to feel better, and nothing works." They have tried to stop worrying. They have tried to think positively. They have tried to push the sadness down, distract themselves from the anxiety, argue with the intrusive thoughts, or simply wait for the depression to lift. And every strategy has either failed outright or worked for a few hours before the pain returned — often worse than before.
If this sounds familiar, I want you to know two things. First, you are not failing at coping. You are executing a perfectly logical strategy that happens to backfire when applied to internal experiences. Second, understanding why it backfires is one of the most important shifts that can happen in therapy.
The quicksand metaphor captures the problem beautifully.
The Quicksand Principle
If you have ever seen a movie where someone steps into quicksand, you know the conventional wisdom: the more you struggle, the faster you sink. Every instinctive response — thrashing, kicking, pulling one leg up to free it — only drives you deeper. The counterintuitive move, the one that actually works, is to stop struggling. Spread your weight. Lay flat. Let the surface hold you. It goes against every survival instinct you have, but it is the only thing that works.
Now consider what happens when a painful emotion shows up — anxiety before a presentation, a wave of sadness on a Sunday evening, a sudden stab of shame triggered by a memory you thought you had put behind you. What do you do?
Most of us do exactly what we would do in quicksand: we struggle. We try to suppress the feeling. We distract ourselves. We pour a drink, scroll through our phones, cancel plans, avoid the situation that triggered it, or launch into an internal argument: "I shouldn't feel this way. What's wrong with me? I need to get over this." Each of these moves is an attempt to escape the emotional experience. And each one, like thrashing in quicksand, tends to make the situation worse.
Why Avoidance Backfires
This is not a matter of willpower or technique. It is a feature of how human minds work.
When you try to avoid a physical danger — say, a dark alley in an unfamiliar city — the avoidance works cleanly. You walk the other way, and the danger is gone from your environment. You no longer have to think about it. Problem solved.
But emotional pain is not a dark alley. It is not located in any particular place in the external world. It exists inside the same mind that is trying to avoid it. And this creates a fundamental problem: in order to avoid a thought, you have to monitor for the presence of the thought, which means you have to hold the thought in mind in order to know whether you are successfully not thinking about it.
This is the white bear problem, named after a well-known series of experiments: when people are asked not to think about a white bear, they think about white bears more frequently than people who were given no instruction at all. The act of trying not to think about something requires you to represent the very thing you are trying to avoid. The suppression instruction becomes a trigger for the experience it was designed to eliminate.
Applied to real emotional pain, the consequences compound. A person with anxiety tries not to feel anxious — and now they are anxious about being anxious. A person with depression tries to push away sadness — and now they feel sadness plus frustration that the sadness won't leave. A person with intrusive thoughts tries to stop the thoughts — and the thoughts accelerate because the monitoring process keeps activating them. Each layer of avoidance adds a new layer of distress on top of the original experience.
The Spreading Net
There is another dimension to this problem that makes it especially difficult: avoidance doesn't stay contained.
When you avoid a painful thought or feeling, you also begin avoiding the things associated with it. If a particular place triggers a painful memory, you stop going there. If a certain topic of conversation triggers anxiety, you steer away from it. If vulnerability triggers shame, you stop being vulnerable. Over time, the territory of avoidance expands. What began as avoiding one specific feeling gradually becomes a way of life — a progressively narrower existence in which more and more situations, people, topics, and experiences are off-limits because they might trigger pain.
The mechanism behind this is the same symbolic capacity I described in my post on why your mind won't stop talking. Language connects things. Once your mind has linked a painful experience to a particular situation, it will rapidly extend that connection to anything symbolically related. A song that was playing during a painful breakup becomes something to avoid. Then the artist who performed the song. Then the friend who introduced you to that artist. Then the restaurant where you used to eat with that friend. The network grows. The world shrinks.
This is why clients often arrive in therapy not just with one problem but with a life that has become constricted in ways they can barely articulate. They are not just anxious — they have stopped doing dozens of things that might trigger anxiety. They are not just sad — they have withdrawn from contexts that might stir difficult emotions. The avoidance strategy, applied consistently over months or years, has done far more damage than the original pain ever did.
The Counterintuitive Move
If struggling makes you sink, and avoidance spreads the net wider, what actually works?
The quicksand answer is instructive: stop struggling. Not because the situation is not painful — it is. Not because the emotion doesn't matter — it does. But because the struggling is the part that is making it worse. The emotion itself, like the quicksand, is not actually lethal. What is lethal is the frantic response to it.
In therapy, this translates into learning a fundamentally different stance toward internal experiences. Instead of treating painful emotions as emergencies that must be eliminated, we practice treating them as experiences that can be noticed, acknowledged, and allowed to be present — without the reflexive fight to make them go away.
This is not passive resignation. It is not "just sitting with it" in the vague, unhelpful way that phrase is sometimes used. It is an active, skillful practice of changing your relationship to what shows up inside you. It involves noticing the emotion without fusing with the story your mind attaches to it ("This means I'm broken," "This will never end," "I can't handle this"). It involves making room for the physical sensations without interpreting them as catastrophic. It involves recognizing that having an emotion and being controlled by an emotion are two very different things.
In previous posts, I've described some of the specific skills involved: cognitive defusion, which helps you observe thoughts without being governed by them, and the self as context perspective, which allows you to be the awareness in which difficult experiences occur rather than the experiences themselves. These skills work precisely because they change the relationship to pain rather than trying to eliminate the pain itself.
What Changes When You Stop Struggling
When clients begin to practice this shift, several things tend to happen — not all at once, but gradually, with practice.
The emotion itself often becomes less intense. Not because it has been suppressed or argued away, but because the secondary layer of struggle — the anxiety about the anxiety, the frustration about the sadness, the shame about the shame — begins to drop away. What remains is the original feeling, which is almost always more manageable than the compounded version.
Behavioral flexibility returns. When you are no longer organizing your life around avoidance, options reappear. You can go to the gathering even though you feel anxious. You can have the difficult conversation even though it triggers vulnerability. You can sit with uncertainty rather than needing to resolve it immediately. Your actions begin to be guided by what matters to you rather than by what you are trying not to feel.
And paradoxically, the painful experiences often visit less frequently — not because you have found a better way to avoid them, but because the conditions that were maintaining them (the struggle, the monitoring, the avoidance-driven constriction) are no longer in place.
A Note About Real Pain
I want to be clear: this is not about minimizing pain. Some of what my clients carry — grief, trauma, chronic illness, loss — is genuinely painful, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. The point is not that pain doesn't matter. The point is that the instinctive response to pain — the struggle to eliminate it — often causes more suffering than the pain itself. Learning to tell the difference between pain and suffering, and recognizing that you have far more influence over the latter than you think, is one of the most liberating discoveries in therapy.
The quicksand is real. The sinking is real. But the struggling is optional.
Getting Started
If you recognize the pattern I've described — the exhausting cycle of avoidance, the life that has gradually narrowed around what you are trying not to feel, the sense that your coping strategies are making things worse — therapy can help you learn a fundamentally different approach. I provide telehealth psychotherapy to adults across Colorado, integrating ACT and related approaches within a Process-Based Therapy framework. Contact me at rachael.stclaire@hush.com for a free 15-minute consultation, or visit the Appointments page.