Avoidance is one of fear’s most elegant traps. It works, but only apparently. I avoid what I fear, my anxiety decreases, and I feel momentarily safe. The problem is that this very relief becomes the implicit, but misleading, proof that the danger was real: “If I avoided it and now I feel better, then it really must have been something threatening.”

From here the spiral begins: each act of avoidance confirms the fear, prepares the next avoidance, and makes the perception of the feared object grow larger and larger.

If we wanted to use a physical analogy, we could think of a system with positive feedback: a small initial perturbation, instead of being dissipated, is continuously fed back into the system and amplified each time.

The result is growing instability.

Have you ever heard of the Larsen effect? It is that piercing whistle produced when a microphone gets too close to a loudspeaker. The sound entering the microphone comes out of the speaker, re-enters the microphone, is amplified again, and so on, in an increasingly uncontrollable crescendo.

When we avoid a fear, something similar happens. Avoidance is subtle because it creates the illusion that, by avoiding the problem, we are weakening it. In reality, we are merely preventing our mind from confronting what is real.

Here, however, the microphone analogy must be reversed. In the Larsen effect, to interrupt the loop it is enough to move the microphone away from the loudspeaker. In the case of fear, instead, moving away is precisely what feeds the feedback circuit.

The apparent danger grows because it is never experienced.

Gradual exposure does the opposite: it brings the person closer again to the feared reality, resizes the perception of the problem, and interrupts the mechanism of amplification. At that point, fear, no longer nourished by avoidance, progressively loses intensity.

Moreover, it is not always necessary to confront directly what one fears. Often avoidance is not only physical, but also mental: we even avoid thinking about encountering what frightens us. And yet, if we tried to explore our worst fantasies with lucidity, we would often discover that something very different happens from what we had imagined: fear loses its solidity, breaks apart, and becomes smaller.

Perhaps the most emblematic example of “avoided fear, increased fear” is the attempt to avoid physical death. Many people live by running away from death: not only by doing absurd things to keep it at a distance, but even by avoiding thinking about it. Death then becomes a taboo, something to speak of only in whispers, and thus a natural phenomenon is transformed into an imaginary monster, nourished over time until it conditions our freedom to live, love, experiment, and open ourselves to life with trust.

But death, like birth, belongs to the great flow of life.

To stop fleeing from it does not mean to desire it, but to restore it to its proper place: no longer the invisible mistress of our fears, but a natural threshold within the mystery of existence.