How Pulling Away Can Keep You Feeling Trapped: The Chinese Finger Trap Analogy

Image via iStock

You’ve probably seen or played with a 'Chinese finger trap' at some point, those woven tubes that tighten around your fingers the more you try and struggle to pull away. At first, it feels like you’re stuck. Your instinct is to pull harder, to escape. But that only makes it worse. The real solution? You have to gently push inward, move closer to what’s holding you, in order to loosen its grip. It's a great little toy and oddly enough, I have always found it a really powerful metaphor for our mental health.

When we’re struggling, when we're feeling trapped, when we’re overwhelmed by anxiety, grief, trauma, or even just life, we often respond in the way we’ve been taught: by pulling away. We distract ourselves, we rationalise, we numb out, we power through. We tell ourselves, "Just keep going," or "Don’t think about it," or "You’ll be fine." And sometimes, that works, at least for a while. But more often than not, the harder we try to pull away from uncomfortable feelings, the tighter their grip becomes. It's avoidance plain and simple. We use it in the name of survival, because when we were cavemen it is highly likely that it would've kept us safe, or at the very least it would've protected us from things that made us 'feel' unsafe. And although avoidance might feel like relief in the short term, it rarely brings real freedom. What it actually does is keep us stuck. Liike the finger trap, the more energy we spend trying to escape the discomfort, the more entangled we become.

Take emotions, for instance. If you’ve learned that certain feelings are unacceptable, say anger, sadness, or even joy, you may have developed a habit of pushing them down. Maybe you grew up in an environment where big feelings weren’t welcome, or where you were only rewarded for being “fine.” Over time, you learned to disconnect from what you really felt. That disconnection becomes your normal. But in reality, feelings don’t go away just because we don’t look at them. They wait. And sometimes, they find new ways to get our attention.

Anxiety, for example, often isn’t just about the thing we’re anxious about. Sometimes it’s a build-up of everything we’ve tried not to feel. All those pushed-down emotions start to surface in ways we can’t control, racing thoughts, tight chests, constant worry. It’s like our body is saying, "Hey, something needs attention here." But instead of listening, we often respond by trying to shut it down. More distraction. More avoidance. More pulling away.

And it’s not just emotions. Relationships get tangled up in this dynamic too. If you’ve ever experienced avoidant attachment, you know how scary closeness can feel. Maybe you were hurt in the past. Maybe you learned that being vulnerable wasn’t safe. So now, as an adult, intimacy feels like a threat. When someone gets close, you pull away, not because you don’t care, but because your nervous system is screaming, "Danger!" Again, the trap tightens. The more you pull away from connection, the more isolated you feel. And the more isolated you feel, the harder it becomes to trust.

The same thing can also happen within the body. Think about chronic illness, fatigue, or even OCD-like behaviours. Sometimes, when we’re not listening to what’s going on emotionally, our bodies step in to speak for us. It’s not that the symptoms aren’t real, they are. But they can also be messengers. A racing heart, a tense stomach, a pattern of compulsive checking, they might all be ways your body is trying to say, "Something’s not right. Something’s being ignored." And if your response is to fight or control the symptoms without addressing the deeper need, the cycle continues. More pulling. More tightening.

This is where the finger trap metaphor comes in again. The solution isn’t to escape or overpower what we’re feeling. It’s to get closer. To lean in. To gently explore the parts of ourselves we’ve been trying so hard to avoid. This isn’t easy. In fact, it can feel terrifying. But it’s also where the real freedom begins. Let’s say you’re someone who avoids conflict like the plague. You’d rather stay quiet than risk upsetting someone. On the surface, this might look like peacekeeping. But inside, it’s a trap. You’re swallowing resentment, losing your voice, and building pressure. Over time, that tension has to go somewhere, maybe into your body, maybe into passive-aggressive behaviours, or maybe into complete emotional burnout. Now imagine what might happen if, instead of avoiding the discomfort of confrontation, you gently leaned into it. What if you explored the fear underneath, maybe fear of rejection, or fear of being misunderstood? And what if, in doing that, you found a new kind of courage, the kind that lets you speak up, even if your voice shakes? Or imagine you’ve spent your life telling yourself that rest is lazy. That you have to earn your downtime. So, you push and push, always achieving, always doing, until your body starts to push back. Fatigue. Burnout. Illness. The trap is tightening. But what if you paused? What if you got curious about where that belief came from? What if you let yourself rest, not as a reward, but as a right? That shift, as simple as it sounds, is profound. It’s you, leaning in.

The moment we stop pulling away from our pain, it starts to loosen. When we listen to our body instead of fighting it, when we feel our feelings instead of numbing them or medicating them, when we approach our patterns with compassion instead of judgment, that’s when healing becomes possible. Not because the pain disappears, but because we’re no longer trapped by our resistance to it. This is what it means to heal. Not to escape or erase our struggles, but to meet them. To make space for them. To learn from them. It’s not quick, and it’s not linear. Some days will feel like progress. Others will feel like you're back where you started. But every time you lean in, every time you choose to stay with what’s hard instead of running, you’re breaking the cycle. You’re loosening the trap.

AI Generated Image via Wix

So, if you’re feeling stuck right now, if your anxiety is overwhelming, if your relationships are strained, if your body is speaking in ways you don’t understand, pause. Take a breath. And ask yourself: what have I been pulling away from? What might happen if I turned toward it instead?

It might not be easy. But it just might be the beginning of something different.