Choosing Direction: Understanding Our Patterns Through Toward and Away Moves

Toward and Away Moves

The start of a new year often arrives with a surge of expectation: new routines, new habits, new versions of ourselves. For autistic and ADHD minds, this cultural momentum can feel like stepping into a system designed for someone else’s brain. Plans are expected to be linear. Motivation is expected to be consistent. Progress is expected to be smooth. But many neurodivergent nervous systems do not move in straight lines. They move in bursts, in deep-focus immersions, in sensory tides, in cycles of energy and collapse.

When change is framed as strict resolution, it can quickly become another source of internal pressure. Missing one day doesn’t just feel like a small disruption, it can trigger all-or-nothing thinking. A single dropped habit can register as total failure. Executive function overload, demand sensitivity, and perfectionism can combine into a familiar loop: intense initial drive, mounting internal strain, eventual shutdown or burnout, followed by self-blame for not “sticking with it.”

Many autistic and ADHD adults know this pattern intimately. It isn’t a lack of motivation. It’s a nervous system trying to manage capacity, predictability, sensory load, and emotional intensity all at once.

Instead of forcing myself into rigid commitments, I’ve been practicing a gentler orientation: slowing down enough to notice what truly matters to me, and choosing steps in that direction, not perfectly, not consistently, but intentionally. Less like climbing a staircase. More like navigating by starlight, checking direction rather than demanding constant speed.

A framework that has been especially supportive comes from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): the distinction between moving toward and moving away. Rather than sorting behaviors into right or wrong, functional or dysfunctional, this lens invites a different question. In this moment, is this action helping my nervous system move toward something meaningful? Or is it helping me create distance from something that feels overwhelming, unpredictable, or unsafe?

A small shift in question. A profound shift in how we relate to ourselves.

Trading Judgment for Curiosity

What I appreciate most about this model is that it does not put behavior on trial. It does not ask us to convict ourselves of failure. Instead, it treats every action as information, a message from the nervous system about what feels safe, threatening, or important.

Every behavior is an attempt to meet a need. Even the ones we wish we didn’t rely on.

So rather than asking,
“Is this behavior bad?”

we ask, “What is this behavior doing for me right now?”

In ACT terms:

Toward moves are actions that orient us in the direction of our values, even when those actions are uncomfortable, effortful, or imperfect.

Away moves are actions that create distance from internal discomfort, emotions, sensations, or thoughts that feel overwhelming, even when that avoidance makes complete sense in the moment.

This distinction matters because many of us were raised inside moral binaries: productive or lazy, strong or weak, disciplined or out of control. Those categories flatten the complexity of human coping. The toward/away lens replaces the courtroom with a laboratory: we observe, we get curious, we gather data.

Why Context Changes Everything

In one training I attended, a facilitator created a simple exercise. Two circles were marked on the floor: one labeled Toward, the other Away. Participants received cards describing different behaviors and were asked to place each card where they thought it belonged.

Examples included:

• Answering a text message

• Going for a run

• Staying up late scrolling

• Taking prescribed medication

• Skipping a work meeting

• Buying lottery tickets

Most people sorted quickly. Some cards were placed with confidence. Others sparked debate. Then the facilitator added context.

She asked us to imagine that the person skipping the work meeting was a single parent whose child had just been sent home sick, with no available childcare and a supervisor known for punitive reactions. Suddenly, skipping the meeting wasn’t simply “avoidance”, it was a protective act, a step toward caring for a dependent, a step away from a system with little flexibility.

The behavior didn’t change. But its meaning did.

Human actions never exist in isolation. They are shaped by nervous system capacity, trauma history, socioeconomic realities, sensory needs, cultural expectations, attachment patterns, and access to support. When we remove context, we misinterpret behavior. When we restore context, compassion becomes the natural response.

And when we apply that same contextual lens inward, we begin to understand ourselves not as problems to solve, but as systems doing their best to cope.

Gentle Self-Check-Ins Instead of Self-Correction

Bringing this framework into daily life isn’t about policing ourselves more closely. It’s not another productivity strategy or self-improvement plan. It’s more like pausing on a long walk to check whether we’re still headed in the direction we meant to go.

I return to simple questions:

• What is this action giving me right now?

• Is it moving me closer to something that matters to me?

• Or is it helping me step away from something that feels difficult inside me?

These questions aren’t demands. They’re invitations. Awareness first. Choice later.

What It Means to Move Toward

A toward move is any step that aligns with a chosen value, even if the step is tiny, awkward, or uncomfortable.

Values are not destinations. They’re directions, like north on a compass. You never “arrive” at connection, health, creativity, authenticity, justice, or care. You orient toward them, again and again, adjusting course as conditions change.

Toward moves often look very ordinary:

• Cooking a simple meal instead of skipping dinner

• Taking a slow breath before replying in a tense conversation

• Closing the laptop when your eyes begin to burn

• Asking a friend for support

• Letting yourself feel disappointment rather than immediately distracting from it

For me, many toward moves feel like nudging a heavy door that doesn’t open easily.

Stepping out of hyperfocus to attend to relationships. Resting when urgency tells me I must keep going. Declining opportunities that excite me but exceed my capacity.

Each of these carries emotional weight. There is loss in saying no. Vulnerability in slowing down. Discomfort in choosing presence. Toward moves are not always pleasant, but they are aligned with the life I want to inhabit.

Sometimes choosing one value means temporarily stepping away from another. Prioritizing rest may delay productivity. Choosing family time may reduce professional momentum. Life is a landscape of intersecting paths, not a single straight road. Naming those tensions prevents self-blame from filling the gaps.

What It Means to Move Away

Away moves are actions that help us create distance from internal discomfort, emotional pain, sensory overload, anxiety, shame, grief, or exhaustion. Often they are protective strategies shaped early in life. The nervous system saying, “This is too much right now.”

In the short term, these strategies can keep us functioning. In the long term, they can quietly pull us away from the life we want.

Avoided emotions do not disappear. They settle into the body, showing up later as tension, shutdown, irritability, insomnia, dissociation, or burnout. They find alternate routes when the main road is closed.

I value emotional presence and integration. Yet certain feelings, particularly shame and perceived rejection, flood my system. My body contracts. My thoughts narrow. Historically, numbing through that impulse sometimes appears as overworking, endless planning, or disappearing into screens.

None of these behaviors are inherently wrong. Focus can be regulating. Distraction can be soothing. Work can be meaningful. But when they primarily serve to avoid internal experience, they function as away moves, small retreats from something I ultimately want to face.

Awareness Without Force

For many AuDHD and trauma-shaped nervous systems, forcing change through willpower is like trying to steer a canoe by arguing with the current. The harder we push, the more resistance we meet.

Instead, I practice gentle naming: “I’m stepping away from something hard right now.”

That sentence alone creates breathing room. Space to soften judgment. Space to understand the need beneath the behavior. Space to return later when capacity is greater. Sometimes awareness is the whole intervention. A lantern lit briefly in a dark room.

The Overlapping Territory Between Toward and Away

Most behaviors do not live cleanly in one circle or the other. They overlap.

Taking a long bath after a draining day may be a toward move, restoring the nervous system. Staying in the bath for hours to avoid an important phone call may become an away move.

Same behavior. Different purpose.

Listening to music while working may help sustain focus, a toward move. Playing the same song on repeat to block out rising anxiety, an away move. Both can be true.

Human behavior is rarely tidy. For minds that crave clarity, this ambiguity can feel uncomfortable. But life is more like weather patterns than math equations, shifting, layered, dynamic. The toward/away lens doesn’t demand purity. It invites noticing.

Building the Muscle of Meta-Awareness

Over time, gentle inquiry strengthens the ability to observe our own patterns rather than being pulled blindly by them.

I ask myself:

• What is this giving me right now?

• What feeling might I be stepping away from?

• What value might I be stepping toward?

• Could both be true?

These questions do not demand immediate change. They simply widen the space in which choice becomes possible.

Compassion, Choice, and Direction

What I value most about this framework is that it meets the nervous system where it actually is, not where hustle culture insists it should be.

When I recognize an away move, I can usually understand why it appeared. There is always a protective impulse underneath. That understanding naturally grows compassion rather than criticism.

And inside compassion, agency emerges. Not rigid self-control. Not “fix yourself.” But the quiet knowing that even in complexity, small choices exist.

Walking the Path, Imperfectly

Today, my toward moves include writing these words, stepping out of deep-focus work to answer messages I’ve postponed, noticing overwhelm rather than overriding it, and choosing connection even when my nervous system hesitates.

Some steps are large. Most are small. All are imperfect.

And I am reminded that even noticing avoidance, even pausing long enough to say, “Ah. I’m stepping away right now.”, is already movement toward awareness, toward compassion, and toward a life shaped by what matters.

Not perfection. Not pressure. Just direction.

And that is enough.