How To Repair After Pushing Your Partner Away - AVOIDANCE In Relationship Part 2

SPEAKER_00: Hi, this is Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence. As it's the end of the month, we have another spotlight on relationship. This is the second part in a two-part series about avoidance. If you're in a relationship with someone or you identify with pulling away and needing space in relationship, then these two podcasts are for you. But please do listen to the first part first because it will make sense of this part. In the first part I talked about what avoidance in relationship is, where it comes from, and how it's an avoidance of intimacy and also a fear of dependency. Today I'm going to be talking more about how you can work with this in relationship. Of course, it's natural for us to need space in relationship. It's normal for us to come together, be apart, come together again. But it's when the avoidance causes a problem in the relationship that it needs to be worked with a little. It's where it starts to become more of a burden than an asset, where we're less able to be close to people, less able to share intimacy or to attune to each other. This whole way of seeing things forces us only to focus on ourselves. The person who's avoidant really only becomes aware of their own needs when they're away from the relationship. Because the trigger of being afraid of being reliant on somebody has been removed. You'll often find that someone with this kind of history might feel attached to an ex a lot more than others. I know this has happened to me. I think I've spoken before of how I thought about my first boyfriend for a very long time. But it's a fantasy, and it stops you getting close to people in the present. What happens in a relationship with an avoidant person is that the avoidant person will be so scared about being relied upon that they will see your needs as something that you need to fix, nothing to do with them. They'll be very bad at picking up your mental state or picking up any emotional cues. Well they may pick them up, but they will be too scared of them to do anything about it, so they will have to look after themselves. Avoidance is a constant suppression of the attachment system in the brain. And they rarely search inside themselves for what the dissatisfaction is in relationship. Sadly, though, until they look inward, the change won't happen. Sometimes this can be triggered by severe loneliness or some kind of trauma or accident that can trigger wanting a change and realizing what's important. What the rest of this podcast is about and something that I would promote to you, is something that I came to pretty late in relationship myself. For whatever reason, it's something that's not really talked about in our culture. A good relationship is based on helping your partner to regulate their nervous system. Not at the expense of yourself, but with all the awareness and knowledge that you can master. The trick for avoidance to learn is being able to shift from a total sense of self and what's going on with themselves and their own stresses and strains and difficulties and fears, to being able to really fully be able to see their partner. That way you can shift to being secure. If you see it as your duty to care for how the other person feels, and you increase your self-awareness of how you block that, you can shift to not being trapped by your insecurity. First you need to identify how you do the things that makes you avoidant, how you push people away, how you stop yourself from being intimate. How your negativity and your critique of someone comes in quickly. Asking yourself repeatedly whether what you're doing, what your impulsive response to back away is, asking if that's your attachment's insecurity. You can also remind yourself that you do need intimacy. If you were excited about somebody when you first had a date with them, when you were first getting to know them, remember that. You have had a lot to lose by pushing someone away. Your job really is to up being able to rely on somebody else, mutual support, and de-emphasizing self-reliance. You might also need to be aware that you misinterpret behavior. For example, if someone expresses that they miss you and they want to spend time with you, it doesn't mean they want you to stop doing everything else that you do. It doesn't necessarily mean that they want to invade you. Keeping on top of gratitude is a good idea here. You could write a relationship gratitude list and remind yourself of it daily. Things like noticing what your partner does that makes you happy is really important to remember, and noticing their positive attributes that you like. You could list how your partner contributed to your well-being and to you being grateful about life. When looking for the one, you really have to be an active partner in this, and what that means is making whoever you're with special as a part of you, getting close to them in the moment. Always looking for the one, maybe another avoidance tactic. You could make the person you're with your soulmate just by getting close to them and understanding them. And remember that distraction helps. If you're in a relationship with an avoidant, you might want to provide distraction, or if you are avoidant, plan yourself around activities. This might help you to let your guard down and to allow more loving. Apparently, and actually I've seen this happen with my clients and in my own life, when the attachment stuff is dropped, when the insecurity and the defensiveness is not so much of an issue anymore, we allow ourselves to become more loving, more intimate, more successful and more happy in life, because we look outward more. Together in relationship, you can remind each other of secure experiences. I have an arrangement with my partner. My primary way of communicating is verbal, as you might be able to tell. His is not, his is physical. It took us a long time to work it out, but we now play to each other's strengths. If I'm feeling insecure, I will ask him to tell me whether he's been thinking about me, and he thankfully always says he has. Which calms my verbal need down. And then I remember the uh intimacy that we have physically together, which helps me to feel understood, listened to, paid attention to, and loved. It's not easy when you're dating, and it's not easy when you first start getting to know somebody, and it's not necessarily easy if you've been in a relationship for a long time with somebody, not really knowing how to do relationship, particularly if you've had an insecure childhood in some way. It's not easy to try to calm each other's nervous system down. It's difficult to calm your own down, never mind somebody else's. But that is the key to be able to work out what makes you feel insecure, what makes you feel like you have to defend yourself, and to understand that your partner probably has something like that too. If you look at the relationships that other people have in your life, the good relationships, the secure relationships, how do they behave towards each other? And could you emulate that? You can also see this in the way that we relate to pets or the way that pets relate to us. We let animals get away with a hell of a lot more than we let human beings get away with. Well I know that's true for me anyway. Something to get curious about, I mentioned last week, is to inquire as to what shuts you down and what opens you up. What makes you tick in relationship? Look at your past and your current relationships from an attachment perspective. How can you see that it comes into play here? The way being able to become more secure works is that there's a part of our brain that disrupts a memory when we remember it. So we recall something and then we edit it. That's just naturally happens in our brains in the present. So viewing things from an attachment lens means that you can start to change the beliefs that you made at that time. If you've got an unhelpful belief like I mustn't rely on anybody, that's going to put me in real trouble, you can change that. An exercise you can try is listing all of your exes from an attachment perspective. See what your reactions were and what their reactions were and where that might have come from in an attachment history perspective. Particularly look at how you might have lost out because of your reactions. What you might need to know if you are an ambivalent person in a partnership with boyfriend, girlfriend who is avoidantly attached and who seems not to care whether they hear from you or not. Or you might want to consider this if you are the person who seems not to care very much. Things might be a little bit different for you or for that person. They might not be okay without you, you might not be okay without your girlfriend, partner, boyfriend, despite your protest, or despite their protest. Eating habits might be different, sleeping habits might change, and the avoidant person might go back to addictive behaviours or compulsions, something like eating, but also alcohol and all the other things that show up. This person might think that they're fine, but they might be behaving slightly differently. I would encourage you, if you're in a relationship with an avoidant person, to boldly assume that that person is missing you. Like I said with my partner, I've assumed that he's not thinking about me because he doesn't tell me. But actually once we broach the subject, he said, I think about you all day. He just doesn't tell me because he's not verbal. So now he calms my nervous system down by telling me. What I try to do for him is relate affectionately towards him, especially when I know that he's triggered. That way we're trying to meet each other in our respective love languages. I also try boldly assuming that he misses me, even when my belief system tells me the opposite. And I know that when we can do this, when we can break through the defensiveness or the triggering, or the feeling like we need to defend ourselves, or feeling scared, or feeling abandoned, or feeling invaded, when we can break through all of that and recognize that the other of us needs something to calm us down so that we can get back into a loving connection, the rewards are tremendous, really worth it. I believe both of us get a lot of satisfaction from this. Because neither of us are wrong in this scenario, and love is allowed to thrive. I'll just add as a caveat here, if you're single and you're dating someone who actually doesn't seem to have the willingness to work this kind of thing out with you, drop 'em. It's never gonna work. There has to be a mutual interest to prioritize the relationship. No matter how avoidant somebody gets, they will let you know if they're invested in having a relationship with you. And so will you, if you're avoidant. What really counts in the end is the ability to be there for each other. We all want to feel safety and acceptance. In childhood it's one-sided, where in adulthood we make a deal with each other, to uphold a sense of safety and security for each other. That's the point of relationship. So start asking each other about your childhoods, about things that might still affect you. Start learning the signs of when your partner is triggered. The worst thing that you can do is to ignore that cue. But if you can recognize it, you can quickly change your voice, your tone of voice, to modulate the response. Your tone of voice can activate or deactivate a triggering. For real success in a relationship, you've got to learn to soothe your partner's vulnerabilities, as well as your own. It's worth mentioning here that that triggering, that dynamic that happens between you, or that happens to so many people, so many of us I should say, there is no way not to take it personally with a difficult attachment history or an insecure attachment history. It's instinctive and it's wired to respond that way. But you can reduce the gap between your response and your reaction over time. But really, you need to recognize the flooding when the system is flooded first. What I've talked about today is about being able to look inward when you're feeling distant or avoidant. Having a look at what might have triggered you into that state. I talked about regulating each other's nervous systems and shifting away from a self-view to a view of the other and of relationship. Understanding that you might push that away if you're feeling insecure. I've said that what counts is the ability to be there for each other. I've also talked about how our attachment can't be changed completely, can't be changed to the experience that we've had, but our attachment styles are changeable, we can learn new skills. Coupling has been our primary social construct since life began. What I feel is that good relationship improves everything in life. It improves every social structure. From the lives of our children to society. If you want further help with understanding your part in the dynamic you have in your relationships, I'd love to help. Please check out my Calling in the One programme on my website, Bristolcounselling.co.uk. I will now be on holiday for the next couple of weeks. Hooray! This is my first trip abroad since the whole COVID thing began, so I can't tell you how excited I am about that. But it is unfortunate that there are so many bank holidays and my holiday now, because I do the podcast on Mondays usually, and I now don't have time to do that again until the middle of May. But the quick tips, the podcast bite series to help you with comfort eating recovery will still be past your way. So keep an eye out for those. Meanwhile, I hope you're enjoying the bank holiday season if that's what's happening in your country, or at least I hope you're looking forward to a break at some point soon. Thank you so much for listening today. I'll see you soon, I hope. This is Underground Confidence with Shelly Treachery.