Avoidant Attachment: The Blindspot That Keeps You Repeating The Same Relationship Mistakes

[bottlesofchris]

Girl. Just write the books. It’s never enough lol. You are magical. Healing an avoidant attachment style seems impossible

[OllieSmiless]

"we need negative emotions to break loops of negative behavior" - this is gold!!!

[robertgarvansnyder]

Holy crap, this is some next level content. This is 100% my strategy, for 40 years: feeling judgemental and impatient in lieu of feeling pain and hurt, which then results in the other person feeling invalidated. But then, *conveniently* the next day, like 80% of it goes down the memory hole, and I start rationalizing why the other person acted the way they did.

[starrw.]

And also our defense of being logical & unemotional & unresposive to the other person, can have them feel unheard & not cared about : So they escalate to get a response to feel like we care: And the situation keeps escalating & you leave that person feeling more hurt & not cared about etc:

[sarahjay]

DA and Anxious look EQUALLY crazy to each other when activated. Anxious look crazy and emotional and DA look like a psychopath lol but when you understand it it makes total sense :)

[BookWorm]

my brother said it best, "you act like I'm treating you like an emotional punching bag."
He said this during a time where I was starting to learn to stay in my body and characterize my emotions (noticing where I felt sensations, describing the sensations, attempting to name the emotions, and paying attention to the thoughts I would have during my emotions).
I learned that I couldn't heal if I kept pretending that I wasn't hurt.

[MsAleytys]

"emotional pain gifts you with discernment"
mind blown. i can see all these defense mechanisms at play quite clearly when named...

[EsseQuamVideriSeen]

Quote 8:46 "But the ways in which you are in pain in your relationships often are not apparent to you because your brain has learned to cover it up with frustration and contempt."

This is so true! Frustration and contempt are nothing more than a cover up for the pain I would/should otherwise be feeling. Thank you for pointing this out!

Here is some more gold 8:22 "Your pain is not something you're hiding from other people. It's something your brain is hiding from you!"

Your video transcripts are always a big part of my daily journal.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights!

[ranc]

"So when your partner is dysregulated, yelling at you, saying nasty about your character, it's unlikely you feel pain of that. Likely you're defensive and dismissing them, loud or inside. Problem: pain is not getting through, unable to learn the lesson:
situation is painful and needs to be avoided."
This explains a lot.
And this is what CBT is doing wrong and social anxiety advice online: we are been told that we must not avoid people and that we must expose and be strong and confident and somehow other people will not hurt us with them being nasty. Then we end up not avoiding difficult people and due to stress and pain - we end up avoiding people in general - not meeting new people or organizing parties or being initiative in anything.

[lecy]

so true! my peers say i’m emotionally intelligent but i feel like since i started therapy its like the first time i’m ever experiencing real emotions and actually feeling like a human.. i’ve always been neutral and numb 24/7

[dariyamakhmutova]

Thank you ❤️ Lately, I started to believe that I am heartless psycho because I leave people easily after moments of crisis. And you helped me to understand that leaving is the only way I “can” solve the problems by blocking pain. For now, I just don’t allow myself to feel the pain, because of protective mechanism of my mind😭💔, it makes so much sense. I should accept all the negative emotions and pain, in order to learn how to truly prevent repeated unhealthy dynamics.

[FLVCTVAT_NEC_MERGITVR]

This might be the single best synthesis of avoidant reactions to emotional pain I have ever seen. Thank you so much.

[miaduana]

I recognized how part of the disorganized attachment style I used to employ was this numbing technique. I prize pain now as an important news outlet instead the enemy.

[kklsdwr]

Wow, I'm not even halfway through and this stopped me in my tracks: "Your pain is not something you're hiding from other people, it's something your brain is hiding from you." I arrived here because I'm just now learning that there's likely an emotional root to the crippling migraines I've endured for 30 years and which are getting worse. I've known I have a dismissive avoidant attachment style for awhile, but I have a feeling a lot of things are going to fall into place by the time I finish this video. Thank you.

[MiauxCatterie]

I have a more anxious attachment. this was helpful to gain insight into the mind of my on/off partner. in our case, I'm usually trying to explain to him how he's been unfair to me and he won't hear it. he tells me that my words mean nothing and I'm not saying anything of value. which hurts desperately from someone who swears they love you. he then leaves and ghosts me and refuses to ever talk about it so nothing improves. he treats my needs and concerns like I'm being disobedient. that's why we keep ending. he sees it as him holding a boundary against my "craziness" but honestly I would not get to the point that I lose my cool if he'd respect my needs that I vocalize in neutral ways the first ten times

[Brandon-yrnj]

THANK YOU for covering the stereotype about dismissive avoidants deciding to ignore their emotions. I swear there’s a subtype of anxious-preoccupied that pretends to be DA but they’re just passive aggressively seeking validation

[lizardluminals]

I don’t know who needs to hear this but I’m currently in the process of becoming a psychologist so I can help people with this. If you want to heal then I’d like to recommend a process that you can do to heal yourself from the avoidant attachment style.

First it’s important to understand that the core root of your attachment style is self limiting beliefs. All things extend from this; all your behavior, all your deactivation strategies, all the anxiety, all the fears of commitment and abandonment and engulfment. All of it stems from your limited beliefs about yourself.

The core beliefs I’ve found are “I am unlovable”, “I am not enough”, “I don’t matter/am not important”. You fear abandonment because it triggers the belief of being unlovable and not enough. You get intense anxiety when you stand up for yourself and assert your wants/needs because it triggers your belief that you don’t matter. This is also why avoidants tend to get in toxic relationships because it’s comforting to have those beliefs being confirmed by the toxic partner but healthy partners trigger those beliefs and trigger anxiety as a result.

I’m speaking from personal experience because I have healed my fearful avoidant attachment. If you want to heal then I recommend this.

Every day affirm/repeat these affirmations 300 times a day. You can do less but the more you do the quicker you will heal. You can download a counter app and use it to count the number of times you affirm.

The affirmations to affirm are these

“I know when affirmations are beliefs”

“I am enough”

“I am lovable”

Then when “I am enough” becomes a belief affirm “I matter” the same number of times a day.

You may get resistance to the affirmations, if you find the resistance is too strong, you can record the affirmations and listen to it in the background as you go about your day. But still affirm the affirmations yourself.

Please feel free to comment if you have questions. You do matter and you’re worth becoming secure so you can experience strong healthy relationships.

[dukekessler]

Im very high on the DA attachment style. It has served me very well in my professions (army vet with multiple combat deployments and current police officer). In my relationships its been very difficult. Going through a divorce currently and I was very cold and aloof throughout the marriage and didn't know why until recently discovering attachment styles. She had her issues too but me being highly unemotional didn't help the marriage at all. Its been a strange divorce, no betrayals or any big events but the little resentments built up over time to where they are insurmountable.

I'll try to use this going forward but the odds are low that I will ever actively seek out a relationship again.

[aikishugyo]

As someone brought up on the "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" mantra to avoid getting into physical altercations as a child, it seems in retrospect that helped to cultivate an avoidant mental state as a child, sadly something that has taken a long time to come to terms with.

[sirene]

Wow. Just in my most recent therapy session I was recounting incidents from an old business relationship, where I was getting insulted and humiliated all the time. Still, I kept going back for more because I had reasoned to myself that the guy is just a jerk and none of what he says is valid or makes sense. From up there on my high horse of integrity and superior analytical skills, I couldn't see the ways this was actually damaging for me. Thinking back to it, I said it felt like I was a boxer who kept getting punched and stood bruised, bleeding, yet content that they won the fight. I have a lot of work to do in acknowledging the hurt and I'm still kind of stuck between contempt and resentment, but your metaphor totally resonates :)