Are YOU the avoidant in your relationship?

Now for the big stuff. What do you do? How do you handle it? If you are the avoidant person in the relationship and want to move to a more secure relational style, a couple things. Number one, you have to unequivocally, you just have to, if you want to just going off the choice conversation before. But where we all need to start is understanding the origins of your avoidant attachment. Where did it actually come from? And the reason why this is important is that you. Part of the healing for all avoidance is to see the patterns and the behaviors that created their avoidance in the first place. Because, and I don't know how else to say this, more often than not, an avoidant has learned their avoidant attachment from an avoidant attachment. Okay? Oftentimes, if you are avoidant, you learn that avoidant attachment style from another attachment style. Right? One of your parents had a very emotionally disconnected attachment style in some way, shape or form. And so it's quite common that it's a learned behavior. And if you can start to see the patterns in your parent. And this is the hard part, but it's the thing that we all need to come into contact with. If we are the avoidant person, what we start to see is that we are putting our partner in the same position that we felt we were in growing up, okay? We're putting our partner into this position where they're starved of the connection, the intimacy and the closeness that they're wanting. And that's a very similar position that we were in when we were a child with a caregiver or with somebody that we deeply loved. So we have to start to do that work. Now, maybe I can create a separate section on that for you guys to kind of dig into, but that work should really be done with a psychologist, therapist or coach that really knows what they're doing, doing when it comes to attachment style. This is why at our men's weekends and all the programs that I do, a big portion of it focuses in on helping you become a secure attachment style. Number two, prioritize your experience. Prioritize your experience. Avoiding. People usually have the story that what they need or want doesn't matter or they have to sort of manipulate and coerce things to get what they want, right? So there's usually this story of like, well, what I want doesn't matter. If I say what I want is going to cause a problem. If I try and tell somebody how I really feel, it's going to be used against me, it's going to be used to harm me. I'M going to get rejected because of it. I'm going to get punished because of it. And so because of that, avoidant people actually do not generally prioritize their real internal experience. So their real wants, needs and desires are oftentimes omitted from the intimate relationships in their life. And they might seem counter to that because again, in relationships, when a avoidant gets in a relationship with a secure or an anxious person, what ends up happening is that the avoidant person is getting pursued, they're constantly getting chased. And so for the other partner, it can feel like the whole relationship is about the avoidant person. But for the avoidant person, what it'll like for them is my needs actually aren't a priority in this relationship. And that's what confu can creates a tremendous amount of confusion and conflict in the relationship. So you have to start to be willing to be specific about what you're experiencing in the relationship, not complaints about the other person, but actually to communicate your wants, your needs, your desires. And you might wanna start by owning the fact that you have a hard time building, developing, maintaining closeness in the relationship. And because that's you prioritizing your experience of I have a hard time trusting not you, but I have a hard time trusting closeness. I have a hard time being open and honest about what I'm feeling. I have a hard time actually asking you for what I want and need. I remember working with a man, and this is just an examp who was in, in a relationship with a woman, and they've been dating for a couple years. And he said he really had struggled for his entire life to communicate what he wanted sexually in the bedroom. He felt like he had never been able to actually ask for what he wanted in the bedroom because he was so worried that he's gonna get rejected and denied. And so he had to start to open up with the woman that he was dating and start to say, hey, listen, I'd like to explore X, Y and Z. I would really love for you to do this or for us to explore this. And it was something that he done in any prior relationship. And it really opened up their relationship in a massive, massive way. So you have to start to prioritize your own experience, your own needs, your own wants and desires. And where you can start is just writing, just taking a pen and paper and making a bit of a list, like, what are some of the things that I want in the relationship? Right. Do you want to go on a date night a week? Do you want to go and have a specific type of date? Do you want to do more travel or adventure or hiking with your, you know, with your partner? Do you want to go and travel to certain places? Are there certain conversations that you want to have? Right. So start to really just write out what are some of the things that, you know, you already want to be included into the relationship that you've maybe been struggling to talk about or to open up about. Number three is shift from blame to ownership. Shift from blame to ownership. Avoidance. Tend to over index blaming the other person as a defense mechanism. Right. It's not a attack weapon, it's a defense mechanism. And so one of the things that we have to do when we recognize that we are the avoidant partner is that part of how we are creating distance and space between us and our partner is over indexing that they are the problem, that there's either something wrong with them or, you know, the decisions that they're making or that, you know, they're constantly in the wrong. And we, we have to start to take ownership over our part in the conflict, and you have to start to take ownership over your part in the disconnection in the relationship. And so when something isn't working in the relationship and you have conflict around it, you have to step away and take a real solid look at what's my responsibility in this. How am I contributing to the disconnection? How am I contributing to, to this conflict? And once you start to do that, you can bring that back to the table and take ownership over, you know what, I shut down in that conversation, or I actually wasn't listening to you, or, you know, I was blaming you for what was going on. But you have to start to look at taking ownership over your part of the relational dysfunction. And specifically, and this is the big, big, big piece that you need to start to take ownership over in order to move into a more secure attachment style. You have to take ownership over the ways in which you are pulling away, shutting down, or disconnecting. It cannot be the responsibility of your partner. And the reason for that is that even if they were pointing it out and they were right, it would still cause you to pull away. So you have to take ownership over all the ways in which you disconnect, shut down, pull away from emotional closeness, physical closeness, and sexual closeness. And so that where I would encourage you to start with that is again, just sit down and start to take stock of what are some of the ways in which I pull away, shutdown, or disconnect in my relationship and just start to write some of those pieces out so you can catch yourself in the moment and take ownership over them and lean into closeness and connection. So then times in which you would normally, you know, conflict starts to brew up and you shut down and pull away. Or, you know, your wife or your girlfriend makes a comment about how you forgot about something instead of shutting down, or like, you always do this, or, you know, you're always criticizing me, you lean in and say, you're right, I did forget this. I did forget to pick that up from the grocery store or whatever it is. Next. Use shutdown as a bridge. Use shutdown as a bridge. Now, this is a really, really important one. Every single time you want to shut down or pull away, or you find yourself shutting down or pulling, pulling away, call it out. It might be in a conflict and you can say, I'm shutting down right now. Or it might be, you know, you and your partner haven't had great communication for a few days, and you can feel yourself pulling away. You can feel. Feel yourself wanting to disconnect. You can feel yourself wanting to move towards coping mechanisms, whatever they might be. Call it out and say, you know what? I feel like there's a lot of distance between us. I feel like I'm pulling away. Have you felt that, too? And in this way, you're using the recognition of the shutdown as a bridge for connection. You're using the recognition of shutdown as a bridge of connection. And you can use that to open up into a conversation about number two, point number two, which was prioritize your experience. And you can say, think things like, hey, I'm shutting down. I need a minute. Let's reconnect. And you can take a breath and lean back in. And then you can say, what's actually underneath the shutdown, Right? What's actually happening behind that? Are you worried about letting them down? Are you worried that your needs don't matter? Are you worried that you, you know, if you ask what you want, you're going to be rejected? Are you just struggling in some way, shape or form because you, you feel a little bit lonely, right? Like, whatever it might be, but use that shutdown as a bridge to reconnect to your partner. Next is build trust with routine and repetition. So just because you use shutdown as a bridge one time doesn't mean that that's going to magically move you out of this avoidant behavior. You are going to need some repetition, right? It's like a golf swing. You're not going to get up to the golf tee and crack it 300 yards right down the middle of the fairway, right? You're gonna, you're gonna shit the bed a couple times. It's gonna go way off to the right or way off to the left. You know, you're gonna hook it, you're gonna slice it. That's gonna happen. It's gonna take some practice. So you need to have a bit of a routine and some repetition to actually lean into intimacy and to begin to trust that it's okay for you to ask for your needs to be met. It's okay for you to be open and transparent, to prioritize your experience. It's okay for you to take ownership not only over your part of any conflict or dysfunction, but it's okay for you to take ownership over what you actually want in the dynamic in the relationship. One thing that can be very helpful in this part of it is to schedule a weekly or bi weekly experience or date or conversation with your partner with, where you get to share something with that person. You get to share in something with that person. It doesn't really matter what it is, but it can be an art class, you could go do pottery, you could go to a sporting event. You can go and have a hobby together, right? A photography walk, a walk through the forest, a hike. It doesn't really matter what it is, but it is a very specific and intention, intentional time where you and your partner are committed to creating some type of connection. Now, the reason why this is important is because you're going to find yourself wanting to sabotage around that and all of your avoidant BS is going to pop up around it. You're going to, you know, the two or three times in, you're going to find like, I don't want to go do this thing, or maybe we can just skip this week or whatever it is and it'll be a training ground for you to prioritize consistent connection, consistent intimacy. Remember what I talked about in the beginning for many, Avoidance. One of the things that creates avoidance, an avoidant attachment in the first place, is inconsistent connection, inconsistent intimacy. And so we have to be willing to prioritize that in order to do the last piece, which is get uncomfortably close.

Realize and remember that for you as an avoidant person, closeness feels foreign and closeness feels like a threat to your system. And so you have to be willing to lean in and you can ask yourself the question, if I was putting the relationship first, what choice would I make? I love this question. For me in the past and for any avoidant man that I've ever worked with. This question has been a radical game changer because for the avoidant person, it is a me first life. I have to protect myself first because nobody else is going to do it for me. And so we have to start to shift and say, okay, I'm in this with somebody. I'm in a life together with somebody. I'm in a relationship with somebody. So if I was putting the relationship first, what choice would I make? You know, about this date, about this decision? And you don't have to use that every single time, but start to leverage that question because it can really help you reorient your mind and your body to a more relationship centric way of living and choosing versus a me centric individual way of living and choosing. That's leaving you alone, disconnected, unhappy, and not getting what you actually crave and want in your relationship.