Connor Beaton breaks down the anxious-avoidant cycle: one partner craves closeness while the other pulls away, trapping both in a loop of affection and withdrawal. The pattern usually starts in childhood. Breaking it requires naming what's happening, talking about it directly, and building independence on both sides.
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All right, team, welcome back to the Mentalk Show. Connor Beaton here. Imagine a relationship. Just for a moment, imagine a relationship that is a constant roller coaster of highs and lows, leaving you emotionally exhausted. But for some reason, you're hooked. You're in. It's almost like you are addicted. You love them so much and you're so connected. And then there's massive disconnection. Likely the sex is great, or even if it's not, you just can't seem to pull away. This is the classic avoidant, anxious push, pull. And it is usually more defined by the duality and the dual experience, the juxtaposition of massive affection, getting what you want, feeling close, feeling desired, feeling loved, and then withdrawal. Affection and withdrawal. Affection and withdrawal. And you go through this cycle over and over and over again. If you are the person who has the affection and you feels the closeness and then you start to withdraw, it's very likely that you grew up in an environment where love and affection and praise was given to you and then taken away. Given to you and then taken away. Or. Or that love and affection and praise or validation, closeness was something that you deeply craved. And so when it shows up, it feels foreign and your system doesn't know what to do with it, and you start to withdraw and pull away. The other version of this is usually a little bit more of the anxious side, which is that when the love and affection starts to show up, it feels so good, you love it. You really start to kind of bask in it. And all of a sudden, very quickly sometimes for some of you, you shift into this space of, I don't want this to go away. I never want this to stop. This closeness, this connection, this affection, this love, this care, this embrace that I feel right now. I don't want it to leave. And so what do you do? You start to squeeze tighter, you start to text more, you feel your energy starts to get a little on edge. You're, like, a little too close to that person, and you won't pull yourself away. And you know that every part of you saying, just relax, just calm down, just take a breath, like, give them some space. But for some reason, you just find yourself, like, curled up in their lap, and, you know, you won't let go. I've seen this happen for men and women. You know, I've worked with tons of clients that are. That are guys where they're just like, you know, she starts to give me some love and affection, and I can feel every part of me. It's almost like I want to bear, hug her and never let go. And as soon as that comes online, as soon as I act in that way, I can feel her wanting to run. So those are some of the main signs of the cycle. How you start to break the cycle is as follows. Number one, you need to gain some self awareness of identifying the patterns that you are embodying that are contributing to this push pull dynamic. You need to identify your patterns that are contributing to this push pull dynamic, this affection and withdraw dynamic. What are you specifically doing? What are those patterns? And the second part of it, right, so what are the patterns? Are you love bombing them, you know, love texting them constantly telling them like, I never want this to stop, if only we could just stay in bed forever. And, you know, this sort of like Romeo and Juliet, overly romantic, romanticized gushing. As soon as you get any sign of affection. I'm being very dramatic here for a reason, but I think some of you will get it and hopefully it's not pissing too many of you off. You're like, okay, Connor, we got it, I got it. Are you contributing that or are you contributing the deep fear of the intimacy that as soon as closeness happens, your body wants to run, you want to pull away. You don't want any type of like cuddling and snuggling or, you know, you're hyper vigilant to anything that they're saying that has to do with, I don't know, commitment or intimacy or really being known at a deep level. So notice your side of the cycle. So bring some awareness to your side of the cycle. Part two of that is what are the origins of that pattern within you? Where did it actually come from? So start to get very clear on what your contribution to the pattern is and where it originated. Next is beginning to communicate full transparency of where you're at. So ideally you have a person that you can go through this with, but you can say, look, I've noticed that we go through this cycle of being affectionate and having a lot of closeness and connection and some intimacy and then it's like ice cold. Have you noticed that too? Have you felt that? And start to get a sense of, can you meet in the same plane? Can the other person acknowledge that that's true as well? Yeah, I've noticed that as well. Every single time we get close, you pull away, right? So start to acknowledge, hey, I've noticed this pattern. Have you noticed it as well? That's part one. Part two is, are you open to working on that together? Are you Open to breaking that cycle together. The last piece about breaking this cycle is you either have to learn to lean more deeply into yourself or more deeply into the relationship. So if you are the anxious person, you have to begin to learn to trust and rely more on not more on yourself, but more in yourself. That you're lovable, that you are, can be grounded, that that other person is somebody that's going to lean into the relationship. You can start to trust the relationship a little bit more and you start to develop other relationships outside of that main one. Because another big one for generally anxious people that are needing a lot of that affection from the relationship is that their external relationships from that intimate one are usually lacking. Right. So if you're a highly anxious person, it's very likely that your external relationships outside of that are either a little too surface level or you're lacking in some. Some deeper relationships that can sort of hold you accountable, that you feel safe with, et cetera. So you have to start to soothe the part of you that wants to suffocate affection, closeness and intimacy. And on the, on the opposite side, the avoidant person or the person that does more of the pulling away.
You need to begin to lean into the relationship and start to rely on the relationship a little bit more. And what this looks like specifically is more transparency about what you don't like in the relationship. Well, actually, maybe not that one so much because sometimes avoidant people are very willing to talk a lot about what they don't like, but more willing to communicate what you love about that person, what you are enjoying about the relationship, more willing to talk about your personal process, what's happening inside of you as you go through the relationship. Right. And sometimes that's going to mean communicating. You know, I felt a little shut down yesterday. Or I can feel that part of me wanting to close off and not communicate. I'd like to have an hour to myself today to just like do my own thing. Or you know what, I'd like to just take the next 12 hours and have some space. Are you cool with that? Right. So start to communicate more transparently about what's happening inside of you. I'm going to break this down into one key phrase that I think every avoidant needs to know. Expression is the antidote to avoidant attachment. Expression is the antidote to avoidant attachment. And that can be as simple as owning when you are feeling that pull out of the relationship. Owning. Ah, I can feel myself shutting down. You know, I can feel myself shutting down. I can feel myself pulling away. Sometimes that expression is the first step in breaking your pattern in your cycle. So I hope that you guys found this valuable. Send this to your partner. This man it forward. This is definitely something that you know if you're in a relationship you should listen to with your partner. If you are in that affection and withdraw cycle, this can be very, very helpful for the two of you to break that. So as always, share your comments below. Man it forward. Connor Beaton signing off. See you next week.
