Why Men Who Want Love the Most Run From It the Hardest - Dismissive Avoidant Men

Behind every dismissive avoidant man, there is a specific mother wound. There's a specific type of mother that created this attachment style. And so today I'm gonna be talking about the creation of the dismissive avoidant man and the mother archetype, the mother wound that has gone into creating this man and what you specifically need to know about it, whether you are that man or you're with that man, and how you can begin to address this cycle, this protection mechanism that has shown up. So let's talk about the dismissive man, the dismissive avoidant man. He's usually the guy, from what I've seen in working with so many dudes, that has a— usually he's got a lot going on for him. He's got drive, he's got determination, he's got direction, he's able to build and create. Quite often he's like magnetic. He seems to be able to draw women in relationships into him. And as you do that, as you draw women in, you find that maybe you don't have so much of a problem attracting women, but you have a challenge having it go the distance. And so the moment that she really shows up, that there's emotional availability, that she's consistent, that she's genuinely loving and nurturing and compassionate, you start to Homer Simpson into the bushes, right? You just start to fade away. You pull back, you find yourself getting a little bit more cold. You find this hypervigilance showing up of like critiquing these really small and seemingly innocuous and insignificant things that you start to fixate on and you start to pull away. Maybe you might find yourself saying she's too needy or, you know, her love is just too intense or it feels like she needs too much from a Or it's like, this is too much too soon. And what's actually happening inside of you, inside of the dismissive avoidant man, is that your nervous system is responding to what it perceives to be a threat. And it's not because that woman is actually dangerous. This is the misperception. This is the misinformation of the nervous system in that moment. It's actually, because love feels dangerous, and that love and intimacy has always felt like a threat. And that's because of the dynamic that you experienced with your mom growing up. And so I'm gonna talk about who this type of woman is, what type of mother creates a dismissive avoidant man, and how do you begin to unwind this pattern of, avoiding relationship, avoiding connection, avoiding intimacy, avoiding love. So let's talk about the mom. And again, to be very, very clear, 'cause I read the comments on my YouTube channel, on Spotify, this is not to blame your mom, and this is not to pass the blame onto her, and this is not to say she's a terrible or bad mom. This is just to talk about the limitations and the byproduct that was created because of those limitations. So I wanna make something clear. I'm not talking about the cruel mother. I'm not talking about the mom who screamed or hit or completely abandoned. I'm talking about something a little bit quieter and a little bit more insidious. It's something that, that doesn't leave physical bruises, but kind of carves out a space, a hollowness in a young boy's chest and heart that he then spends the rest of his life trying to fill in with achievement, with accomplishment, with drive, with determination. And while simultaneously protecting this pain, this hollowness inside of him from love, closeness, and intimacy. And so what I'm talking about is the emotionally unavailable mother. And this is the mom that is often present. She fed you, she drove you to practice, she drove you to school. She was around. She was there. So she was physically present, physically present, but when you came to her scared, she just told you to toughen up, or she would give you the Simon treatment. When you cried, she got uncomfortable. Maybe she changed the subject. She just told you to go do something. And when you needed to be held emotionally, you needed to be nurtured, she handed you down some type of logic about why you shouldn't feel that way. She gave you a task, or she was just silent and kind of gave you a blank stare. Now, she didn't do this to hurt you. She did this because there was something in her life that made it so that she was incapable or unable to really give you some type of emotional comfort. This is very common for women that they themselves are addicts. They themselves have childhood trauma that they haven't dealt with. They themselves experienced something in their upbringing that taught them that love is distant. And that's not to excuse the impact that it had on you. It's just to say that quite often that is the case. The emotionally unavailable mother is the mother that has her own deep wounding that she hasn't processed or dealt with that is showing up in her parenting with you. But regardless of what her experience was, it left an impact on you, and that impact on you as a dismissive avoidant, now man, but as a boy, was profound. And it had an impact on you because as kids, we don't have the cognitive ability to say, "Hmm, my mother is actually emotionally unlimited. She seems to have problems communicating emotions or talking about emotions." That's not what happens in a kid's experience. What happens is that the nervous system starts to interpret her emotional unavailability as the following. Your nervous system started to interpret your mom's distance and unavailability as, my emotional needs are a problem. When I feel something or I start to get emotional, that's an issue, specifically with women. Being vulnerable is unsafe and unwanted. Love is, love comes with emotional distance. So intimacy is actually about distance and space. And your nervous system also learned this is actually just what love is. And so your nervous system starts to conclude that love means I shouldn't need anything from her. I am not allowed to express my emotions. And the dismissive part of the dismissive avoidant attachment style is I shouldn't even need those things. I don't even need those things. It's ridiculous that I might even need those things. So there's the sort of traditional avoidant attachment style, where it's really, I'm okay without needing you. You know, I'm okay on my own, and that's just kind of how I am. But the dismissive has a little bit of a different flavor. It's almost like, it's ridiculous that I would even need emotional connection. Why would I even want that? Why would I even want to get close in that way? So to you and to this kind of man, to the dismissive avoidant, love and closeness is something that your nervous system actually sees as a threat and something that should be fundamentally dismissed. So let's talk a little bit about the attachment style itself, because researchers call what, what we're talking about the dismissive avoidant attachment style. And what I want to be clear about here is that This is usually the attachment style that people are like, "He's got commitment issues." That's the classic line, right? "He's got commitment issues." Because from a research perspective, the dismissive avoidant man really learned to regulate his nervous system and regulate himself by turning down the emotional volume and interpreting life through this lens, okay? This is the lens, this is the, the glasses that the dismissive avoidant man has on. I can only rely on me. I can only rely on me. And it's not safe to rely on others. That's kind of the avoidant style. But with the dismissive, it's, why would I even want to rely on others? Why would I even need to rely on others? That's absurd. That makes me weak. That's unsafe. That's unwanted. So there's a kind of flippantness to the avoidant style. And so what an avoidant man, what a dismissive looks like learned is he learned to self-contain. He learned to need less. These guys are generally the needless men, and they learned to not reach. So they don't really reach out and try and make contact or connection. And usually these types of guys, they are fiercely self-reliant, which is part of the appeal and the draw for so many women, because from the outside he looks like he has high independence, high agency. And he was taught to really be resilient. And that's all true. But he was taught to be resilient, not by, you know, love and kindness and support. He was taught to be resilient for survival purposes. So for the dismissive avoidant man, this resiliency that he's created is a survival state. It's like, this is me just surviving. And if you're watching this and you're dismissive and you grew up with this type of mother, you need to— well, you will have learned that reaching for help was dangerous, emotional connection was foreign, compassion was something that you probably didn't receive, nurturing was also a very foreign thing. And here's what's important about this adaptation. And here's what's hard for you as a dismissive avoidant man, and for the people that are with dismissive men. It worked. And for some of you guys, it worked really fricking well. You learned to turn this survival strategy into gold, in usually a very real way. A lot of dismissive avoidant men that I have worked with over the years, they're wildly successful. They're very, very successful. They're very good at what they do. They're very good at creating wealth. They're very good at creating status. And so the challenge is that this has become, this survival strategy has become something that has actually paid off usually within their career, their finances, their business and professional life in some way. So the problem for many dismissive avoidants is that beginning to address their dismissive avoidant attachment not only feels like a threat because they're having to build connection, be expressive, talk about what they're feeling, allow themselves to rely on other people, but it actually feels like a threat to their ability to succeed. Because for many of them, again, this survival strategy that they deployed early on in life, I shouldn't need anybody, that's ridiculous. I should only rely on myself. That's actually been what's made them very successful. It's been part of, I should say, not all of, but part of what has driven them towards success. And so the tragedy is that it keeps that man out of relationship, out of closeness and connection and intimacy, which a part of him really wants because he's trying to fill that void inside of him with success, with accomplishment, with achievement, with doing, with making, with earning. And that's working really well, but it's also not filling the hole. All right, guys, really quick aside. First off, thank you so much for tuning in to the show and to the channel. If you are wanting to go deeper, if you're a man that's working on himself in some way, shape, or form, you're wanting to be more self-led, you want to trust yourself more, you want to have a deeper level of self-worth, or maybe you're looking to improve your relationship, then I encourage you to check out the Man Talks Alliance. You can go to mantalks.com/alliance. We have over 1,000 men in this incredible community from around the world, men who are just like you, working to better themselves, to be a better husband, a better father, a better leader in your own life. So check it out, mantalks.com/alliance. So let's talk a little bit about why real love feels like a threat to the dismissive. And this is where it kind of gets important because for the dismissive man, he doesn't generally struggle with emotionally unavailable women. He actually does really well with them. So what you'll notice for a lot of dismissive men, dismissive avoidant men, is they are good in relationships with emotionally unavailable women because it recreates this kind distance, but it will always reach a point where he will feel dissatisfied, unsatiated in some way. And it's the emotionally available women that start to challenge him, that start to break him open. And I don't mean in like a poetic way, I mean in a psychological way. Because when a woman shows up consistently, she's warm, she's present, she's loving, she's kind, she wants to know him, she starts to really express her love for him and what she appreciates about him, his nervous system or your nervous system starts to register that as a threat and it starts to shut down. And the window of intimacy that, that he developed as a boy, that you developed as a boy, is so narrow, right? It's like intimacy is only okay under these conditions. And it's usually at a pretty safe distance. It's not something close. Whereas general like real genuine love, that requires emotional attunement, that requires emotional expression, that requires really being understood, having your needs prioritized, having how you feel prioritized. And usually for the dismissive avoidant man, that amount of connection, that amount of information and data and emotion is overwhelming. Discombobulates his system. It feels like it's too much to handle because guess what? Your nervous system— I couldn't get that out— your nervous system was never calibrated to actually receive that volume of love, of connection, of closeness. And so it feels foreign and it feels like a threat. And so your nervous system does what it has always done under emotional overwhelm. It deactivates. It shuts down. So you pull away, you pull back, you get busy, you start finding flaws in her, and you tell yourself that maybe I'm just not into, you know, that into her, even though there's a part of you that knows actually that's really not true. And this is called a deactivating strategy. So when your nervous system starts to feel too much, and you're like, "Oh man, this, like, I feel a little overwhelmed, and I feel maybe like a little," some guys describe it as suffocated, "and I don't really know what to do, and I'm kind of on the edge." Because there's closeness happening, there's connection happening, you feel known, your system deactivates, a deactivating strategy. You pull away, you shut down the emotions, you start to find flaws, and all of that is to deactivate how you're feeling. Feeling. But here's the important point, is that in the moment, it's— it doesn't really feel like a conscious choice. It's not something that you're actively trying to do. It's an automatic response to a perceived threat, and your system is trying to return to what it thinks a regulated baseline is. And that regulated baseline is in agency. In solitude, in isolation, not in relation. So for the dismissive avoidant man, the hard part is that he's learned to find a quality, a kind of pseudo-regulated state in isolation. And relationship actually feels dysregulating. Real deep, real deep love and intimacy and connection that he starts to build, this is the heartbreaking part, is that usually it's the women that are very good for him, the women that are genuinely in love with him, that have very good interests in him and care about him, and he starts to feel that, it's those relationships that activate his nervous system the strongest. So here's the deeper truth I wanna get into before we talk about what to do about it. There's a part of you that runs from love to keep you safe, and that part of you is not broken. This is one of the hard parts about the dismissive avoidant is that he gets so much flak, and he's talked about as if he's broken, something wrong with you, defective. And when you start to gain awareness about this, It can feel like that. It can be like, wait, why would I pull away from something that's good for me? That doesn't make sense. I must be fucked up. Well, you're not. You're not. It's just that you learned to adapt to the environment that you were in. This is an adaptive strategy. This is a type of intelligence, and it kept you functional, highly, highly functional in an environment that could not meet your needs. But you are not a boy in that house anymore, and you are not a boy with that mother anymore, and you cannot continue to project your mother onto the women that you date. And the woman that's in front of you, the woman that loves you and is compassionate and nurturing and cares and shows up for you and is actually safe, she's not mom, but you're relating to her as if she is mom. Your nervous system is relating to her as if she is mom. And that's really the work, because what needs to happen is not just aha moments and insight moments. It's that knowing why you pull back doesn't actually automatically stop you from doing that. What changes the pattern, what stops you from pulling away, is learning to tolerate the, the discomfort of being loved of being in connection, of having more closeness than you're used to, and flipping the story from, why would I even need that? Or that's not something that I even need— closeness, connection, emotional expression— to that's something that I know I desire. That's actually something that I know I crave. I'm just afraid of it. I've just disregarded it as something that's that's important. And here's the thing, learning to feel safe and learning to trust closeness and intimacy and expression is the key. So the first step is being able to start to, to cognitively see the pattern of your pullback and pull away. The second step is being able to understand the story that you've told yourself about intimacy, about love, about closeness. And starting to rewrite the new story, being able to admit, actually, I do want closeness. I do find value in connection and intimacy. And then the third step is being able to start to allow your nervous system to tolerate more closeness. And you might need to take time in doing this, because if you try and rush it, it's gonna overtax your system. And you're gonna wanna shut down. You're gonna wanna have that shutdown strategy deployed immediately. So you're gonna have to learn to go bit by bit, and you're gonna have to communicate in your relationship and start to say, "Hey, I'm feeling overwhelmed with the amount of connection and closeness and intimacy that we have. I could use a little bit of breathing room for a couple hours," right? And again, we don't want to take days and days and days or weeks and weeks and weeks, you wanna catch it in the moment and say, "Hey, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. I could use a little bit of space for a few hours." And then you take real intentional space to let your system adjust in solitude. The key for the dismissive avoidant man is that as you move back more towards secure relationships, secure attachment, because dismissive avoidant is an insecure relating, The key to this is you expand your tolerance and find safety in solitude. Expand your tolerance, find safety in solitude. And so the hard part is that you and the woman that you're with are going to have to have as clear communication as you can about when you've reached your tolerance around intimacy, closeness, connection, vulnerability, emotional expression. and then you're going to have to find a bit of reprieve in solitude for a period of time. And the hard part is, is that the woman that you're with needs to know that and hold it. So she needs to be able to say, "I'm here as you go through this wave," and that's gonna be hard for her 'cause that might activate some of her stuff. But you have to be very clear about that because it doesn't happen all at once. The misconception with especially dismissive avoidance whether it's a man or a woman, is that they should just be able to get over it within the span of like 2 weeks. And what's actually necessary is for your nervous system to acclimate to being able to receive more love, more intimacy, more praise, more validation, more support, more emotional connection, and then being able to regulate both with your partner and on your own in solitude. While learning, and this is the key part, to slowly rely less on, "I need to be by myself in order to be okay." And so you have to start to practice being and staying in the emotional connection, staying with the discomfort of when she says she loves you, or that she's so into you, or she's giving you praise or acknowledgement, or she's genuinely caring and compassionate about something that's been hard in your life. And instead deflecting it away and batting it away like a badminton— with a badminton racket, that you actually let it land for you. And you start to communicate about the impact that her love and her compassion is having on you. And you start to open yourself to having more tolerance. And when I say tolerance, I don't mean that you're tolerating love. I mean that your nervous system has a greater capacity to to be close, to be known, to be tended to and taken care of, to be emotionally connected, all those different pieces. So it is a dance. That's the dance that has to happen between you and a woman that you really want to be with. So let me know what you thought about this. If you've been, if you are a dismissive avoidant guy, just comment below what really stood out to you. A dismissive avoidant man, you might want to share this with him. And if he's open to it, maybe watch it together. But share any thoughts that you have below, and I hope that you found value in this and can implement it. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.