in your relationship in NYC, do you sometimes feel like your partner is shutting you out ? This often shows up most clearly after a fight, when one partner shuts down completely.
Do you or your partner sometimes have a hard time staying connected and close to each other? If you reach out when afraid or uncertain, and your partner goes cold, that creates real distress. By ‘style,’ I mean a learned response pattern, not a fixed personality trait.
What Is Avoidant Attachment, and Why Does It Matter So Much?
Avoidant partners tend to highly value independence and self-sufficiency. Depending on others, especially in a close relationship, can feel dangerous. Even worse, depending on others, especially a romantic partner, can be a sign of weakness, and even pathetic. The avoidant stance leads to distance in a relationship, and can eventually lead to disaster, the end of the relationship.
Going Deeper
How Does an Avoidant Style Develop?
A key word for an avoidant style is dismissive. Most likely, when you grew up as a child, you experienced a lot of dismissiveness from key caregivers. We do what we know. Dismissed as a child, you grow up dismissing in return. More specifically: your emotional inner world got dismissed, treated as unimportant or irrelevant. The message is clear: focus on behavior and performance, not feelings. Showing emotions is a sign of weakness and embarrassment. Emotional closeness is avoided, replaced by achievement and self-reliance.
In adulthood, if you cope by shutting down emotionally, intimacy becomes something to be managed rather than sought.
How This Plays Out in Relationships
And what do you really need on the inside? Being seen and responded to by a present partner is what real connection requires. You need a partner who can genuinely attune to what you’re experiencing. You need someone who can feel something of what you’re feeling. When your partner is present with you, attunes to you, and resonates with you, you’ll develop a trust in them.
What are some common ways a partner who is cut off may be shutting you out? Simple things can happen, such as tuning you out, especially when you’re upset. With deeper avoidance, partners often develop somatic symptoms: they feel it in the body instead. they tries to numb out upsetting emotions on the inside to feel better on the outside. Humans can’t actually shut feelings off, even with practice.
Going Deeper
Can You Shut Off Your Emotions?
Research shows that suppressing emotions tends to amplify them. The body holds what the mind pushes away. Emotions intensify even as conscious awareness dims.
How would you know if you’re doing this? One key indicator is to look at what happens in your body. Body aches, back pain, tension, or headaches may signal suppressed emotion. The emotions get stuck in your body, without a way to be released. Grabbing a drink to ‘blow off steam’ doesn’t actually release the tension.
A Brilliant Way of Coping
Why would a child develop this way of coping? In reality, children are brilliant at adapting to their environment. They need to survive at all costs. Avoidant attachment develops as a smart childhood adaptation to caregivers who couldn’t meet emotional needs. Children deprived of touch, affection, and emotional support show severely impaired development. What this means is that the child learns that they is not going to get emotional needs met, even if physical needs are fulfilled, so the child tries to “turn off” the need for emotional responsiveness. Even though connection can’t really be shut off, low expectations feel safer than repeated disappointment.
Does your partner Sometimes Forget You?
If your partner has an avoidant style, you may feel like you barely exist in their awareness. In reality, they may have genuinely not thought of you, because connection doesn’t feel necessary to them. Remember, this is not necessarily a belief they is aware of, but it is a believe the guides their reality, and actions are based on this filter.
Whenever you try to get back in their awareness, an avoidant partner often pulls back further. The response you get from trying to reach them is most likely an even more intense withdraw, they is perceiving your attempt to connect and get closer as a threat to autonomy, the sense of who they is. When any of us feel like we’re under attack, we’ll most likely respond intensely, which is why you probably experience your partner’s withdraw as so severe.
How a Fantasy Starts to Feel Like a Nightmare
Loneliness is a common complaint that couples experience when one partner shuts the other out
When you are first dating a partner, it may be easy for them to bring you into a fantasy world. As you’re getting to know each other, they is most likely not making any associations between you and their significant caregivers, so most likely they is not aware of the threat you naturally present to their independence as his romantic partner. As time and experience continues in your relationship, the fears start to brew, and eventually can boil over.
Is their fear of fusing with you the only fear they has? Most likely, more fear exists: they is likely also afraid that the closer you get to them, the more you’ll be able to see them from the inside, with flaws. This second fear, that there is something wrong with them, is a fear of shame, of not being good enough, and can lead to even more withdraw.
How High is the Bar Set in your relationship?
The avoidantly connected partner usually relies on their own ways to calm or stimulate their feelings and emotions, though at times they may attempt to connect with you. However, the bar is often set extremely high in terms of their expectations for your response, and if you don’t cross that bar, they can easily return to a withdrawn, isolated space. Because the bar is raised so high and you can’t always cross it, they feels disappointed in you, and this reinforces their core fears, that they can’t really depend on someone to come through for them, and that they truly is an isolated “I.”
How “We” Feels Like a Threat to “I”
Where does your partner get stuck? Most likely, when they needs to shift from an “I” to a “we,” the fears of dependence can easily surface, and in an intense way. The urge to withdraw comes on strongly. It may be possible momentarily for them to shift into a “we” for a time, but then they easily and comfortably goes right back to a more isolated “I” state, and holds onto their “I” in a rigid stance out of fear.
How Can You Help Save Your relationship in NYC?
What can you do to help draw your partner out, even when they is strongly shut down? The first step is to practice modifying your voice and what you say to help them shift how they is experiencing your attempts to connect, helping them know that being a “we” doesn’t mean surrendering their “I.”
You can help your partner regulate their emotions by slowing approaching them, and syncing up with their cues to get closer one step at a time, instead of a giant leap at a time. With experience, they will learn that being closer can actually feel good, and over time, they will learn that they can count on you to be there with them, without overwhelming them with your own needs.
Your challenge as you reach out to them is to practice your own ways of slowing yourself down, what we call the 3-R’s of the Loving at Your Best Plan: to stop and regulate yourself, monitoring your body to see where you’re upset, and modifying your breath based on your need; the second R is to reflect on what is upsetting you: what makes sense about what you’re experiencing? Do you know where you’re feeling sensations in your body, can you then identify the emotional state inside based on the sensation? Is the situation that is upsetting you with your partner reminding you of something you’ve experienced in a past relationship? If so, how could that be influencing how you are seeing the present situation with your partner? Can you then understand and make sense of what is upsetting you? Once you’ve done this, you can do the third R, which is to identify the Response that you need. You can express what you’ve reflected on to your partner, and reach out to them to invite them to meet your need, specifically.
What can your partner do? they can become much more aware of how shutting down stems from fears that are most likely outdated, hindering the safety in an adult romantic relationship. The goals are to regulate their central nervous system enough to then “make sense” of the muscle memory responses that come with their physical and emotional approaches that romantic relationships offer.
Share Your Experiences in your relationship in NYC
Do you relate to being in a relationship with an avoidantly attached partner or spouse? Or are you the partner or spouse struggling to get out from behind the wall of avoidance? Share your experiences on our blog, and join the conversation in our Marriage and Couples Counseling and Therapy in NYC blog.
Ready to Transform Your Relationship?
Travis Atkinson, LCSW, specializes in evidence-based couples therapy including the Gottman Method, EFT, and Schema Therapy, for couples in NYC and online. Take the first step today.
