When an Avoidant Realizes They've Lost You
In today’s post, I want to talk about what actually happens when an avoidant realizes they’ve lost you. But first, a quick disclaimer:
This isn't meant to diagnose anyone or give false hope. If you're in a relationship that doesn’t feel safe or is not meeting your emotional needs, this isn’t permission to stay. Your well-being comes first.
Not All Avoidants "Just Don't Care"
The common belief is that avoidants simply move on and never look back. But after years of coaching and hearing hundreds of stories from clients and former partners of avoidants, I’ve seen another side to this.
Avoidants don’t immediately realize they’ve lost you. It often takes time—weeks, sometimes months—because they’ve already started pulling away while the relationship was still active. This deactivation process is slow and subtle: fewer texts, less emotional engagement, more time alone.
But eventually, something shifts. They realize you’re really gone. You’re no longer responding. The access to your energy, presence, and emotional connection has been cut off.
And if you were someone they felt close to—especially if they have a small social circle or limited deep relationships—you may have held a significant place in their life.
They Miss the Connection (But May Never Admit It)
Even if they don’t say it out loud, many avoidants do miss you. They miss the companionship, the emotional support, the bond you shared. But they’re often too stubborn—or too scared—to admit it.
Some avoidants have told me directly:
"I regret it. I made a mistake. But I didn’t know how to be fully vulnerable without being hurt."
Their resistance comes from survival patterns rooted in early life experiences. Vulnerability, for many avoidants, has historically led to pain. So when they begin to feel obligated or overly exposed in a relationship, fear takes over, and they shut down.
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You're Not Meant to Save Them
If you’re healing from this kind of relationship, it’s important to remember: you’re not here to save anyone. Especially someone who doesn’t want to be saved or isn’t ready to do the work.
You may feel compassion for the trauma they’ve endured—and that’s valid. But don’t let your empathy cost you your peace. You can love someone and still choose yourself.
You’re not the rehab center for someone else’s unresolved pain.
What to Do Instead
If they’ve realized they lost you, and they reach out, pause. Check in with your own healing. Are you reconnecting out of love—or out of fear and longing?
If they haven’t reached out, that doesn’t mean they don’t feel it. But it’s also not your job to wait. Focus on rebuilding your life. On becoming the secure version of yourself who doesn’t chase, doesn’t beg, and doesn’t settle.
Because when you get to that place, the right people won’t need to be convinced to stay.
Final Thought
Many avoidants carry deep regret—but also deep fear. Whether or not they come back isn’t the question. The question is: Are you in a place where you could meet them again with clarity and boundaries?
💬 Want to explore your healing journey more deeply?
Book a 30-minute session and let’s talk through your story, your patterns, and your power.
Bonus Youtube Video And Script
In today's video, we're going to talk about when an avoidant realizes they've lost you.
Before I get into that video, I'm going to give a little bit of a disclaimer. This video isn't intended for you to diagnose anyone, but it's also not intended to give you false hope to stay in a relationship that you don't feel comfortable with, or something that's not meeting your needs.
I'm just going to get right into the video. I know what people are going to say right away from the title. “When they lost you they've lost you”, “nothing, they would just won't care”, but I've been doing this for a really long time. From what I've observed from people that I've worked with in the past or even from coaching people who were in a relationship with an avoidant, I've got hundreds and hundreds of people in my notebook that have the same story, you'd be surprised.
When they realize they've lost you, first, it'll take awhile for them to really register it, because they go into this self-isolation mode. Which is something that they probably already started while they were in the relationship with you. They probably already started to deactivate, pull back, text less, but they do have this breaking point where they realize, maybe a couple months down the line, that you're actually gone. You're no longer responding to their text messages, because from the majority of the people that I know, they are okay with remaining friends, they do miss that companionship. After the breakup happens, the ones who are more introverted, and they don't have a whole lot of close friends and a lot of close relationships, you were someone that they gave a lot of themselves to. They kind of filled you in that slot of ‘the people who are most valuable in their life’. What you'll see from an avoidant who really cares for you is they are very consistent. They show up time and time again. It's just after a while that that intenseness that they felt for you, turns more into fear. It goes from like “I was doing this voluntarily because I was enjoying a relationship”, but after a while they feel that shift of “all right, I feel now I'm more obligated to do these things”. It makes them feel like they're losing themselves. This is when you start to see a lot of the deactivation start to happen.
I see a lot of the comments and I see a lot of what people are saying, and most of it is negative. I understand your feelings and your experience is real, right, they are real. I'm not here to talk you out of being in any relationship where you feel like you're losing yourself. If you guys have seen any of my other videos, I talk a lot about putting your mental health first and not completely giving up your boundaries simply to try to make a relationship with someone who's been traumatized, work. I mean at some point, we all become traumatized from trying to help people who are traumatized. I mean if you go back and look at a couple of my videos where I talk about the adverse childhood experiences, the ACES test, aces too high website: acestoohigh.com. It talks a lot about how people show up later on in life, from all the childhood trauma that they've experienced. This is usually what people get hung up on when they're in a relationship with someone who they know have experienced these hardships over the course of their childhood, but at the same time, it's not our job to try to save anyone or to try to introduce someone to a new lifestyle that they're not comfortable being in. So when they realize that they've lost you they'll miss the companionship. They'll miss having you in their life. Many of them are stubborn and will never admit to it. However, the people that I had that come to me now, and talk to me about their avoidant attachment styles, they'll admit to me that ‘hey yeah, I regret it, I made a huge mistake, but at the same time I never had It modeled to me how to show up in a relationship and how to completely be vulnerable with someone, because when I've been vulnerable with someone, I've always been taken advantage of or hurt’.
So if you found this video of any value, please like, comment and share. You can reach out to me on my other social media accounts: Instagram is [iamcoachcourt], Facebook is [coachcourt] and right here on YouTube [coachcourt] and always remember, when you go be love, you'll never have to find it. Namaste.