Anyone that has ever gotten into a relationship with someone that's a dismissive avoidant will experience a pullback. What that pullback will look like is them needing to take time and needing to take space for themselves. Especially if they're an avoidant who isn't working through their communication issues with a counselor or a therapist. During these times, there are a few things that I've noticed that the avoidant realizes and this is what they've told me, this is what people that I've coached have talked about. However, here's a disclaimer, this content isn't intended to encourage anyone to stay in a relationship that they consider to be abusive or manipulative. Any relationship that feels you're sacrificing your mental health I recommend that you really rethink if this is the relationship dynamic for you.
Before I get into the content, if this is your first time viewing my channel, my name is Coach Court and I've been helping people navigate relationships for over the past 18 years. If you want my help personally, the quickest way to get into contact with me is through my website at www.fruitfulseedz.com.
First let's talk about why avoidants need space in the first place. For many avoidants, closeness can feel very overwhelming. Even if they have a lot of strong feelings for someone, they can experience what I like to call a ‘vulnerability hangover’ that causes them to pull away. During this time that they're taking their space, it's usually an opportunity for them to recharge their batteries, get themselves back to homeostasis, ‘center’ and just have the energy to interact in a relationship again. It's almost like a tug-of-war. When they feel that they are being pulled too far out of their comfort zone, their autonomous zone is when this actually occurs, but here are three reasons why, outside of them feeling a little bit too overwhelmed, that's the first one, they'll be overwhelmed by the closeness.
The second one is they need time to process what it is that they're actually feeling. Avoidants aren't very good at thinking on the spot and going with the flow in that way. So they need the time to pull away and completely process, mull over what it is that they're feeling or why they're feeling that way. Usually they have pretty good reasons as to why, but the problem is when this happens, many of the people that they're dating they're blindsided, because hey feel like whatever the issue that this person had, it was already buried. The hatchet had already been buried. This was something that didn't even need to be brought up again, but the issue that happened 6 months ago, they're still feeling a certain type of way about it, and that space kind of helps them process why they're feeling that way. I've seen clients get broken up with during this time, because the avoidant may feel like ‘hey we don't really see eye to eye’, ‘we're not compatible with each other’, but when they were having a conversation they were agreeing to a lot of different things, shaking their head and just agreeing to disagree. However, after they've taken that time to really process what it is that they actually feel, that’s when they come back with their true feelings about a certain situation.
The third reason why they do this is because they want to preserve their independence, like I talked about before, their autonomous zone. Whenever they're feeling like they're making decisions that's not actually their decisions, they need to pull back to see if it's actually them making this decision or if they're just agreeing to whatever it is someone else has laid out in front of them.
Now here's the good thing about allowing them to take that space, there's some type of light at the end of the tunnel here, they start to miss that connection. During that time apart, they may come to the realization that I actually missed this connection that we had. Even though I needed a little bit of time and a little bit of space away from this person, my feelings are actually growing more in that silence. I can't think of the person I heard this from, but he said: “the real music is made with the silence in between the notes”. I wholeheartedly believe this. If you're in a relationship with an avoidant. you'll agree that when they do get that time apart they get to come back and it's usually stronger than it was before.
The second thing that happens is they get to understand their own emotions. It's like we talked about before, because avoidants suppress their feelings so much and they're not able to go with the flow and have these very difficult conversations in the moment. It's why you see them start to shut down, it's why you see them start to dissociate from whatever conversation that you have. Their bandwidth isn't as wide as someone who is a healthy communicator, someone who is more secure, so they really struggle during those times. When they are able to process what they're feeling they can finally do that. Whether it's them having feelings of affection, regret or desire to reconnect, they actually do understand that when you give them that time to process what's going on.
The third thing that tends to happen, and I see this pretty rarely, it doesn't happen a lot, but I've seen it before, they start to understand that it's okay to compromise. They recognize that balance is important in this relationship, it doesn't have to be a tug-of-war match all the time and this is usually someone who was leaning more secure. If they're an avoidant leaning more secure, they're working on their secureness, they start to see things not so much as black and white, there's a gray area there. They start to miss that level of closeness and understand that we can have this closeness, it's not so scary anymore, it's not something that I have to let ego get in the way, like ‘my way or the highway’. It's not the case when someone is leaning more into secure, if there's someone that has a baseline dismissive avoidant attachment style.
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