What does my avoidant partner want me to know?
It’s their responsibility to learn how to communicate. But here’s a starting point.
Q:
I’m an anxiously attached person in a long-term relationship with an avoidantly attached partner. Unsurprisingly, they struggle to share their inner world with me: What are they feeling? What do they need? And it leaves me stumped in understanding how to best show up for them. I know that each individual is different, but I’m curious if you can shed some light on the avoidant mindset, so to speak. What does my avoidant partner wish I understood?
A:
This is the forever question within an anxious/avoidant dynamic, isn’t it? What the hell does my partner, with a wildly different attachment style, really need? And how can I learn to understand, respect, and offer it, when it feels so opposed to my own needs?
This struggle shows up on both sides (I promise that your avoidant partner doesn’t understand you either). But what makes working with an avoidant especially difficult is that they have a hard time feeling their feelings in the first place, never mind communicating them to someone else.
That is to say, their attachment style itself (and the traumatic experiences and psychological organization that created it) makes it incredibly difficult to heal and show up differently. Often, avoidants are so out of touch with their emotions (and emotional histories) that they don’t even realize they’re in pain.
This is why their pleas of “Nothing is the matter,” “I’m not mad,” and “My childhood was fine” are so common – and frustrating to others.
But as someone who often experiences avoidance as a coping mechanism, I can promise you that we aren’t trying to be difficult.
And that’s the first thing that your avoidant partner wants you to know: They aren’t trying to hurt you. They aren’t aware of their emotionally unavailability. They don’t yet have the skill set to do something different.
But what is happening for them internally?
If this issue sounds familiar – either because you’re avoidant and want support, or because you’re in a relationship with an avoidant and at your wit’s end – I’d love to help you make sense of it. As a relationship coach, one of my areas of expertise is attachment (and especially the anxious/avoidant trap). Let’s get to the bottom of it – together:
Avoidants aren’t a monolith; they don’t all experience their attachment in the same way. Of course your best bet is to sort this out between you and your partner (perhaps with the support of a therapist or coach).
But having a starting point for understanding some commonalities in what avoidants are thinking and feeling can’t hurt.
1. I’m also triggered by your behavior.
You know the feelings of anxiety, overwhelm, and/or displeasure that you have when your avoidant is… avoiding?
Your avoidant gets them when you’re… anxious-ing, too. They’re just less outwardly obvious (until they have an explosion of some kind).
Often, in the conversations happening on the pop-psych Internet about attachment, the avoidant gets blamed for the entire dynamic. But this is just low-hanging fruit.
The anxious/avoidant trap is a dynamic: something both partners are contributing to and responsible for. It happens because both partners are triggering one another.
Your partner is just as triggered as you are. They just tend to turn that anxiety inward.
One of my favorite pieces of information that came from early attachment research is this: While avoidant children appear calm, cool, and collected on the outside, they actually are having a similar internal experience to anxious kids, like an elevated heart rate.
It’s normal for an anxiously attached person to be overfocused on “The Other” (your partner). But the real movement in an anxious/avoidant dynamic happens when each person takes responsibility for their role in the dynamic and works on their own healing.
That means that your job is focus more on how your behaviors can shift. That’s all you really have control over anyway. You can’t change them (much as you might want to).
Talk to your partner about the behaviors of your own that they struggle with – and see where fair compromise can be made.
2. I shut down to protect myself – not to hurt you.
It is perfectly reasonable to feel hurt by your partner shutting down. Whether they’ve gone quiet, asked for space, or are giving you the silent treatment (this one is a red flag btw), it’s okay to have feelings about that.
But these withdrawal techniques are simply the brain’s way of trying to protect the avoidant. Think of it like a freeze response: They’re so overwhelmed by emotions (their own or yours), that they simply ice over to cope with that.
For me, the feeling of shutting down emotionally feels like dissociation: My thoughts leave my brain. I find it incredibly difficult to speak. My emotions feel like they’re taking up so much space in my body that I need everything around me to just stop so that I can move through them.
Or, when an avoidant asks for space, it’s generally because they feel a lot safer when they’re isolated. Space gives them the time to sort through their emotions without the pressure of someone else awaiting a response.
The purpose of the behavior (usually) is not to punish you. (And if your partner is punishing you, I recommend running as fast as you can in the other direction).
So what’s the compromise here? Let your avoidant have their space, but also set expectations around when they will come back around and with what kind of mood.
3. I’m very sensitive to criticism. Please be gentle with me.
One of the easiest ways to trigger your avoidant partner? Criticize them.
Anxiously attached folks can have a hard time admitting that they’re a part of the dynamic problem, but this is one of the places where it can be the most obvious:
Anxiously attached people have a tendency to pick fights. Because a fight can feel more connective, and therefore soothing, than silence.
Anxious attachers can lean into passive-aggressive comments, throwing little barbs at their partner to let them know they’re unhappy. They can poke at avoidants, asking them the same questions repeatedly (see: “Are you mad at me?”). They can pick up on small shifts in mood or tone and not let them go. They can question intention and motivation. And they can respond to avoidants in ways that imply (or explicitly state) that avoidant isn’t doing enough.
While the anxious person’s underlying motivation in these behaviors is to rile their avoidant up just enough to feel connected, these (real or perceived) criticisms can be incredibly triggering to avoidants.
Many avoidants grew up in households where they felt immense pressure to be perfect, and yet could never meet the standards of their caregivers. In relationships, avoidants can often feel unseen and misunderstood, and these big or small criticisms can feel like a highlighter pointing out their flaws.
Have you heard of rejection sensitivity dysphoria? It’s something that a lot of anxious attachers deal with: perceiving rejection, and having a strong reaction to it, even when they aren’t being rejected.
Avoidants are similar, but I call it criticism sensitivity dysphoria.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t give your avoidant partner constructive feedback. Please do!
But consider: How often am I providing feedback? How necessary is the feedback? Is this an appropriate time to offer feedback? What language am I using to express the feedback? And what is my honest, authentic motivation in offering it?
Meenadchi’s book Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication is a great starting point for learning new skills for how to communicate hard things.
4. Learning to feel and name my emotions is going to be a process.
Perhaps most importantly, if your avoidant partner is open to healing their trauma and working on their behaviors, something they might want you to know is that this is going to be a journey for them – not a one-and-done solution.
We all have maladaptive coping mechanisms. We learn them at a very young age. And as our brains develop, the matter builds on top of and around itself. So what you learn when you’re little becomes a part of—well—everything. And it takes time for us to realize that what made us feel safe as a five-year-old with our parents doesn’t quite work as an adult in a romantic relationship.
But because that neural pathway is so well worn, because the pattern is so well established, because we’re so used to grabbing that one tool out of our toolbox, it’s incredibly hard to give up and replace with more helpful skills.
Asking an avoidantly attached person to feel and communicate their feelings, to remain present when they feel emotionally overwhelmed, to be open and honest and vulnerable and intimate is asking them to do the exact things that terrify them.
And that’s true whether or not it makes sense to you.
It takes time and effort to learn new relational skills, to work them into our behavior.
Give them some grace.
5. You can leave if you’re unhappy.
Okay, so your avoidant partner might not be actively thinking this or wanting to communicate to you, but I want to make this clear:
If your partner isn’t working on their maladaptive behaviors,
if your partner isn’t putting effort into the relationship,
if your partner isn’t in the process of healing their trauma,
if your partner is using avoidance to hurt or punish you,
if your partner’s behavior is aligned with abuse,
you are more than within your right to walk away.
Hell, it can just be because you’re sick of this shit.
You have the autonomy to leave any relationship at any time for any reason. You are not beholden to this partner. And you sure as hell aren’t expected to stay in an unhappy relationship just because your partner has started putting in the work. The idiom “too little, too late” can apply here.
It takes an enormous amount of time for our wounds to heal and to see the fruit of that labor. You are not required to stick around.
If you are unhappy in your partnership, you can leave.
You aren’t a better, more ethical, more moral, kinder, sweeter person for staying in a relationship that hurts you. Don’t be a martyr. There’s no gold medal on the other side.
Leave relationships that aren’t serving you. And it’s okay if this is one of them.
Need help figuring out if the connection you’re in is healthy enough for you? Want to do some work on your own attachment and how to maintain connection in an anxious/avoidant dynamic? Let me help.
Securely yours,
Melissa