If you feel that your avoidant partner isn't recognizing your love or reciprocating your efforts, it's time to leave. While you might feel emotions like sadness, anger, fear, or grief, this is all part of the healing process. Allow yourself to feel the painful feelings of your breakup.
Your dismissive avoidant ex will indeed return to you once you let go of them completely, but don't allow them in. They might return because they actually love you, or they might simply return because they don't want to let you go completely. Even if they love you, don't expect them to have changed.
Does your avoidant partner seem like they're willing to talk anything out? Or, do they constantly make excuses, say they're tired, and put up walls? If your avoidant partner constantly finds ways to get out of deeper conversations, spending time with you, being affectionate, and having sex…it's not a good sign.
This is why we actually prefer shorter periods of no contact, no more than 21 days if you are trying to get a fearful avoidant back.
At this point, you may be wondering: will an avoidant miss you? The thing is, when you're patient enough to give them a lot of time and space, they will initially get back to their everyday life. They will neither miss you nor demand time or attention from you.
They're always looking for the red flags, and they will find them, so when you go no contact with the dismissive avoidant, don't expect them to reach out to you.
Feeling pressured to open up
Because of their childhood wounds, being vulnerable tends to be a huge trigger for people with an avoidant attachment style. They have spent years, if not decades, building barriers around them to keep others out.
If an avoidant starts pulling away, let them know that you care but do not chase them. It may be very painful to do this, but pursuing them is likely to make it take longer for them to come back. They need breathing space, to feel safe with their own thoughts and unengulfed.
A fearful avoidant during no contact acts slightly differently from other attachment styles. Going no contact with them can become extremely distracting and often requires a lot of discipline. The fearful-avoidant does not express remorse or sadness over heartbreak in the initial weeks of the breakup.
It's if it's been at least six months and that person hasn't even tried to contact you, they don't like anything on your social media, they don't care about your life, chances are it is done. They don't want anything else to do with you, as far as romantically.
As a result of turning off their emotions, avoidant attachers are not likely to over-reflect on why a relationship didn't work out. Yet, interestingly, this reaction means that avoidant attachers may struggle to move on from previous relationships as quickly as they could if they had dealt with their emotions head-on.
Fearful avoidants both want and fear intimacy. So they seek closeness. But once they do, their fear of intimacy and attachment kicks in and they suddenly feel the need to escape, and this is when they need you to chase them.
Slow to text back
Dismissive avoidants don't like instant back-and-forth texting unless it's urgent or they're really interested. Their typical response is to take their time when texting back. To them, it doesn't matter when you text back as long as you do text back.
Despite popular opinion, it's entirely possible to have a satisfying, fulfilling relationship with someone with an avoidant attachment style. Although we stated earlier that attachment styles are stable, they are not a life sentence. Your avoidant partner can become more secure in their actions.
Avoidantly attached people are prone to “shutting down, numbing, rigid compartmentalizing, and pushing away,” Mary Chen, LFMT, tells SELF. And these suppression techniques can feel “exactly like rejection” to their partners, making it hard to approach—and therefore understand—avoidants!
Individuals with fearful-avoidant attachment push people away due to an intense fear of rejection. In this case, the act of pushing people away is done out of fear and not because of trying to maintain independence. They desperately want to feel connected but have a hard time trusting others.
What happens when you walk away from a dismissive avoidant? You'll trigger their abandonment wound, and they'll tell themselves their fears were justified. Dismissive-avoidants are highly sensitive to rejection. It's part of why they reject others pre-emptively.
At first an avoidant will go through this period of separation elation and often won't feel your loss until they perceive that you have moved on. At that point they start to reminisce and could potentially start caring if you leave.
Avoidant / dismissive adults still self regulate in unhealthy ways; they might feel threatened by triggering dating or relationship situations, such as a partner trying to get emotionally close, and they might shut down their emotions in an attempt to feel safe and avoid feeling vulnerable.
The dismissive-avoidant is afraid of and incapable of tolerating true intimacy. Since he was brought up not to depend on anyone or reveal feelings that might not be acceptable to caregivers, his first instinct when someone gets really close to him is to run away.
Dismissive-avoidant after breakup: short-term
So in the aftermath of a painful breakup, they are less likely to turn to friends and family. They want to deal with things on their own. And when it comes to challenging, romantic feelings, airing their 'dirty laundry' is often the last thing they want to do.
If you're an avoidant attacher with abandonment issues, you may keep people at arm's length to avoid them getting too close and meaning too much, due to a belief deep down that they will leave at some point. These behaviors may make you seem private, withdrawn, or emotionally unavailable to others.
So, before an avoidant attacher can even be faced with the possibility of rejection and abandonment in a relationship, they tend to look for escape routes. If someone close to them pushes for increased intimacy and emotional closeness, their fear response is triggered – which, as we now know – is flight.