Avoidant behavior is always rooted in fear of undesirable consequences. Abandonment, disappointment, guilt, shame, blame, anger, grief, loss … avoiding feelings is a preemptive strike on avoiding a threat or threats the individual associates with experiencing and or expressing what they are feeling.
The Avoidant Is A Master Of “Silent Conflict”
It's simply easier for the avoidant to push people away as opposed to staying in the fight and voicing their frustrations. I kind of look at it like muscle memory. Someone who is ignoring you and is an avoidant hasn't been doing this just with 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.
Love Avoidants fear vulnerability, intimacy, dependence, and genuine love. This avoidance of connection stems from difficulty developing healthy attachments in their early life. It is a form of self-preservation.
Chasing an avoidant or pushing them to commit to you will feed into their cycle and drive them further away. Instead, focus on your own life and emotional well-being for a time and use this as a period of no contact with the avoidant. Then you're ready for the next step.
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.
Once again, people with a dismissive-avoidant style showed that they did care about relationships. Dismissive avoidant students reported higher self-esteem and positive mood than non-dismissives—but only when told that surgency predicts future interpersonal success.
Love Avoidants recognize and are attracted to the Love Addict's strong fear of being left because Love Avoidants know that all they have to do to trigger their partner's fear is threaten to leave.
But sadly, someone with an avoidant personality disorder, finds it very difficult to develop healthy relationships with boundaries. Individuals with this disorder also find it difficult to trust or express their deepest feelings for fear of abandonment, rejection, or loss.
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.
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.
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.
As such, individuals with a dismissive-avoidant attachment style tend to deny feelings and take their sovereignty to an extreme. They don't rely on others and don't want others to rely on them, they keep their innermost thoughts to themselves, and they find it difficult to ask for help.
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.
People who are avoidant may feel uncomfortable with the vulnerability and intimacy required in close friendships. They may also struggle with asking for or giving emotional support. As a result, they may have few, if any, long-lasting friendships because friends feel like the relationship is one-sided.
They go out of their way to spend time with you.
This being said, if your avoidant partner prioritizes you and goes out of their way to spend time with you, they're likely in love. Big, big love. An avoidant in love will try to spend as much time with you as they can.
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.
Some studies showed that differences in attachment styles seem to influence both the frequency and the patterns of jealousy expression: individuals with the preoccupied or fearful-avoidant attachment styles more often become jealous and consider rivals as more threatening than those with the secure attachment style [9, ...
On the other hand, people with an avoidant attachment may be attracted to anxious partners because their pursuit and need for closeness reinforce the avoidant person's need for independence and self-reliance. Anxious and avoidant partners may also seek their partner's traits due to wanting those traits in themselves.
The fearful avoidant will typically go through a period of euphoria after a breakup due to their newfound freedom from the confines of the relationship. However, that doesn't mean they won't eventually regret the breakup.
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.
Yes, the dismissive avoidant misses you, but they miss you later on. In the beginning they're going to be relieved that they have their freedom. They can get their independence back and they get to go and do what they want to do without having to answer any questions to anybody.
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.