by Amy Chan
When her boyfriend (now ex) wanted her to move to the Upper West Side, she freaked out. Her commitment alarm bells started to ring as she saw her future suffocating her: “I started to feel the future. First Upper West Side, next the suburbs! It was all too much.”
Since learning about attachment styles and realizing that she had avoidant tendencies, Serina has been much more aware of the role she plays in connecting or disconnecting from people.
During our call a year after her attendance at Renew, she shared a story of a man she had recently dated who asked why she didn’t reply to his text messages. She generally takes a day to reply to a message (whether it’s from a romantic interest, family, or a friend) and didn’t realize that he expected a response within an hour or so.
“That was insightful information for me. I had no awareness. I just have a different relationship with time. I don’t need to know what someone is doing all the time and thought everyone else was like that too. Now I force myself to communicate more. When I start dating someone, I directly ask what their expectation for communication response time is.”
Understanding how her lack of communication was taking a toll on the people she cared about and making a concerted effort to improve this was a critical first step for Serina.
If you find that your avoidant behaviors are not giving you the relationship outcomes that you want, here are a few different areas that you can start working on.
Practice Labeling and Writing Down Your Feelings
Avoidants often have a hard time being aware of their feelings. They feel the symptoms of their feelings—increased heart rate, anxiety, stress, rage, and so on—but cannot identify the emotion at the root. Developing this awareness is key to becoming more secure and also having meaningful dialogue around feelings when conflict arises with your partner.
A study conducted by UCLA professor Matthew D. Lieberman revealed that putting feelings into words makes sadness, anger, and pain less intense.20 For example, anger shows up as increased activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that monitors fear and sets off a series of biological alarms and responses to protect the body from danger. When the angry feeling is labeled, Lieberman and his team of researchers noted a decreased response in the amygdala and increased activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that processes emotions and inhibits behavior.21
Build Boundaries, Not Walls
As an avoidant, you may not expect that your partner can fulfill your needs or heed your boundaries, and as a result, you have become accustomed to suppressing them. By not expressing your needs and limits to your partner, you set him up for failure, which triggers your natural instinct for creating distance. To avoid reaching this point, it’s important that you communicate clearly. If your partner is demanding more time and attention from you, see if you can have a noncharged conversation to negotiate where both you and your partner feel like your needs are being met. Remember, having healthy boundaries means that you not only set them but also keep them. For instance, if you decide that Sundays are reserved for “me” time, but then cave when your partner asks you out, you are communicating, “Don’t take my boundaries seriously.” You train people how to interact with you.
Express a Need a Day
Since avoidants tend to disassociate from having needs and do not feel safe counting on others to meet their needs, you can build your comfort for getting needs met by expressing a need a day. Start small. For example, ask your partner to help you with a favor, or if you’re feeling overwhelmed with work, communicate to your partner that you’ll be focusing on your project and won’t be able to talk until the evening. By intentionally asking for what you need and experiencing someone following through without negative consequences, you’ll gradually build up your comfort in relying on others.
Set a Time Frame Before You Consider Ending It
With the awareness that your avoidant attachment causes you to find reasons to push someone away, set an actual time frame where you commit to staying in the relationship. (Of course, this doesn’t apply if the relationship is toxic or unhealthy.) For example, instead of second-guessing the relationship on a regular basis, commit to staying in it for three months and only after then reassessing if you want to stay or not. During that time frame, do not engage in hemming and hawing about your decision; simply enjoy the time with the other person. This pushes you to move through the uncomfortable feelings that will inevitably rise and gives you a chance to experience the discomfort settling or even dissipating completely, if given the luxury of time.
Avoid Anxious Types
Dating a secure partner will help you become more secure. A secure partner will be more likely to tolerate your periodic withdrawals, as he will not take your need for space as a personal dig against him or your relationship. An anxious partner, on the other hand, will react to your need for space by trying to push harder for your time and attention in order to feel reassured. Also, a secure partner has the emotional keel to deal with conflict and come up with resolutions, versus catastrophizing them. A secure partner can model how to be present and how to communicate in a healthy way, helping you grow.
YOUR ATTACHMENT STYLE IS NOT STATIC
The tips I’ve shared above can help you create a healthier connection with a partner and move you toward a more secure style. Our styles are not static and evolve as a function of the people we are with and the choices we make about how we behave. The more you practice communicating and connecting in a healthy way, the more you can rewire and renew. You are not held prisoner by the way you grew up forever.
Even the most secure among us will at times react to triggers in ways that harm connection. Whether you’re secure, anxious, or avoidant in your attachment style, use the following exercise to determine what your key triggers are and take stock of your past reactions to triggering events in order to strategize a healthier response. This can also be helpful when you are dating someone, for it provides a framework for you to have an open discussion on your triggers and how your partner can best support you and vice versa.
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EXERCISE: Replace Your Reactions
By first recognizing the patterns of your reactions, you can then identify alternative ways of responding and practice honoring your boundaries and the boundaries of others without hurting the connection.
In the first column of the worksheet here, write down what triggers you. If you identify as anxious, you may find most of your triggers result in protest behavior; if you identify as avoidant, you may find most of your triggers cause you to create distance. You may veer more secure and find yourself having triggers in both categories.
Once you’ve identified your key triggers, in the second column write down how you have typically reacted in the past. Next, in the third column, brainstorm a healthier response. The objective is to create a strategy for replacing your old reaction with a healthier response while you’re in a nonactivated state (that is, not upset or emotionally charged) and to have a plan of action the next time your nervous system is sending you panic signals.
If you are in a relationship or starting to date someone, you can use the last section to identify the triggers of your partner and how you have reacted in the past. Now that you understand the different attachment styles, use compassion in coming up with a healthier way to respond to and support your partner.
Example: Anxious
Trigger: The person I’m dating takes hours to reply to my text.
Past Reaction: I keep texting and texting, which makes me more angry and desperate.
Healthy Response: I won’t jump to conclusions when I don’t hear back and will use self-soothing exercises to manage the feelings of anxiety. Instead of texting multiple times to get validation, I will journal or call a friend and commit to not sending another message until I’ve calmed down.
Example: Avoidant
Trigger: When the person I’m dating keeps wanting to hang out and I need time for myself.
Healthy Response: Communicate clearly that I need some time for myself, that my taking time for myself doesn’t mean I feel differently, and that once I’ve had some space I’ll reach out to find a time that works for the both of us.
Example: Supporting your partner when he is triggered
Partner’s Trigger: He feels suffocated and resentful when he doesn’t have enough free time.
Your Past Reaction: I would make assumptions that when he wanted space this meant he was losing interest. I would get upset and guilt him into spending time with me.
Healthy Response: Now that I understand that time apart is healthy and not a threat to the relationship, I can welcome his need for space without guilting him and ensure each week I have designated days where I too am seeing friends and doing activities that light me up.
ANXIOUS
Trigger Past Reaction Healthy Response
AVOIDANT
Trigger Past Reaction Healthy Response
YOUR PARTNER
Trigger Past Reaction Healthy Response
IS YOUR CHEMISTRY COMPASS BROKEN?
Our ability to love intimately and sexually unfolds in stages, starting with our attachment with our parents. Our early patterns of relating and attaching to others get “wired” in our brains in childhood and then repeated in adulthood. If childhood patterns are problematic, we then grow up with a chemistry compass that’s broken, and we are pointed toward those who embody the worst emotional characteristics of our primary caregiver(s). Our psyche tries to re-create the scene of the original crime (how we were wounded as children), hoping that we can save ourselves by changing its ending.
Psychologist Ken Page describes this as an “attraction of deprivation,” when “our conscious self is drawn to the positive qualities we yearn for, but our unconscious draws us to the qualities which hurt us the most as children.”22 Basically, we try to get our unmet childhood needs met by our romantic partner. We’re often attracted to a man for qualities we dislike and then want him to get rid of the exact things we were first drawn to. This is where the loop from childhood plays out in adulthood. Our partner doesn’t fulfill the need we lacked growing up, which leads to the same familiar conflict and suffering we experienced before.
Remember Mandy, the one who rehearsed her I-hate-you speech for hours when her boyfriend didn’t reply to her Snapchat message? During the session at Breakup Bootcamp when she did an exercise to discover her attractions of deprivation, she had an aha moment.
Mandy realized that she needed a lot of validation from men and finally understood the root of why. After exploring her reactions when a man she liked didn’t give her attention, she was able to make the connection to her wound from childhood: a lack of affection from her father. She secretly yearned for her father’s approval, for physical affection, for encouraging words of support. But instead he had a cold demeanor and rewarded her with praise only if she achieved academically. Mandy became accustomed to earning love, and when she didn’t get validation, she would feel anxiety. In her romantic relationships, this was a familiar dynamic, and she was drawn to types who fit the emotionally unavailable role once held by her dad.
We develop instincts that become our chemistry compass, pointing us in the direction of those whom we find attractive or repulsive. So, if growing up you didn’t have a positive model of what a healthy partnership looked like, it can be challenging to know what love feels like. The right person may be right in front of you, but you don’t notice because you’re too preoccupied chasing the bad boy, the unavailable workaholic, or the guy who fits a superficial checklist. Human beings like what feels familiar, and if inconsistency, fighting for love and attention, or enduring emotional abuse was your norm growing up, then subconsciously, you’re going to keep choosing partners who make you feel the same way. This is often referred to as the “familiarity principle of attraction.”
With a broken chemistry compass, even if you do date someone who can meet your needs, because it’s so unfamiliar, you might self-sabotage or try to change the person to mirror your parents.
HAVE I MET YOU BEFORE? OH, HI, DAD.
My kryptonite: DJs.
In my twenties, I would beeline straight for the DJ booth, because behind those decks was where I’d meet my soul mate, obvi.
Dates in my twenties consisted of DJs, club promoters, and the ultimate double whammy—a DJ who was a club owner. DEAD.
These men were always the king of the room, had social clout, were charismatic (and often alcoholics), and I. Loved. Them. Of course, they loved me too, at like three A.M. when the club shut down, after I’d fought off other groupies clamoring for their attention. These men were unavailable and not invested in building a relationship with me; they sometimes gave me attention and most of the time did not. Then in my thirties, this “type” morphed into a more age-appropriate version. My new target: CEOs of tech start-ups.
These were visionaries dedicating their life and most of their waking hours to building their world-changing app! I felt lucky to get a sliver of their time. There’s no pattern here, right? HA!
While the professions of the men I chose were vastly different, the emotional experience was exactly the same as my dynamic with my father.
When I was growing up, my father was neither physically nor emotionally available. My mother was in a constant state of anger, resentment, and misery, doing everything around the house and for the family business. But no matter what she did, my father never appreciated her. My mother was trying to earn her husband’s love, and I was trying to earn my father’s love—it was one big chase with no prize in sight.
The two things I yearned for the most from my parents were safety and connection.
I subconsciously picked men who were unable to meet either of those needs, feeling the same angst, inconsistency, and lack of safety over and over again. I would be constantly disappointed in the unavailable men I dated when they didn’t change to meet my needs, and I pushed away the available ones who could love me in a healthy way because that felt foreign. Once I realized I was attracting the experiences in my adult relationships that could evoke the same emotions I felt as a child, I had a starting point for change. Instead of wasting years on a hamster wheel of dysfunction, I took a peek to see what was on the other side. The preview was enough for me to choose to avoid that wheel forever. Hold the applause—this awareness took me about three decades to figure out. I’m writing this book so you don’t have to spend such a long time to come to this conclusion.
IT TAKES A VILLAGE
Now that you have a framework for managing your triggers in a healthier way, the next step of becoming more secure is to start surrounding yourself with relationships that foster trust and a sense of safety.
Regardless of your attachment style, it’s important to address not only the romantic relationships in your life but all relationships. Our brain is influenced and molded by what it is repeatedly exposed to. This means if you feel unsafe, judged, and energetically depleted by the majority of people you’re surrounded with, you’re not going to build those necessary neural pathways associated with healthy connections. To start building our neural pathways of feeling connected, we need to surround ourselves with a village of safe relationships.
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EXERCISE: Who’s in Your Village?
Conduct an inventory of the five adult people you spend the most time with. This can include your friends and family, but may also include people you might not necessarily feel close to but spend a lot of time with, such as work colleagues, roommates, and neighbors. The objective is to assess who is in your village and if those are high-safety or low-safety relationships.
For each person, answer the statements below regarding how you generally feel around him or her on a scale of 1 (never) to 10 (always). Don’t think too hard and go with your gut.
&nb
sp; STATEMENT #1 (NAME) #2 (NAME) #3 (NAME) #4 (NAME) #5 (NAME)
I feel safe and secure when I’m around this person.
After I leave an interaction with this person, I feel positive energy.
I trust this person.
I feel respected by this person.
I know I can count on this person.
I feel supported in this relationship.
I feel a sense of connection and belonging when I’m around this person.
I feel that I can share my feelings with this person without being judged or criticized.
I feel there is an equal exchange of give and take in this relationship.
This person respects my boundaries.
TRUST SCORE:
SCORING
The chart gives you an idea of the relationships that are shaping your brain and central nervous system.23
Low-Safety Relationship (0–35)
These may be abusive or high-conflict relationships. If you’re surrounded by people who score low on trust, you likely find yourself feeling on edge, anxious, or depleted from your relationships. There may be an uneven power dynamic, where you feel subordinate or disrespected. Because you’re not getting healthy dopamine from your closest relationships, you may have a tendency to seek a dopamine fix from other sources—for example, indulging in food, alcohol, shopping, or other addictive vices. If the majority of your relationships are low safety, it will be difficult for you to feel relaxed and calm because your sympathetic nervous system is on constant high alert. It’s in your best interest to try to decrease the amount of time you spend with these people. If a relationship is physically or emotionally abusive, it’s of the utmost priority to get out of the relationship, which may mean you seek professional help to support you.