Why Therapy Doesn't Work for Dismissive Avoidants

Hi, thank you for watching this. If you're a dismissive avoidant, I really hope that this will be useful for you.

So, I'm Christine. I am a registered member of the BACP. So, that's the British Association of Counselors and Psychotherapists and I have a private practice in the UK and I also work internationally. Um, I work online and I would say that each week terms of working online, I'm teaching groups and classes and I'm seeing on average about 300 people a week. So the classes that I teach, there's about kind of 50 50 plus people in each one of those classes and I also teach four groups a week. They're smaller. They're more intimate. There's between kind of 10 and 15 people in those groups. So yeah, it's roughly about 300.

And when I'm teaching those groups, what I'm focusing on is limrance recovery. So I uh specialize in limrance. That's what I work with. That's what the majority of my clients are kind of coming to me for. So I'm discussing lirance with those clients. And the other thing that I'm discussing is attachment theory because there's a very very strong connection between limrins and having an insecure attachment style. And I can't really talk about women's recovery without also talking about attachment and moving from an insecure attachment style to an insecure attachment style. So that's what I'm doing each week.

And the reason that I've set up this channel is really in response to things that people have asked me in the classes and the groups. And one of the most interesting things that people have been asking is really about dismissive avoidance. So that's why I'm doing this session today on dismissive avoidance. And the question is, why does therapy not work for dismissive avoidance? This often comes from dismissive avoidance themselves. They're frustrated in therapy. It doesn't feel like a good fit. They're thinking of leaving. And it also comes from um the partners of dismissive avoidance. So often the partner of a dismissive avoidant will be anxious, often anxious, preoccupied, and they're saying, "I'm doing everything to kind of do the work myself. I'm working really hard in therapy. my partner was really resistant to therapy. Why does it not work for them? Please tell me why."

So, I hope that the information that I have today will be useful and kind of look at why that might be happening for you if you're avoidant and also what to do. What to do so that you can stay in therapy and so that you can actually learn really really good skills to move you towards an insecure attachment. Okay.

So, I'm going to tell you about something that happened to me recently which I found very interesting. I felt it I found it sad actually, but I also found it interesting. And that was that recently in London there was a training that was advertised for therapists and counselors who wanted to work with avoidant clients. It was about avoidant attachment. I thought fantastic. I really really want to go to that because obviously this is part of what I what I do in my work. I'm often working with avoidant clients. So I went to this session. It was packed. It was really busy. There was lo loads and loads of professionals there. And the therapist who was running the training, she started the training by opening the floor with a question and she said, "How do you find these clients? How do you feel when you are working with avoidant clients and lots of people answered and what came back was completely negative."

Okay, people said, "I feel stuck in this work with these clients. I feel deskilled with these clients. I don't know what to do. I feel overwhelmed. Nobody nobody said anything positive." Now, I would have said something positive myself. I'd actually joined via Zoom and everyone who was on Zoom was automatically muted. So, I couldn't kind of share what I was thinking. But had I shared something, I would have said, "I love these clients. I love working with them. They are challenging. They are complex clients. They are interesting clients. and they keep me on my toes. They are alive. You know these clients, the client work with avoidance is alive work and it's some of my most favorite work because it's so alive."

And I was thinking about this and I was thinking, wow, it's so different. My personal experience of these clients is so different from what I heard in that room. And like I said, I I I felt sad about it because I thought this is this is really this is really really upsetting to kind of hear that so many of the therapists and counselors there are not enjoying the work with dismissive avoidant clients. And I did think to myself, imagine if the therapist had got up and she'd said something like, "Okay, so we're going to talk about female clients today. How do you find your female clients? What do they like to work with?" And people had said, "Oh, they're really difficult. You know, I feel stuck in the work. I feel deskkilled." That would be ridiculous if we were talking about any other kind of category of clients. But for some reason, when we're talking about avoidant clients, it's okay. We're allowed to say, you know, these are difficult clients. We're allowed to other them, allowed to make them different from us, which I don't think that is okay. I don't think that you should other your clients. You know, it certainly wouldn't be okay in any other area, but somehow it is with avoidance still.

So I was thinking a lot about this and I was thinking it's really interesting that I don't have a personal experience of othering these clients. Quite the opposite. So recently I was with two of my colleagues and I was talking to them about this training. Now these two colleagues I know them because the three of us used to work together and we used to work together in a drug and alcohol treatment center. And what's very interesting about working in a treatment center is that very often your clients are going to be avoidant. And this is kind of unique. You know, you you'll find avoidant clients in the prison system. You'll find avoidant clients in the the you know the treatment center or also you'll find them in 12step groups if people have come through narcotics anonymous or they've come through alcoholics anonymous. And it's very very interesting to kind of work in this field because I mean sometimes it is the majority of your clients very often it's a large percentage of your clients are avoidant.

So when I was talking to my two colleagues about avoidant clients, all three of us have had a lot of experience of working with them. And I said to my colleagues, you know, told them about the training and I said, how do you feel about working with avoidance and all three of us had the same experience like wow great clients, you know, you're really alive. You're [laughter] really kind of present in the room. You have to be on your toes, but that the work is exciting and interesting and it's a good challenge. Now, as I said, all three of us met together in a treatment center, and it might just be that we have the experience of working with these clients. If you're running groups in a treatment center, and you've got big groups, you know, they're 20 plus people, and the majority of the people in that group are avoidant, they're just come through detox, they're in treatment, they're there for three months, they don't all want to be there. [laughter] Some [clears throat] of them really don't want to be there. Nonetheless, they're in groups and they have to do groups every day. You don't have a choice. you know, everything is compulsory. You're going to have to enjoy that feeling of connection and aliveness. You're going to have to be on your toes with those clients and you're going to be able to you're going to have to really duck and dive quite a lot with those clients. And my two friends, my two colleagues and I, we've all had that experience and we've all felt enlivened by it. You know that yes, of course, you are personally challenged. Of course, some of those clients are exceptionally intelligent, so street smart, very funny, and very very rebellious. So, you get you get a lot of energy and that kind of communal energy in groups, you know, it can be it can feel very alive, but it's also it's wonderful. It is a wonderful energy.

So all three of us were kind of talking about this and I was saying to them, isn't it interesting that we have this experience like these clients are just fantastic and we love working with them which was so very different from that training. And we were kind of discussing it and one of the interesting things that came up was that all three of us don't other core fear of the avoidant which is engulfment. And the reason that we don't other it is because we all share it. All three of us have had an experience of having an insecure attachment in childhood. My two friends, they were both fearful when they were in, you know, when they were children. They've now developed secure attachments and I was dismissive avoidant. Now I'm insecure. So, we've had that experience ourselves of what it feels like to be engulfed. We know what it is. We know experientially what it is. And so, there is a way that we feel kind of natural compassion for clients who experience it.

And one of my colleagues was talking to me about her experience of working with anxious clients and with avoidant clients. And I think she said something that was really very interesting. She said, you know, what's it like for us really to work with anxious clients? And the truth is in many ways these clients are quite easy clients because they want to connect. They are looking for reassurance. They are really looking to be connected and attached to their therapist or their counselor. So when they come into the counseling room or or the therapy room, they want to be helped and supported. Sometimes they put you on the pedestal and of course you have to make sure that you're not on the pedestal or help them see that that's not something that's appropriate. But nonetheless, that's what's happening. So they're not resistant to being helped. Quite the opposite. And my colleague said to me, and then what's it like when you see avoidant clients? It's completely different. You know, your avoidant client is not going to put you on a pedestal. Okay? At the very least, they're going to want parity. That's it. At the very least, they're often going to be doing a power grab because they are used to being the power in the room. So, you absolutely have to be on your toes. You know, you have to be kind of ready for that. They are probably going to be in contempt of you. They're not going to admire you for being the therapist or the counselor. They might kind of rip that apart because they don't respect that. You know, you have to prove that you have value. You don't automatically have to have value. And the feeling of being with someone who's got a lot of contempt for you because contempt is often the protective mechanism of someone who's avoidant. Well, of course, that's a very different experience from sitting opposite someone who is anxious and who is desperate to please you and you know wants to be connected to you, wants to fawn, do all of those kinds of behaviors. So, totally different. And my friend was saying to me, yes, if you have experience of working with clients of this, if you know what engulfment is and you know the behaviors, that's really okay. You can manage it, you understand it. If you've never had experience of that, if you have just had experience of abandonment, it may not be something that you are familiar with and it might feel quite frightening for you even if you're a professional.

And that was certainly very interesting hearing her describe that because it made me think of something that happened to me when I was in my training and um yeah I'm just going to tell the story because I think it think it might be might be relevant to this. So what happens to you when you are training if you are training to be a counselor to be a therapist also for a coach is that part of your training has to be about developing your skills as a professional. So what you do is in training you have diads. You have kind of say say a therapeutic diad and one student will be the person who is the client and the other student will take the role of the professional and you have a tutor who watches you and the person who is being the client. They'll they'll bring a presenting issue. They'll talk about their feelings and the person who is the professional will hold the client, work through the clients and then your your therapist who's kind of watching that diad will give feedback and say that was a good session or could you think about doing this next time? It's very much a kind of it is a teaching space. Sometimes when you're doing that kind of session, the person who is in the role of the client, they might bring something that's difficult for them, possibly too difficult for them, and they might start to feel emotionally overwhelmed. In which case, the therapist who's training will stop the session and say to the student who's becoming overwhelmed, "Okay, let's take a moment. That looks like you're going a bit too deep. Are you okay?" Fundamentally, they just make sure that they're safe. And that can sometimes happen.

Now I had an experience in training which was quite different from that. So one day I was in a skill session and I was playing the role of the client and another student was playing the role of the professional and I started to share some feelings I had. Now I was not overwhelmed by my feelings. I was comfortable expressing my feelings and I was expressing them and then the tutor who was watching us stopped the session and she asked me if I would go and talk to her and another tutor. Okay. So I said sure. So I I went into an office and I spoke to her and another tutor and what they asked me to do was to not bring that material. Now it wasn't material that overwhelmed me. What it was was material that could potentially overwhelm other people. [laughter] I was not at risk. Apparently, other people were at risk because of my material. And um and I listened to that and I said, "Oh, okay. Yeah, all right. If you want me to kind of dial down my material, I can do that." But the thing is fundamentally what I was bringing was engulfment material. This is the core wound of the fearful avoidant. Sorry, the dismissive avoidant also fearful actually. And I will I will say more about this. So that's the kind of the core wound. It's engulfment. Like I said, it's not abandonment. It's engulfment. It's a very different core fear. And when you are expressing it, it has a particular flavor. It's a difficult flavor, let's be honest. And my my tutors, both of them said, you know, please kind of dial down the the content and the material that you're bringing. So like I said, I agreed to this, but I also thought to myself, wow, you know, okay, so clearly it's okay to bring anything about abandonment. That's something that students can manage. But when it comes to engulfment, somehow this is something that other people can't manage. And if they can't deal with me, and I'm someone who had by the time I trained, I'd done loads of therapy on myself. I'd done years of therapy. So, I was like really very kind of therapy, very comfortable with sharing my emotion. They can't deal with someone like me as an avoidant. How on earth are they going to deal with clients out there? How are they going to do it? They're not going to be able to. They're not going to be able to sit with engulfment. It will be too much for them because they've never learned in training how to deal with this emotion.

Now, that could be a one-off. Okay? It might be that in my training institute there was a discomfort about what I was bringing and they didn't kind of they didn't think that it was okay. It wouldn't be held. People wouldn't understand it. So that might be something that doesn't happen in other training institutes. You know, hopefully not. But nonetheless, that was my experience when I was training that my feelings as a dismissive avoidant were not considered okay. They were too much for other people. And this is really how the dismissive avoidant feels anyway. And the reason for that is in childhood the dismissive avoidant is parentified. So if I can give you just a description of what happens to the dismissive avoidant in childhood. So in a in a regular family when you have parents and you have a child and this is a securely attached unit what will happen with a parent is that they will be able to co-regulate their child. They will be able to support their child when their child is distressed. Unfortunately, in a family where you develop a dismissive avoidant attachment, this also happens for fearful, it's quite different. In a in a family unit where is the there's a dismissive avoidant attachment being formed for the child. The family roles are switched. So the child becomes parentified. They become like the adult and the parent becomes like a child.

Now like I said, my background is in addiction recovery. I'm often seeing this with my clients. There's intergenerational alcoholism. There's intergenerational drug addiction. So, I can give you a kind of practical example of this with that kind of framework in mind. So, say I'm a child and I'm around 10 and in my family, it's just me and my mother and my mother is an alcoholic. Now, because of my mother's alcoholism, she can't co-regulate me. She's not able to do that. She's actually very distressed herself. She's unwell. So what's happening to me as that 10-year-old child is that I am becoming parentified. I am becoming my mother's parent. And what I'm doing is out of necessity, I am co-regulating her. She's not co-regulating me. She's not able to do that. So out of necessity, I co-regulate her. I help her and I support her. I might be doing practical things for her. I might be clearing away bottles, for example, if she's been drinking too much. I might be cooking for her. I might be worried about her finances. The most important thing that I'll be doing is I will be reassuring her. I will be supporting her through her emotions. And that is what co-regulation is.

Now, when it comes to my own feelings as a child, nobody's coming. Nobody's able to regulate me. So out of necessity I learn to cut off my feelings. I move into thinking and I start to exclusively self-regulate. So I am just self-regulating. I am taking care of myself. And that is the pattern that happens for the dismissive avoidant. It's very different from the anxious pattern. The anxious pattern you you kind of you still have a sense of longing for reassurance. You're still looking for reassurance. What happens for the dismissive avoidant is you absolutely cut off from trying to get reassurance. Re reassurance actually starts to feel invalidating for you if people offer it to you because you feel like it's questioning your competency. So that's the kind of pattern which means that this feeling that I'm just describing of I'm too much. This is where it comes from in childhood because you have had an experience as a child that your feelings were too much for an adult. You know, you've had that sense of if you would like support from your parent, if you asked for it, it wasn't safe. And therefore, you have you kind of have this lingering feeling of I'm too much. I am too much. And if you ask any avoidant about how they feel about their feelings, they have that this sense of other people can't hold my feelings. This is just the automatic response that you will have. Which of course, as you can imagine, makes it very difficult for you to believe that therapy is going to work for you. As I've said before, the anxious person, you have that sense of I'm I'm really longing to be supported. Whereas, if you as an avoidant have that sense of I don't trust other people can hold my feelings because I didn't have an experience of that in childhood. And also, my feelings feel like they're too much. You know, you're already going into therapy at quite a disadvantage. you really really are.

So what should you look for when you are finding a therapist if you are avoidant? If you're kind of resonating with everything that I'm saying here. So the most important thing to look for is a feeling of being held. Okay? So I'm going to tell you another story. Sorry to tell you so many stories, but I'm going to tell you a story that happened to me and when I was looking for a therapist. Now this was already when I'd had a lot of therapy. Obviously in the work that I do, I have to have ongoing therapy and supervision. Um, and I was kind of between therapists and I was looking for a new therapist. So I went to see a particular therapist and as soon as I sat down with her, I thought this is not going to work. And I was pretty sure that this therapist had an anxious attachment. So what I did was I said to her, um, can we just talk about attachment? I said, I have a feeling that you have an anxious attachment. And the reason that I think that is because you know I'm dismissive avoidant and I've done a lot of work on my attachment. You know I've moved towards insecure but I can still feel that you are probably anxious and I have that feeling that you probably can't hold engulfment. That's my guess. And uh we had a conversation about it and she agreed with me and she said yes I don't think I can I don't think I can hold the engulfment fear for you. I said fine thank you very much. I really appreciate you being so honest. And I left and I found another therapist who could hold me.

But imagine if you are a dismissive avoidant. You might not even know that you're dismissive avoidant. Attachment might be something that you've never come across and you sit down with a new therapist or you kind of try therapy for the first time and you feel what I felt in that initial session. You have that feeling of I don't think this is going to work. Now all you've got is all you've got really is your gut instinct. But my gut instinct was right. [laughter] Okay, now I know it's quite honed because this is my business. But nonetheless, if you're avoidant, you'll probably have the same instinct of I don't think this is going to work. Okay, now if you have that, trust it. And trust it in this specific way that I'm going to talk about. If you are with someone who has an anxious attachment, what will happen to you is that you will reactivate what happened to you in your childhood where you were parentified and you had absolutely to reassure a parent or a sibling whatever your pattern was and out of necessity you had to self-regulate. So if you sit opposite someone therapist and that pattern is reactivated for you, you will immediately shut down your feelings and you will offer the therapist supports and help. Okay? You just do. That is the pattern. And if you're already kind of in therapy and you're recognizing this pattern and every time you go into therapy, you ask your therapist how they are and how they're feeling. Don't do that again. Okay? [laughter] Don't do that? That's not going to get you anywhere. But that is the automatic pattern from childhood where you sit down and if someone is if you can feel their anxiety, if you can feel the distress, what you do is you offer reassurance. That is what happens to us as dismissive avoidance. So trust that instinct. If you find that you go into that pattern automatically, put that on the table and say to the therapist, look, I don't know why I'm feeling this. I mean, maybe you do know why you're feeling this, but you know, this is one way of describing it. You know, I don't know why I'm feeling this, but it feels like, you know, that if I express my feelings, you might not be able to hold them. And the feelings that I have as a dismissive avoidant and they are intense are disgust, contempt, revulsion, horror, hatred. Those are the things that come up for you when you are triggered into engulfment. This is not the nice kind of feeling that you get when you're abandoned. No, it's not a nice feeling, but it's a more sort of acceptable feeling that when you're abandoned, you know, when you fear abandonment, you feel helpless and hopeless and powerless. And people can have a great deal of empathy for that. Very different if you're dismissive avoidant and you are expressing disgust and revulsion and hatred and horror and the ick the awful feeling that you get when you're triggered. And if you're dismissive avoidant, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. So you can ask the therapist, look, this is what I experience when I'm triggered and it's intense. Can you hold that? Cuz I fear that I am too much. And if your therapist says, "I don't think I can." As the therapist said to me when I asked her, that's great. Then you don't need to waste your money. If the therapist says to you, "I can hold you." Ask them how they're going to do that. say, "Well, okay, if I kind of show you my contempt, if I show you my disgust and my revulsion, do you think you can hold that?" And you know, hopefully hopefully you're going to be with someone who can, who absolutely can. But if that initial instinct of yours is, I don't think this is going to work. absolutely put that on the table because if you don't and if you haven't had any experience of working in the kind of therapeutic diet before, you may think to yourself, well, it doesn't feel like it's working with this therapist, but maybe I should just kind of carry on for a bit and try see how it goes. Or you might think, this is probably my fault. You know, I know I feel like I'm too much. It probably is that I am too much. Or you might think therapy just doesn't work for me. Just doesn't work. and all of those things really none of it is true or accurate. What's really happening is that if you are sitting opposite someone who is anxious and who hasn't done the work on their anxious attachment, you are going to immediately be the power in the room. Okay, that was what happened to you when you were a child. You were the power in the room. You were strong. You took care of everybody else. You reassured everybody else. And it's not true power because you're still a child. But what that means is that for many years you have been used to the person who regulates other people and unfortunately you can replicate that in therapy and you just don't want to do that. Okay.

What you need absolutely is to sit opposite someone and feel your nervous system relax. That feeling of being met. Okay. That feel like it feels good and you'll know it. You'll be like, "Oh, this person can get me and they're strong enough for me. That's what you're looking for. And when you have that, it feels really, really good. So look for that. Absolutely. Look for it. And if, like I said, if someone kind of can't give that to you, move on. Really move on. Don't waste your time. Don't waste your money working with someone who can give you theory but can't give you that feeling, that absolute deep sense of it's just security really like, oh, I'm met here. I'm understood. Okay.

So what happens when you do actually sit next to someone, sit down beside them and go, "Wow, this person gets me." All right, then the hard work starts and it feels really, really good. That kind of initial meeting of like finally I'm understood. Yay. You know, it does it does feel really good. What I'm going to tell you now is that that impulse that you've had, that instinct of this doesn't work or this does work. If you have that impulse with someone where it does work, whatever you do, as soon as it feels like you're not, it's not going to work with them, don't listen to the second impulse. Okay? [laughter] Don't listen to that. The first impulse that you have like I feel met. That's brilliant. Okay? Hold on to it because what is going to happen to you as soon as you start working with a therapist is that your feeling of disappointment is going to start to grow. So you have that initial excitement. Wow. Wow. Wow. And then the disappointment kicks in. What I should do is I should tell you about the idealize devalue discard pattern for the dismissive avoidant. For any of you who've done any work on um NPD, if you've kind of done any research on narcissistic personality disorder, you'll already be familiar with that cycle. Now, the cycle is the same for the dismissive avoidant. It's just that you don't have to have [clears throat] NPD if you're dismissive avoidant. Okay? NPD you have to have a great deal of trauma. You can absolutely have um a dismissive avoidant attachment and not have NPD. Unfortunately, currently in social media, they're often seen as the same thing, which is just nonsense. Not okay. Um that's a whole other video. [clears throat] But what's going to happen to you when you meet someone and you get that feeling of like, wow, I'm met. I'm understood. It feels sometimes for the dismissive avoidant as if the closer you get to someone, the less you like them. So the more you know about someone, the less you respect them, the less you've kind of feel connected to them. And all of this is happening because of that core fear of engulfment. And what engulfment really means is the closer I get to someone, the less okay I feel. Very different again from anxious because if you're anxious, the closer you get to someone, the better you feel. It's not like that for for the avoidant. So just be aware of that. That feeling of disappointment that starts to arise. Just hold it. Speak to your therapist about it. Don't act out on it. Okay? Don't then kind of go, "Yeah, yeah, you know what? This felt like it was going to work and now it's not." Don't don't kind of run away from the therapist when you start to feel disappointment. What's actually happening is you're getting closer to the core fear of engulfment. It's a good sign. It means that you trust this person enough for those awful feelings to start to surface. And when engulfment surfaces, it's horrible. It really, really is. And you may find that when you kind of start to feel engulfment, this is when you do a power grab with your therapist. All right? If you're experiencing that, just put it on the table. Just be completely honest with your therapist. I mean, I've been in therapist for many, many years. Sorry, what did I say? I've been a therapist for many, many years. No, I've been in therapy for many, many years. Like a long, long time. I still when I am feeling stressed think to myself today would be a great day to have a fight with my therapist. [laughter] Really? That would be good. I could go to therapy and I could have a fight with my therapist. I mean, it's ridiculous. It is ridiculous to think like that. But that can still come up for me when I am stressed because when I'm stressed I just don't want to be vulnerable. Now I can call that out. My therapist can call that out. it's okay. I don't actually have to have a fight with my therapist. But nonetheless, that can be really really there because it's much easier for me to kind of have some kind of freesome, some kind of frustration, some kind of conflict rather than allowing myself to be vulnerable. So if you are relating to this pattern and if you're dismissive avoidant, it's likely that you are that you kind of know what I'm talking about. Just call it out. Okay? That's all I do in my session. I kind of go, I I don't actually want to have a fight with you. I mean, I do want to have a fight with you. That's what I say to my therapists. I do, but I realize that that's not the work. Actually, what the work is is to kind of be vulnerable. Um, and it will be the same for you. You know, when when you kind of you have that sense of I could get revenge by having a fight with my therapist. I could kind of avoid all vulnerability. I could have a much more exciting time. I could kind of create some aliveness. That's the reactivity you often have um with dismissive avoidant. Yeah. All of that. all of that. Just just be honest about it because all of that for you is going to be much easier than being vulnerable.

And the other thing to be aware of when you are vulnerable, when you start to kind of really get in touch with your feelings is that you will feel physically violated. It feels absolutely terrible. It really really is a dreadful feeling. You have the sense of someone taking advantage of you. you you you can feel that sense of like with your therapist of you know if I am vulnerable they have power over me and it's not okay you really do not like that experience so again just express that and let the therapist know I don't want to be vulnerable it feels like you'll take advantage of me and the therapist can hold that you know they can they can kind of really be present with you through that so that you realize oh I'm not going to be taken advantage of I'm going to be okay I am sort of safe here and what you're doing is you're absolutely learning ing how to co-regulate with another person. You're learning how to not just that your therapist matters to you, but that you can say, "You matter to me. You matter." You know, that's the thing that's kind of really really difficult for you as an avoidant to really allow the other person to matter to you and to impact you to have a positive impact on you because the ego structure for avoidant is very much like I kind of take care of myself. I am completely powerful. Yeah. Nobody influences me. It's just me. Yeah. It's me, my castle, my rock. Me, me, me. Actually, to be impacted by another person and to be impacted by them positively, that means that you're kind of allowing yourself allowing yourself to be in relationship and to be vulnerable and to kind of open your heart. And that's what you will feel actually. you will kind of feel that sort of softening softening in the heart, the openness that that comes when you when you allow yourself to be seen by another person truly seen at the kind of the depth of who you are.

There's lots more that I could say. Um yes, there's probably far too much that I could say actually, but um I'm I'm going to be doing a few of these um of these videos. Um I hope that what I've said here will be useful for you. Like I said, if there's anything that I haven't covered, anything that you want to um to ask me in the messages in the messages, if I'm not in I'm not in the class, am I? I'm on YouTube. Um if you want to ask me um in the comments, that would be really great. Be fantastic to hear from you. And as I said, thank you so much for watching. I really hope that this will be helpful for you if you are avoidant.