Transcription
Hey guys, I'm Heidi Prib. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here.
Today on this channel, I want to talk about something that I see getting discussed pretty frequently online, but that I also see a high degree of what I would call not great mentalizing about the phenomenon. So, this phenomenon in question is the concept that those with avoidant attachment styles often seem super securely attached in the early stages of a relationship.
So, when you're going on initial dates with an avoidant or you're getting to know them, they might actually seem very open, very self-aware, very interested in a commitment. They might be saying and doing all of the right things. And it might lead you to believe that they are incredibly securely attached. When in reality, sometimes this is actually a little bit of a flag that someone is not checking in with themselves as they're going through the dating process.
So over the course of this video, we're going to talk about both what this feels like to be on the other side of. So if you're someone who's dating an avoidant or has had a relationship with an avoidant that felt really good in the beginning and then a switch flipped or if you are someone with an avoidant attachment style who kind of recognizes that there's a way in which you show up in the beginning of a relationship that doesn't always align with how you feel later on. We're going to talk about it from both sides and why this actually happens.
Because the most common explanation that I see given online is that avoidants are being manipulative or insincere or that they are intentionally leading people on in the beginning stages of a relationship. And as someone who definitely comes from the more avoidant side of the attachment spectrum, as well as someone who has worked with and been close to quite a few avoidants over the years, there is a different pattern of what's going on internally that I think is more often what's happening in these cases. Okay?
So, I'm not here to say that it's never the case that someone is intentionally lying or being manipulative. Anyone of any attachment style can fall into that pattern. But there is a much more common explanation in my opinion of why this happens that has a lot more to do with how avoidant attachers learned to navigate relationships very early in life.
So there's kind of two main things that I think can contribute to this. And the first one is that avoidants can be incredibly self-aware. A lot of them can speak with a high degree of fluency about things like their inner experience or how their past has affected them or what they're looking for in relationships. So there's this idea of avoidant attachers as kind of perpetually aloof and uninterested in their own psychology. And while you can absolutely get that, no question, right? You can get that on either side. People who just aren't really interested in looking inward, you can also have a flavor of avoidant attachment that is highly, highly, highly competent at speaking about their emotions in a cerebral way. And if you are not looking too closely, you might mistake this for someone who has a high degree of in-the-moment capacity for emotional availability. But these are not necessarily the same thing.
So when I was learning to code adult attachment interviews, we would read interview after interview of people who were insecurely attached on both ends of the spectrum. I remember the instructor telling us, "When you finally get to a secure interview, you're not going to recognize secure attachment. you are going to be so in the pattern of pathizing things that you are highly likely to find a huge flaw in the secure transcript when you do come across it." But I remember reading this one transcript and I was like this is it. I have never been so sure that I have found the secure transcript. This person had had a difficult childhood. But they were able to very cleanly and clearly explain what that was like for them, how they believe it impacted them as an adult, what they were looking for in relationships currently. They were just so kind of stereotypically self-aware. And so I actually remember emailing my professor because prior to the next class, we had to email in our guesses about what we thought the transcript was. And I said, "Hey, I've got it. It didn't fool me. This is the secure transcript." And I think I even made a joke like, "Do you have this guy's number? He seems incredibly emotionally available."
And then when we were taking up the homework in the next lesson, I learned that nope, that was the transcript of someone who was a reasonably healthy, avoidantly attached person. They were incredibly good at describing their experiences, but they were doing it in a very cerebral way that actually kind of allowed them to stay one step outside of their emotional experience. And so this is one of the first things that I think can trip people up about avoidant attachment is that there's this stereotype that they're completely uninterested in even thinking about emotions or relationships or whatever it is. Whereas in reality avoidants can very often be quite self-aware. But what they are not is particularly relationally aware. And I'm going to make a video in the future that goes over this distinction quite a bit more thoroughly. But the idea is that when we're self-aware, we're able to look inward and kind of make sense of what our experiences have been. But what we're not great at doing is looking at how relationships affect us and how we are affecting others. And I would argue that everyone who is insecurely attached has pretty severe blind spots in the area of relational awareness, no matter how self-aware they get. But again, we're going to go over that more in a future video.
For now, the second thing I want to draw our attention to is that avoidant attachers do not psychologically organize themselves predominantly around how they are feeling in the moment. Okay. And this is the part that I think feels really confusing for those on the anxious side of the spectrum who are constantly trying to understand relationships through the lens of how are both people feeling as they're moving through.
For the avoidant, early on in life, what they learned is that how I feel inside of my connections is actually not that important. When they were very young, avoidant attachers tended to get rejected more often when they were displaying their genuine feelings to their caregivers. But they learned if I pay attention to what is expected of me from my caregivers or from my early environment. And I notice things like when I'm in a good mood, my parents really like being around me and respond positively to me. What starts to get internalized is how I am actually feeling doesn't matter. What matters is if I am meeting the expectations of my environment and if I am taking the right actions. So if I am doing the right thing, even if it's not in alignment with how I feel, I am okay. I'm good. I'm safe.
So, as avoidant attachers are forming new relationships and moving through them, they are less often checking in with which parts of this relationship do I like or don't like? What do and don't I feel aligned with? More often, the way they're making decisions in the moment is by unconsciously referencing the question, what should I do in this moment? What would a good partner do in this situation? and can I go ahead and do that regardless of what I am feeling until they either reach an overwhelm point or the relationship reaches a point where a new set of expectations comes online.
So, if you've been around this channel for a while, you know that one of my favorite shows is Married at First Sight. Only the Australian and UK versions. The American version is very bad, but I was watching, I believe, the UK version last year and there was this couple that comes on to the show where they seemed super super into each other, like they were just getting along like house on fire. They had essentially no conflict and from the outside it looked like the absolutely perfect couple. So, the premise of the show is that these matchmakers set people up. They get married on their first date and then they move in together and the show follows them for a couple of months. And about halfway through the experiment, the woman in this particular couple, who was definitely a bit more anxiously attached, dating someone who seemed a bit more avoidantly attached, told her partner she loved him. And immediately, the whole tone of their relationship changed.
So, watching it from the outside as the viewer, you were thinking, "Of course, he's going to say it back. These two are so clearly into each other. They have this rock-solid relationship." But instead, what happened was he got really uncomfortable, pulled back super hard, and the relationship ended up ending. And this was kind of my first experience of seeing this happen from the outside in a completely detached way. Like I did not know either of these people. I had no context on their inner worlds. And I realized, yeah, this is a pretty common thing that happens with avoidant attachers that does seem incredibly confusing from the outside. Whereas having been on the inside of this phenomenon or having a lot of friends or clients who've been on the inside of this, it is so obvious to me why this tends to happen in relationships where one person is avoidant, which is when someone with an avoidant attachment style makes the decision to, let's say, start pursuing someone. A lot of these rules are not at all going to apply if you're in a situation where, for example, you're chasing an avoidant or trying to get them to like you, but they haven't really internally decided yes about you. But if they do, if someone with an avoidant attachment style really wants to date someone, really likes them, has an interest in them, kind of as soon as that decision gets made to start investing in someone, there's a particular set of rules or shoulds that are then online inside of their mind. And these shoulds about how to navigate the relationship take precedence most of the time over whatever is happening emotionally for the avoidant in the moment.
So these shoulds might look something like if this person that I'm dating texts me, I should text back quickly. And so to really break this down to the very simple in-the-moment process, as soon as the avoidant gets a text that they feel like they should respond to promptly, they might not even be checking in with, "Do I want to respond to this right now?" or how do I feel about getting this text in this moment? The checking-in system goes, how quickly should I respond to this? And what should I say back to be a good person or good partner? And that's the text that gets sent.
Or if they're on a first date with someone or a couple weeks into dating them and the person they're dating starts talking about their interests and the avoidant isn't really that into their interests or they kind of have slight judgments about them. In the early stages, what might happen, rather than checking in and going, "Huh, is the way that I feel about this person's interests maybe an indication that I'm not going to be the best partner for them." What might happen is some sort of self-shaming? So going, I should be endlessly positive and accepting of other people's interests, even if they're kind of giving me the ick a little bit or whatever it is, and then intentionally overriding that and going back into the interaction, showing warmth and enthusiasm because that's what they believe they should be showing.
And again, the really important thing to keep in mind here is that this is not happening consciously. So most of the time, it's not that an in-the-moment decision is getting made where they see kind of two paths. One where they're honest about their feelings and one where they do the thing that they think they should do. It's that the feeling part of the equation is often not even considered as important data. What's getting checked in with and what feels really important is what they should do. And if they do the thing that they feel like they should do, they have behaved in alignment with the thing that their body is telling them is the most important thing to pay attention to.
So, there's a lot of thinking about things like the next logical steps in a relationship. And there's a lot less checking in happening on how am I actually feeling? What is my body responding to uniquely inside of this relationship? And how could this relationship be better co-created between myself and the other person so that we're both getting more of what we want out of it and less of what we don't. Again, there's that blind spot around relationality as a concept.
So, this kind of leads us through that early stage of dating for a lot of avoidants where they're checking in predominantly on how do I make a good impression on this person? How do I show that I am a good and competent partner? How do I live in alignment with my own internalized beliefs and value systems about how to treat someone? But what's often getting neglected is one's actual inner experience. And I want to note this is different than the way that the anxious attacher neglects their inner experience. Okay? So the anxious attacher tends to be quite aware of what they're feeling, but they will sometimes happily put that aside in favor of getting connection. With the avoidant, this is actually not as oriented towards connection itself as it is oriented towards living in alignment with their own beliefs about what it means to be a good person or a person of integrity. That's what they're kind of trying to align themselves with in this early process.
But the problem is that just like those with anxious attachment styles who push down what they want or feel for a long enough period of time are eventually going to reach kind of an overwhelm point, the same is true on the other side. So when an avoidant attacher has been kind of accumulating ways in which they are not feeling aligned with the actions that they believe they should take, what tends to come online is a feeling of intense pressure. And as soon as that pressure is online, what their instinct often is is to pull back to regulate around that feeling of pressure and then to go back into connection only if and when they have figured out how to get back into the state that they feel like they should be in to connect with another person.
So what does that mean? We can kind of think of it very simply as when the avoidant attacher was very young. They may have gotten a lot of really positive feedback from their environments when they were acting cheerful and competent or when they were entertaining other people or whatever it is. And so they may have learned when I am feeling those things, it's time to be in connection. When I am feeling stressed, overwhelmed, pressured, it is time to pull back from connection because those are the states where I would be rejected if I showed up in connection with those states online. And so this is a very natural, unconscious and instinctual program that operates inside of the avoidant attacher. Right? Again, it's usually not a choice that they are consciously making. It's just what their system tells them is the next logical move when they start to feel that pressure mounting.
So when they get that text that they feel like they should respond to quickly, if their system is screaming, I don't want to reply to that right away, what their system is going to tell them to do is pull back. Figure out why you're feeling so weird, why all of a sudden there's this huge pressure on doing the thing that came easily to you a couple of weeks ago. And once you figure that out and get back into that nervous system state of feeling happy and cheerful and like it's time to connect again, then respond to the text, including an explanation of why you didn't respond to the text earlier that makes the other person feel good.
This, by the way, I think is one of the biggest misconceptions that I see floating out there in the attachment world where you'll have people on the anxious side of the spectrum going, "Oh, avoidants are trying to play games or be controlling by not responding quickly." However, what is happening more often in the avoidant experience again as someone who comes from this side of the spectrum and has been close to many many more avoidantly attached people than probably any other orientation is internally they are feeling this sense of ah I should be responding to that I should be responding to that but for some reason there's some sort of pressure I have around it that I don't understand that I'm stressed out by and so it's easier to keep kind of putting it off than it is to figure out what that internal discord is that's going on.
So, this is one potential point in time where that kind of perfect facade starts breaking down because the feelings that the avoidant has been ignoring in order to do the right thing in their relationship start overwhelming them and causing them to pull back to figure out how they can get themselves back into that right way of being where they feel positive and open to their partner and non-judgmental or whatever else it is.
But the other point where this might happen is when the stakes change in a relationship. So that example that I gave from Married at First Sight is a perfect example of this. In the early stages of a relationship, the avoidant attacher might have a certain set of internalized rules about how to show up. So maybe be very responsive, be very positive, be very curious about the other person, whatever it is that they internalized from their early environments. But at different points in a relationship, they might have new sets of expectations come online. So in the initial dating stages, maybe there's a set of expectations about how they should act that feel relatively low stakes and easy to fulfill. But then once more commitment is online, now you're in kind of a different category of self-expectations. Okay?
So, an avoidant might have an internalized belief that if someone loves me now, I should either love them back or at least feel like I am fairly close to getting to that point with them. Or if someone loves me, I should be thinking about spending the rest of my life with them. This also might happen in the jump between casual dating and a more serious commitment. So if the conversations about the relationship start turning towards what the future looks like or whatever it is, now the avoidant is kind of tasked unconsciously with asking themselves, do I want to go into this next phase of the relationship with this person knowing that there's now going to be a much more intensive set of shoulds and expectations that I'm holding myself to. And I think that the kind of sad or tragic part of avoidant attachment is that very very often that answer ends up being no. And this might be the point where they exit the relationship because they were not aware in the initial stages that had they brought in more of what they were actually feeling or more of what they were actually struggling with, they may have been able to co-create a relationship that felt comfortable enough for them that they actually did feel really excited to go to that next level because that next level was not presenting to them now as a lifetime of further self-abandonment.
What is different about all of this between an avoidant relationship and a secure relationship is that securely attached people see relationships as collaborative. So in those initial stages of dating, well, yes, they absolutely have standards that they hold themselves to for how they believe they ought to treat other people. They are also consistently checking in on how am I feeling inside of this connection? What am I comfortable with, uncomfortable with, etc. and how do I communicate those things to the other person to see if we can work on them together? If we can and if we can make the relationship a place that we're both reasonably happy with, then I will keep investing. If not, then that might just be an indication that we're not the best fit for each other, right? But it's viewed not predominantly through the lens of what is the right versus wrong move to make in this relationship in a vacuum. It's looked at through the lens of what am I feeling? How do I want to treat someone and be treated? And then how do I communicate all of that as we go through the relationship at every single stage? Okay.
So, what you're going to see from the get-go with people who are more secure is actually less perfection because they are going to be consistently checking in with their own inner experience and bringing it up even if it's uncomfortable. So, if you're watching this because you're coming from the more anxious side of the spectrum and you're trying to figure out how do I tell apart an avoidant person from a secure person in the early stages of dating, it might actually be helpful to recognize that someone behaving in a way that is seemingly perfect is more likely to indicate avoidance than secure attachment. And with that, it might also be very useful to realize that you might find that a lot more attractive. So, because anxious attachers have a tendency to idealize partners, when you find someone who leans more avoidant and they come in seeming kind of perfect and like they have all of their ducks in a row and like they don't really have a lot that comes up for them emotionally, but maybe they are perpetually available to respond to your feelings or to talk through things with you when you're stressed out. That might feel amazing in the beginning, right? And you might mistake that kind of I'm okay, you're not okay worldview that the avoidant has for someone who is incredibly emotionally available because they're available to care for your feelings. But what you really need to look at when you look at whether or not the relationship is secure is are they also coming to me with their vulnerabilities? Are they coming to me with things that are making them uncomfortable in the relationship? Are they trying to talk things out and collaborate on building a relationship together? Or are they perpetually making what feels like the perfect move, but if I really stop and think about it, I don't have a lot of experiences of them being open with me about what their needs are in the relationship. Right? If you're not seeing any of that in the early stages of dating, it might be a sign that you're dealing with someone who's a bit more avoidant than they are secure. Even if they are super super warm, friendly, and available to be there with your emotions.
Okay, so it's this very kind of ironic thing where a lot of people think to spot avoidants early on, you have to look for these giant glaring red flags, right? When in reality, what you're actually going to be looking for if you're looking for a secure person is someone who might be more often making moves you don't love. So, someone who's being very honest with you about their boundaries or someone who is telling you when something you did made them uncomfortable. These are actually clearer indications of secure attachment than behaving in a way that makes you feel perpetually and perfectly comfortable.
Are another thing to check in on is how is the power dynamic happening in this relationship. So again, avoidants are more likely to feel comfortable in a relationship where they are almost never taking on the role of the vulnerable party who needs any sort of care or support from the other person. And again, if that's a dynamic that you secretly kind of like, if you like having that kind of strong stoic, doesn't need much from you person, you might find that incredibly attractive from the get-go. But more secure attachers actually tend to feel quite uncomfortable in relationships where the power dynamic is skewed in that way. So they're going to be looking for a more natural give and take. Can I support you when you're stressed out? But also when I'm stressed out and need support, can I turn to you and expect you to play that kind of solid and stable secure base role for me? And so from the get-go, secure attachers are going to be looking for that natural give and take, that natural tradeoff, whereas avoidant attachers are more likely to feel more comfortable in that I'm okay, you're not okay role where they're dealing with all of their stuff internally. And you very rarely, if ever, see them in a state of kind of in-the-moment emotional vulnerability.
And this one can even be quite overt. Like I've seen quite a few cases of secure attachers kind of going into relationships and realizing especially if they get the sense their partner might be idealizing them in some way or consistently taking the lead from them where they will intentionally try to flip that power dynamic. So they'll go hey why don't you plan a date for us or I feel like I'm not really clear on what your wants are all of the time and that we're very often doing what I want but I also want to take an interest in what feels exciting and interesting to you. So they'll kind of be going in intentionally looking to even out an uneven power dynamic. So again, a secure connection might actually feel more uncomfortable in the beginning stages. If you are someone who gets uncomfortable with taking the lead more or asserting yourself more or setting boundaries more clearly, right? It's going to be easier to avoid all of that in a relationship with someone who leans more avoidant than it is with someone who leans more secure.
And then the last thing to check in on if you're either trying to tell the difference between a more secure person and a more avoidant person in the early dating stages or if you are a more avoidant person who's trying to figure out what are the differences between the way that I show up and the way more secure people show up is again look at that relationality piece. So, is the relationship being looked at as something that is getting consistently co-created where both people's feelings and needs and vulnerabilities and experiences are being brought in and worked with in a dynamic way which requires both people to be competently collaborating on from their adult selves, right? Or is the relationship being governed by a set of rules that one or both people have for how they ought to be behaving inside? Again, right from the get-go, you're much more likely to see the secure attacher bringing in the things that they're struggling with and inviting you to work on those things with them. Whereas the avoidant attacher is more likely to be shaming themselves at the beginning for what they're struggling with, pulling back and then coming in with a perfect explanation about why they needed that time or space. Because again, they don't really know that it's possible to make the opposite move. They have this nervous system that has told them from the very beginning of their life literally that when they are struggling it's time to be alone and when they are feeling the right things it's time to be in connection. And so ironically the more they care about a relationship the more an avoidant is likely to be putting that intense pressure on themselves to show up perfectly. Whereas the more a securely attached person cares about the relationship, the more pressure they're going to be putting on themselves to be honest and direct about what their needs are because they believe that that's the best chance they have at co-creating something that works.
All right, that's all I'm going to say about this topic for today. But as always, any questions, anything coming up for you as you've gone through this video, please leave in the comments section below. I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon.