3 Signs that Avoidance is Holding Your Relationship Back
And how couples therapy could help you feel more connected to your partner.
4 min read
If you and your partner lean toward dealing with what’s happening instead of feeling it with each other, you may be noticing some patterns emerging between you over time. These dynamics reveal important information about your individual early attachment history. Therapy offers the possibility of a more connected relationship once both partners feel more safety to show their full selves.
When both partners in a relationship lean toward a more avoidant way of coping with feelings, there is a preference for rationality and intellectualizing in response to issues that arise. Both partners may tend to hold their feelings about what’s happening at bay, preferring to deal with issues on their own instead. This looks like low displays of emotional expression and/or a preference to leave the situation altogether. And it can sound like, “I don’t need anyone else” or “I’ve learned not to depend on anyone else.”
If you’re reading this and wondering, if rationalizing works well enough, why would absence of feeling in the relationship be a problem? Sarah Shuster, therapist at Downtown Somatic Therapy says that “in the long-term, couples will eventually come up against a major life transition or development, and without a base of emotional intimacy, one or both partners will begin to feel lonely or disconnected from the relationship.” I often hear someone say that they are “just depressed or anxious, instead of that they are scared to share their true feelings with their partner.”
“Couples will eventually come up against a major life transition or development, and without a base of emotional intimacy, one or both partners will begin to feel lonely or disconnected from the relationship.”
Here are three signs that avoidance is holding back your relationship:
You and/or your partner use silence, humor, or distraction tactics to smile over pain or dismiss what’s happening.
You and/or your partner never or rarely experience conflict, both preferring to deal with issues autonomously.
You and/or your partner had a caregiver who didn’t explicitly acknowledge overwhelming emotions.
It can be hard to notice avoidance in ourselves and others if we’ve been taught to disconnect from feelings early on. If we grew up in a home where a caregiver didn’t have the capacity to hold feelings and then mirror them back to to help make sense of our natural emotional responses, we may have learned to shut ourselves off from feelings altogether. Importantly, our feelings or felt sense of anxiety are still present for us now, and may be coming out under the surface. Since we’ve learned that they are too much, we continue to push the feelings down.
It’s important to note that there's a lot of range within each attachment tendency. Within an avoidant attachment tendency, one person may be able to talk about feelings without an embodied experience of the feeling, whereas another person might feel numbed out, shut down, or intellectualized. If a person copes with feelings by these avoidance responses, they may be triggered by intrusion, rejection, and vulnerability. Since these are some of the risks in making progress, a couple might find it difficult to tolerate attempting repair together in a new way.
If both individuals in a couple lean toward an avoidant attachment style, a therapist may be helpful in helping to draw out the feelings gently over time from each partner one at a time. In doing so, when one partner shares, they can experience being received by their partner. In somatic therapy, a therapist and a couple will track what it was like to share feelings and what’s different about my partner's reaction right now compared to what I grew up with or what I expect to receive. This carefully attuned process helps us to slow down and gain more flexibility in our old patterns.
Couples therapy is also a place to explore fears about sharing one's full self with their partner, such as a worry about being experienced as needy or a worry that the need may be rejected. Couples therapy helps us see the costs of avoidance in the relationship in order to help motivate ourselves to take emotional risks. Further, it helps us explore the old roles we played in our family of origin and how we may either be continuing that role now or overcorrecting but swaying in the extreme and opposite direction. For example, if an individual served as a caregiver for family members early on, they may either continue to feel their sense of worthiness depends on caretaking, or they may feel allergic to any feelings or needs because of the extreme burden they felt serving in that role.
“Therapy also helps explore the old roles we played in our family of origin and how we may either be continuing that role now or overcorrecting but swaying in the extreme and opposite direction.”
Together, a couples therapist can support a couple gently walk away from over regulating their feelings by practicing to tolerate fear and anxiety enough to turn toward each other. When a couple experiences themselves sharing their true feelings over and over in a safe and trusting environment, they are able to reach a deepened level of closeness. This capacity to emotionally connect and process together is essential for a couple to withstand challenging life events with more resilience and a sense of truly being in it together.