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The Thais Gibson Podcast
5 Signs A Dismissive Avoidant Isn't Ready for A Healthy Relationship
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If a dismissive avoidant tells you I need space right after closeness, that is not independence, that is avoidance. And that is simply an avoidant strategy. In today's video, I'm going to break down exactly what that means along with five major signs. A dismissive avoidant is not quite yet ready for a healthy relationship. And my hope for you is that if you are the dismissive avoidant, listening to this, you have some insights into what to work on next within yourself. But since most of our audience here listening to this video is probably going to be an anxious attachment style or fearful avoidant attachment style, my hope for you is that you use these signs as vetting strategies. You look to see if these are present in somebody you're dating or getting to know. And if you see that they are, you have a healthy conversation in regards to how to address these things to see if somebody's willing to do the work on these things or if they actively are already. And if the answer is yes, then it could be a sign that maybe you're moving in the right direction and you can keep dating so slowly but surely and betting to see if they're growing alongside you. But if they're not, then you know exactly how to approach a situation instead, which is probably to take a step back and set a big boundary. Now, if you're new here, hello and welcome. My name is Thais Gibson. I'm the founder of Gibson Integrated Attachment Theory, the proven method for how to actually rewire and transform your childhood patterns that you acquired in terms of your conditioning that are showing up in probably all of your adult relationships, not just your romantic ones. And my hope here is to share daily content and videos that help you gain deeper insight into yourself, other people, so that you can actually build the best relationships of your life. Now, let's get into it. Here is the first major sign that a dismissive avoidant isn't ready for a healthy relationship yet. And I use the word yet because it doesn't mean that they won't ever be. It just means that you have to see if this person is actively doing these things. And I want to say one other thing, too. It's a really important rule to follow to not date somebody's potential. If you date what you hope they'll become or what they say that they're going to do, or how they say they're going to change, that can really harm you. I think the best strategy here is proper vetting, which is like, what is somebody actively already doing? If somebody says, oh, I'm Gonna work on myself. I'd like to do that one day. That doesn't cut it, unfortunately. If somebody is like, yeah, I'm already in counseling once a week, or therapy, or taking online courses or reading all these books and journal. Like, if somebody's already doing something, that is what we're looking for. Clear, consistent actions. Okay? So here's the first sign that they're not taking action or that somebody's not ready for a relationship is that they prefer low maintenance connection. And you will see this not only in, in the romantic area of their life, you'll see that they try to keep space and distance and avoid too much commitment and avoid too much investment in a person, but you'll also see that this tends to be across all areas of their life. If you look closely, you'll see that they tend to feel most safe and comfortable when things are easy, when there's distance, when there's no pressure. And you'll see this honestly reflected into a lot of their friendships. So for example, you might see a dismissive avoidant doesn't really have somebody that they stay in regular contact with in regards to their friendships away too much commitment on the weekends, they make last minute plans. I mean, all of these things just scream low maintenance connection. And I think that it's healthy to have some relationships in our life like this. Like if you look at the idea of community based relationships, you know, for example, my husband and I go and we play pickleball throughout the week and we have a lovely community around us of people who like to do that. Obviously those aren't people I'm like sharing my inner world with on a regular basis and vice versa. It's okay to have some low maintenance relationships in your life. That can be a healthy thing, especially if it takes place in a community setting. But I'm talking like these are the only relationships that this person has in their life. They only seem to know how to navigate those types of relationships. And honestly, why this is such a big deal is because it kind of screams that they haven't figured out yet how to go deeper and have sustainable, deeper, long term relationships. And so what is going to show up in all areas of their life is also going to show up in their relationship with you. And that's a really important thing to be paying attention to. Now the exceptions to this would be if somebody was like, yeah, I'm working on this, I'm opening up, I'm trying to intentionally build deeper friendships. Here's what I'm doing already through doing this like, if you're seeing signs like that, okay, you could have a little more patience and keep betting somebody more slowly as you start to date them. But like, you need to be seeing active things taking place, otherwise you were dating somebody's potential. Number two, the idea of vulnerability gets intellectualized. Okay, so what this actually means is this is a signs when he's not ready for a close relationship. Because they don't know how to be in their body, they explain their feelings instead of actually feeling them. So, for example, they might say something like, yeah, I think that I probably should have said this thing, or I think that I probably should have felt this way in the situation, and I didn't. And so they might say, yeah, I think that I should probably want to be more open in relationships right now, but I don't know how to get there. Right. If you're hearing these types of things, unfortunately that person hasn't actually done the embodiment work yet. And a lot of embodiment work happens asomatically and B, through working through our core wounds, it is such an important fundamental part of healing your attachment styles to leverage neuroplasticity, to rewire your core wounds. Because your core wounds are actually the signals that cause your nervous system to be dysregulated. Your nervous system is often responding much more to your subjective internal interpretation of things than the objective world. This is really important to understand. And I'm just going to explain this briefly. Obviously we have so many videos on this channel about this. But if you, for example, have an abandonment core wound, let's say you're anxiously attached watching this, and you have an abandonment core wound, when you feel somebody pulling away, your nervous system isn't just responding to that person. Pull away objectively. Why? Because you can see other objective people, securely attached people. If they're dating somebody and they pull away a little bit, or they're a little distant for half a day, or they're not as communicative over text message for an afternoon, securely attached people, because they don't have this abandonment wound, don't project this big fear, and then get super dysregulated. They may, like, realize that they feel this disconnected state, that they have a need, respond to it healthily, or you may even see a dismissive avoidant, as another example, not panic, right? Somebody panics because they have a stored perception from painful past experiences that they're projecting onto their objective reality. And so they go, oh, I'm going to be abandoned. This person's going to leave me. And if they have a history of having felt like that in the past that has been stored subconsciously. That belief system fires off triggers, all of this dysregulated emotion, which is made up of neurochemical reactions which then those neurochemicals trigger. Like let's say you have adrenaline, cortisol, norepinephrine, that then signals to your nervous system, okay, brace, right? Brace for a threat, brace for abandonment. And that's part of what's happening. So, you know, we really have to be able to not just do like somatic work. Obviously, that's really important. It's one of our six pillars of healing. But that has to be done in conjunction with core wound work and rewiring, because if we don't, then we're only ever just doing the somatic work and we're never actually dealing with the root cause. So really important to make sure you're understanding that vulnerability can get intellectualized. If you see this in other people, it's a sign, unfortunately, that they haven't really done that deeper work just yet. Number three, if this person does not know how to handle conflict in a healthy way, this should be one of the most fundamental life skills every single person is looking to build. If you don't know how to just talk through a conflict in a healthy way, like, hey, when XYZ situation happened the other day, it was a little hurtful for me. Can we try this thing next time instead? So let's say it's like your in laws came over and you accidentally told your your in law. Or let's say you met your partner's parents and your partner accidentally told one of your secrets to their parents that they didn't realize was embarrassing for you, but was, you know, that might cause a conflict. And you might say in that situation, hey, like, I know you didn't mean anything by it, but that was private for me. And I actually felt kind of embarrassed when that came up. Can you be more mindful about respecting my boundaries going forward and just thinking through what you share in case it is something that's more private to me? And like, that should be the way that we approach conflicts. In a perfect world, we should be able to say, okay, hey, here's a situation that felt uncomfortable. Here's what I want to see. Next time we positively frame what that looks like. We actually then, you know, make it very clear and specific so it can't get missed. These are the types of things that we should be able to do in a healthy relationship. If somebody is like, nope, conflict Shut down, exit, stonewall, disappear, pretend I'm fine, deflect any of these things to just avoid discomfort. I mean these are really big red flags and like signs that somebody's not necessarily in a place for a healthy relationship right now. And predominantly to have any kind of healthy relationship ever, you have to figure out how to navigate conflict with that person. And that should honestly just be a non negotiable. If you want a relationship to work, I have a free gift for you that we're doing just for a limited time. It is a course all about nervous system regulation and somatic processing of emotions that will help you feel secure, safe and connected to yourself. It's one of our six major pillars of healing your attachment style. And it's literally for free with our seven day free trial, access to the personal development school and you can check it out down below. Number four is if somebody is always being really ambiguous about commitment. And I don't just mean like commitment in terms of the big future commitments, getting married, settling down, being in a monogamous relationship, whatever it might be. I mean like somebody isn't really willing to say next summer we're going to go to this place on a road trip. If somebody is constantly trying to keep things ambiguous and say yeah, maybe or yeah, we could do that. If somebody is constantly with commitment, with holiday plans, with whatever it might be. If they're always trying to keep things super ambiguous and big, it's a sign that that person doesn't even feel comfortable and safe enough to think of the future, which, which means they're not unfortunately in a place that they're going to be a healthy long term partner. They're not compatible to like be here and show up and make plans and do all these things that functional relationships would naturally do. Okay? So it's a really important thing to keep in in mind. And last but not least, and this is probably the biggest one, number five is if your needs or feelings are constantly getting frame too much, if your bids for closeness keep getting minimized, criticized or even treated like oh, that's embarrassing or there's not a place for that here again you have to look at these things and be like, what does a long term relationship look like with these behaviors in it? How do I feel as a person in a year, in three years? If somebody literally is, you know, minimizing or shaming my feelings and needs? If somebody's never able to talk about the future or make plans? If somebody isn't able to be vulnerable with me or can never move through a conflict like these are serious signs that you have to pay attention to, and you have to ask yourself, would I seriously be happy in a relationship like that? And so these are such important things to vet for. And I really hope that you can write these key takeaways down that when you're dating or even in a relationship with somebody now, to see how somebody's showing up and know that you could set boundaries and act accordingly. I hope this is helpful for you today. Please subscribe to this channel. Like Share if you don't want to miss any of our regular giveaways that we do here on different courses and of course, our daily videos I put out to just share about your attachment style and your healing journey with you. Thanks for watching.