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Have you ever wondered what goes on in the mind and the heart of a dismissible voidant attachment style after an argument? If this is something that you're curious about, or are a dismissible voidant attachment style even better trying to understand yourself after an argument? This is a video for you. In this video we are going to go through the four stages of what a DA experiences after an argument and we'll talk about some healthy action steps that you can take if you are either the DA yourself or the loved one of a dismissive avoidant so that you can move through these situations with a lot more grace and ease. If you are really curious about this, it makes a lot of sense. Because dismissive avoidant attachment style, they're often so stoic, right? You may not even realize what they're feeling or experiencing, but it doesn't mean that they're not feeling things. Yes, dismissive avoidance are better at compartmentalizing as a general rule than the vast majority of people, but it doesn't mean that those emotions aren't there. And it also doesn't mean that those emotions aren't going to bubble back up after the very first stage. This first stage is the shutdown or stonewalling stage. When a dismissive avoidant does not feel good in a conflict or argument. When they feel stuck or trapped or like they can't solve for something and they don't know how to make it better, eventually part of them shuts down internally and they kind of numb themselves to their emotions. Now, this is often taken by a partner or a loved one as them stonewalling the partner and pushing the partner away, which of course is the experience that the partner has, but the dismissive avoidance internal relationship to it, the vast majority of the time is actually to try to remove their relationship to their own feelings. Dismissive avoidants do not feel safe feeling their own feelings. It didn't feel safe to feel their feelings growing up in their household or environment. So what they do is they try to get as far away from their own feelings as possible by numbing and shutting down. And they're not really trying to get away from the person as much as they're trying to get rid of any cause to feel something that makes them feel deeply uncomfortable. And this brings us to stage two, which is our distancing stage. It is within this stage that a dismissive avoidant often feels vulnerable. They don't like to feel so much, and they realize on some subconscious level that, wow, this person's making me feel a lot and I don't like this feeling of vulnerability to this person. And this often happens on autopilot. But what happens is the dismissive avoidance starts to deactivate. And one of the big ways that they will deactivate is to distance themselves by convincing themselves they don't need this person now. They won't so much do what the fearful avoidant does, like convincing themselves that they're in the wrong relationship when they're really triggered. But they will do a lot of like pulling away. So they'll, they'll sort of convince themselves that like, even if this doesn't work, I, I'd be fine if we don't end up together, it's not going to matter anyways. You know, the, the wording will be slightly different. The, the fearful avoidant might say things like this person's wrong for me. Whereas the dismissive avoidance version is often things like if it doesn't work out, I would still be okay. This distancing strategy stage is where they start to kind of con themselves that they don't need this person and that they aren't going to be that affected by this person. They may even try to convince themselves that this argument isn't, isn't even affecting them that much. Who cares about this? Why bother trying to communicate about this? It won't matter anyways. You know, these kinds of components in their internal dialogue and again at a subconscious level, these are distancing strategies that are designed to be self preservation methods. Now once they've had enough space and time, so long as that space and time hasn't been violated by, I shouldn't say violated because it's not even the right word. It is violated. But it's not that the person, person's doing something violating, if that makes sense. Like if, you know, they're trying to take space and that space hasn't been crossed in some way by somebody constantly reaching out or texting, it's not like you're violating the person by doing it. But in theory, the dismissive avoidant has this like invisible boundary that they're not communicating. So somebody doesn't realize they have the boundary and they kind of accidentally violated, if that makes sense. And so because of this, as long as that, that invisible boundary, um, hasn't been crossed, then a dismissive avoidant, if they have had enough space and time, will go into the recovery and connection stage. And it's in this stage that although they may not reach out for connection internally, they start to reconnect to their own emotions and they start to connect to how they felt about the person before the argument. They may miss the person a little bit, think about reaching out, hope the other person reaches out. Now they are so stoic that they won't do this in a very obvious manner, but they will be there kind of hoping to reconnect in some way. Now when a dismissive avoidant reconnect, they don't like to go 0 to 60. They don't like to go right back into like super expressing their feelings. They're slower to warm back up again. They kind of need to restabilize and rebuild the sense of connection slowly over time until it feels safer and safer and then they'll let their guard back down, which takes time and obviously for people of other attachment styles and it seems to be frustrating who have a different relationship to to what they feel after a conflict. But this is useful information to keep in mind. So you can find these sort of middle grounds between your attachment style and somebody else's. If you really want to do some in depth healing around these things. We have a codependency and enmeshment course that you can check out fully for free and actually keep for life. It's valid at 250. That course will really help you if you struggle with emotional over functioning, if you struggle with keeping your boundaries, honoring your truth, not self silencing. The course will really go into all of the reasons why this happens and what you can do instead. And I'll put the link for free for you below. The curiosity and learning stage. Generally dismissive avoidance. If they can have a healthy discussion with somebody they're in a relationship with, where things are above board, it's safe. People are communicating in a more logical way. They'll actually want to be curious about what they can learn and take away from the conflicts and how they can improve next time. But they won't get there. If there's a lot of unsafe conflicts, a lot of heated communication, people aren't seeing and hearing each other. So the more that that's there and that's not one person's responsibility, it's both right the other attachment style as well as the dismissive avoidance responsibility to have that healthy communication. But the more that that is there, the more they'll actually move into curiosity and learning and try to prevent this from happening again in the future in some form. What do they do? What can they do differently? But if there feels like there's too much criticism or too much heatedness in the argument between both parties, because it can very much go both ways these will shut down more to protect themselves, and they won't often achieve that curiosity and learning stage the way that they would if there's healthy discussion.