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The Thais Gibson Podcast
Do Fearful Avoidants Regret Leaving Relationships? | Fearful Avoidant Attachment
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They walk away out of fear, not indifference. And here's the truth that we're going to talk about today, about whether or not fearful avoidants actually regret leaving, especially when they leave a relationship so suddenly. And my hope is that whether you are the fearful avoidant listening or the loved one of a fearful avoidant who stepped away suddenly, the psychology of understanding this situation will teach you exactly how to best respond and what to do next. I'm going to tell you a little bit about what can unfold here so you can really understand it from like a deep level. And if you are a fearful avoidant watching this, this will help you really give context to like, some of your own experiences and behavior, I would hope. One of the first things that you need to know is that fearful avoidant attachment styles, they really shift from feeling anxious to avoid it. And that shift can happen very quickly and very abruptly. And when the fearful avoidant them is in that space of feeling avoidant and feeling anxious, it feels like that is the entire relationship. It feels like that is their reality that they're experiencing. They sort of lose context for the middle ground. And the reason for this is because of how much trauma is often stored emotionally at the subconscious level of mind. So let's unpack that a little bit further. Your subconscious mind is like a big warehouse. It stores everything. It consolidates memories over time. Things shift a little bit over time, but as a general rule, you're really garnering a lot of emotional, emotional storage around things that deeply impacted you. So if in childhood, for example, you had a lot of experiences of your trust being challenged or broken, or feeling not good enough, or feeling unloved or whatever it might be. If you have a lot of experiences of that, your subconscious mind in that warehouse has many, many cabinets full of that feeling. And what this essentially means is that when you get triggered, this is what a trigger is. A trigger is that your subconscious mind is also a bit of an association making mach. And it's trying to use your past experiences to sort of navigate your present and future and, well, really your present. But what happens is when somebody, let's say in your adult life, makes you feel unloved, your subconscious mind goes, oh, what's this all about? What other experiences do we have of being unloved? And it sort of opens those filing cabinets in the warehouse and all of those feelings of unloved pour out, right? And so the experience of a trigger is that something in your present moment, now is reminding you of past, and your subconscious mind is opening up those Stored associations. And the more associations you have there, the more strongly you're going to feel your experience. In other words, if you have a lot of experiences of things that made you feel avoidant, like you need to pull back, protect, push people away to stay safe, feeling hurt by other people. Then when somebody makes you feel those things in your adult life, you go into that really avoidant mode because all of that emotion's online. And with strongly stored emotions, we have these innate coping mechanisms that we've developed. So if when you felt betrayed, you would push back and push people away. If a lot of betrayal comes up, you push people back a lot and push people away a lot. On the flip side, if when you felt a fear of abandonment, you would hold on tight. When a big fear of abandonment comes up, you may hold on really tight to somebody. So because fearful winds in the moment, their emotions are so strong around things, because there's so much stuff there in the warehouse to essentially feel. When they're in this anxious experience, they think like, this is the person. There's nobody else out there for me. Like, I need this to work. When they're in their avoidance side, they're like, I never want to see this person again. I don't care. This is it. I don't want to deal with this person. And when those feelings come online, they're so strong. And something that I've seen fearful avoidance experience all the time, which I think is really hard for the fearful avoidance, which I know is really hard because I once was a fearful avoidant, is sometimes your experience is so real at the time that later on when you come out of that triggered mode, you're like, oh, maybe I don't feel all of that stuff. And when it comes to breakups specifically, I've generally seen this take place in two major ways. One way is when you're really triggered, you feel like, oh my goodness, this person is the source of my pain. The reality is the storage is more of the source of your pain. Though people can absolutely be a big source of pain. It's generally like whatever's happening in front of you combined with all this storage is the source of the pain. And that person's kind of like the catalyst for the pain. But at the time, the subconscious, again, remember, it's an association making machine. So it's not like, oh, it's my own internal baggage that's the source of the pain. It's no, no, this person is bringing all this stuff up for me and I need this person to get as far away from me as possible as a strategy to get away from all of this pain that I'm experiencing. And it's a really intense experience a lot of the time. So you push somebody really far away because you're trying to keep yourself safe and protected. You're trying to get rid of all this pain that you're feeling. The mind doesn't realize, like, how much there is more to that pain at a deeper level. Right. And that's the beautiful thing about, like, when we start to understand the subconscious mind is that all these things, like, I know I used the word baggage a moment ago. Like, it is a good word in a way, because it's stuff that you're carrying that isn't yours to carry. And it's stuff that you've been imprinted with because of your past traumatic experiences. Generally, whether that's huge scale trauma or smaller scale trauma, but on a more consistent basis, that's not your fault. Right? Like, those are imprints that you had. If you feel unloved, betrayed, trapped, helpless, whatever it is, powerless, whatever fears are coming up, you were imprinted with those. They were put into your subconscious mind, probably by circumstances you didn't really want to happen. And while they're not your faults, they're your responsibility to heal, unless you want to keep feeling that way. And taking responsibility is one of the greatest freedoms you'll ever have because it allows you to, like, actually delete these things out and live a life without a lot of the those fears having to come up so much, if at all. So I have some really exciting news, and it's that integrated attachment theory training is back. So who is this for? Well, of course this is for any individual who wants to make an impact and really be of service to others while also obtaining freedom and flexibility and abundance in their lives. And this is also for anybody who's already a counselor, a therapist, a coach, and just really wants to expand their toolkit. We've had so many people enter into the integrated attachment theory program because they're just looking to obtain a certain degree of mastery in terms of understanding their own attachment patterns and also the attachment patterns of maybe their children or partner or other loved ones in their lives so they can really support those people and understand them more deeply. So if you're interested, click the link below to learn more and dive in with me. And I'd love to see you on the other side side before seats run out. With that being said, how this relates to the breakup is there's. Remember I said there's Two ways. Way number one is, yes, when, if your whole point is so triggered, they may threaten to leave a relationship or break up with a relationship because they're just trying to get out of that pain. And they think, if I push this person really, really, really far away, I won't have to hurt like this. And so the subconscious mind is just trying to protect from all of what's going on. And in that case, oftentimes a fearful avoidant when they feel more calm after does regret a breakup because they're going, wait, that's not what I actually, that's what I was trying to do from this, like, survival mode when I didn't know how to deal with how much I was feeling then. Often we'll see fearful into a lot of guilt, sometimes shame. And it can be really difficult to go through that experience. So that's one way. And in that way, yes, fearful ones definitely regret breaking up. I mean, sometimes there's like an actual incident where somebody did something terrible and then you pushed the person away and it was like the right thing, right? And I always said to fearful avoidance in my practice when I was working with so many is I would always say to people, it's never wrong to want to get rid of a person in your life if it's not working right. Like we have a divine right to be able to say, okay, this isn't working, it's not healthy, it's not good, it's not working out. But what we really want to be mindful of as a fearful avoidant is that we're making that decision from a regulated place. So you want to know that you made that decision like when you woke up in the morning and nothing else was going on. And you want to know that you would have felt that way throughout the day. You don't want to make that decision at this peak moment of emotion because then it's other stuff driving the truth of that decision rather than your actual needs and decision and desire. And if your actual needs, if you're like, this really isn't working out, I don't feel good about it. And you feel that way the whole day without there being a fight or an argument or something that's spurring or sparking that emotion, then that's when you know it's your truth, right? It's not fear in the moment, it's truth. It's how you actually feel when you're not triggered. So it's a really important differentiator there. It's like, not about you not being good Enough that the person did this. It's about them being so triggered, right? It's not about you not doing well or being bad or being unworthy or something like that. Which is our mind is also quick to give meaning, right? When somebody, when something doesn't go our way, when we don't get the job, when we don't get the person we want, when somebody breaks up with us, like, oh, I'm going to be abandoned, I'm going to be alone, I'm unworthy of a loving relationship. Like our mind gives really painful meaning to things again actually based on the storage that we have in our cabinets as mentioned earlier. But you know, it can helpful, be helpful to sort of see outside of this sometimes and to understand what's really going on. So we see, oh, this is actually about that person. It's not about me not being something something, right? So we don't have to like diminish our own self worth because of somebody else's actions. The second big reason fearful avoidance break up, and in this case they sometimes regret, and sometimes don't, but usually do regret a little bit later on, is that fearful avoidance are not good at communicating their needs. And they usually don't even realize they're not communicating their needs. Usually fearful avoidance only communicate their needs out of frustration. They usually never proactively communicate their needs in relationships unless they're very small things that they don't feel vulnerable about. What you'll often see is that a fearful avoidance will not communicate, not communicate, not communicate and be kind of like in their anxious side earlier on in relationships. And so we'll often be people pleasing and sometimes self violating their own boundaries, really prioritizing that other person's needs over their own essentially. And then there will be this buildup of their needs not being met. And then eventually they'll hit this tipping point and be like, this is not the right relationship. And generally when this happens, your hormones will go cold, we'll pull away, we'll leave the relationship with and will often not even realize, maybe forever. If they've never worked on themselves or anything like that, or learned about attachment theory or had the chance to really develop insight into some of these things. But sometimes they won't even realize that hey, a big part of that might have been different had you communicated your needs. Had you just communicated your needs, you might have felt more considered. That person might have actually shown up really well. And this is one of the biggest things I saw working with people is how often FAs would think my needs will never be met, so why bother? And then they would start doing the work and sharing their needs with people and it would transform their relationships in a really beautiful way. In this case, when we have this tipping point, FA who has this sort of tipping point and the breakup seems to come out of the blue. Sometimes we'll see the FA regret the breakup later on if they have insight into why I didn't communicate my needs or sometimes miss certain needs that were being met by a partner. Even if it was just baseline needs for connection or for or novelty or things that maybe the FA wasn't communicating, like hey I need to feel supported and it looks like XYZ or hey I want us to take a turn paying for things or whatever it is like things they didn't share but in that case they'll just miss those baseline needs. But usually it's after six weeks or so. Usually it's not an immediate regret. I would say the timeline is generally about four to six weeks. First the FA feels free because they feel free of this one sided relationship that sometimes is really important if you are an FA to recognize you may have a certain amount of responsibility in that one sided relationship if you weren't sharing your needs and communicating your boundaries. The reason I say that is definitely not to blame the FA if you felt like you were in a one sided relationship, but so that if you were in that situation you have the room to grow through that, to not have to be in that position again or to be in relationship after relationship that feels that way when there's something you could do to actually change that potential outcome. And sometimes people will not meet your needs when you communicate them, but then at least you know you're in the wrong relationship because it's not two ways, right? So in that case generally fas will sometimes miss their ex. Things like that about the four to six week mark, sometimes a little earlier too, depending on a variety of different factors. But whether somebody misses somebody and whether somebody wants to rekindle and both parties are willing to show up and put in the work and facilitate change together are two very different things. So keep that in mind. I hope this makes sense. I hope this gives you some context and insight into things. And thank you so much for watching this channel. Thank you all for your amazing comments and shares and questions and I see a lot of really cool stuff in here sometimes so even like people supporting each other on here. So thank you and please subscribe if you enjoy this content and thank you for watching and I'll see you in tomorrow's video.