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So somebody you're dating or truly care about in your life has suddenly pulled away and it probably feels really painful. But in this moment you have to determine, is this a dismissive avoidant discard? Is this person literally cutting loose, getting out of the relationship, maybe even ghosting you in this situation? Or is this their normal behavior? And what can you do to make sure that you put your boundaries and standards up in this relationship dynamic so that you do not have to deal with this type of heartache? Well, today's video is going to unpack and answer all of those questions for you in so much detail so you can gain the certainty, know exactly what's going on, and decide the healthiest way that honors yourself and your truth in terms of how to proceed. So stay tuned. Let's start by going through some major signs that this person might actually be able to do this. I'll save the biggest sign for the very end of this video because it is the big one that we want to be able to be prepared to heal through first. But some three high level signs are, number one, if you see this person shutting down emotionally. So we all know dismissive avoidance are fairly emotional, emotionally shut down. It's a very common theme of dismissive avoidant attachment style. However, when a dismissive avoidant is dating somebody, when they're getting to know somebody, when they're interested in that person, they will actually tend to ask you meaningful questions about yourself. They will try to get to know you, they'll try to figure out who you are in a relationship. They will have a sense of curiosity for and towards you in a relationship dynamic. If this suddenly changes and if that is combined with seeing this person retreat even more than they usually do. And these are signs that hey, this person may be on their way out in this relationship. So that's number one. Okay, we have four total. We're covering three here. Then we're getting into some other things. We'll save the last one for the end. The second one is if there are sudden devaluing behaviors or comments. Now the reason for this is often what precedes a dismissive avoidant discard is that they will begin to flaw find. Now, a lot of when they discard somebody and they move on very suddenly in a relationship and not necessarily jump into a new relationship and rebound, but just like drop the relationship seem to go on with their life a lot of times, especially after long term relationships, things are not always as they seem. But prior to this event taking shape, what you'll often see is that the dismissive avoidant. When they feel too vulnerable, when they feel like there's too much pressure for commitment, when they are feeling like there's too much that needs to be going on in the relationship and they're just starting to doubt their ability to be in a relationship, they start looking for flaws in the relationship. They start having more deactivating strategies than usual. As you start to see these things, it's because at their core, they are scared. Okay, at their core, unfortunately, if you did not get a lot of healthy modeling for emotional vulnerability, it feels confronting. And it's not like they're sitting there shaking in fear, but it's like they really feel this ongoing sense of discomfort that then creates a sense of anxiety. And that anxiety may express itself as more irritability than outward. Like, oh, my gosh, I feel anxious, I feel scared. But they're feeling the sense of, I don't know if this is right for me. I don't know if I'm making the right decision. I don't know if I can do this. Am I even built for relationships? And they have this perpetual anxiety that precedes any kind of discard that tends to happen. And this is where you see that anxiety sponsor a behavior called flaw finding. And essentially what happens is when a dismissive avoidant feels too close to somebody and too vulnerable or like there's too much pressure, they start trying to look for all the reasons that that person is not the right fit for them. And it's unfortunate because it's not really the most fair thing to the person on the receiving end of it. It doesn't feel good to know that somebody's flaw finding, but it's less about you and like, these are your actual flaws and more about them making mountains out of molehills as a way to convince themselves that they'd be okay without you. And so what this then lead point number two is these devaluing behaviors. So you might see subtle criticism. Well, they're usually not very critical individuals of other people through words. They might start poking with these little bits of criticism. They may start showing up in ways where they tell you all the reasons why, hey, the relationship won't work anyways. Or make comments about how you're so different from them, or, you know, make comments about, oh, you always ask for too much. And you'll see these sort of behaviors that tend to push you away. And you can tell that, like, in their inner workings of their mind, they're going through these things, thoughts first, that is then leading to Them to externalize what they're saying. Right. They're clearly citing flaws, showing or trying to communicate flaws that they think you have. And these won't be huge things, but they will be subtle and they will be kind of consistent. You might see this happen a little bit more than usual. And again, I want to talk about what to do to approach these things, how to heal, how to make sure you set boundaries so that these things are not happening, how to know if you should even be staying in this relationship dynamic. Because a lot of these things, they're not great to be on the receiving end of. They're quite unhealthy. And so we have to have a conversation a little bit as to whether or not these are even appropriate behaviors to have in a relationship and to stick in over time. It is the holiday season and for a lot of people this is a really beautiful time that you get to share with family. But for a lot of people it's actually a difficult time who don't feel like they are in a great place in their family relationships. Perhaps you're heading to a family Christmas dinner or holiday celebration and you feel on edge or worried or resentful or feel like there's so much that has been left unsaid and maybe you're even somebody who is no contact with family right now because of difficult situations that have not been resolved. This is why I want to share with you literally as a gift, fully for free, that you get to keep for life our healing family dynamics course. It goes into the deep layers of your family dynamics and relationships and helps you heal, move through them, understand the pain points and challenges and how to actually create resolution and how to know whether or not no contact is maybe a better long term solution for you. You can get this fully for free for life when you check out seven Day Free trial. I will put the link down below and I really hope this is extremely helpful for you for this holiday season. Here's a really interesting thing and I would say this is the third out of four things. We'll get to the fourth at the end that tends to sort of show that they may be on their way to discarding and it's that they start to replace the intimacy in your relationship with some sort of creature comfort. So it's a known fact that dismissive avoidance, they don't often sue through people, they sue through things. So you may see a dismissive avoidant spend all this time cleaning their car or tinkering with their belongings or things that they have this sort of Unique interest to or throwing themselves into work. These are things that they tend to derive this sense of soothing and identity from, Whereas that's not something that they've been conditioned to feel comfortable doing in a romantic relationship or where there's too much vulnerability. So you might see all of a sudden, right before there's a discard, we see these other behaviors. First, the flaw finding, the, the, you know, sort of devaluing behaviors, this slightly pulling away in regards to intimacy and curio about you. But then really, this third piece here is that you'll start to see a big uptick where they're clearly starting to try to focus their attention and energy on things other than the relationship more than usual. This could even be hobbies, work. It could even be like making a new friend or another person. And so you'll start to see these may be warning signs that a discard may be approaching. Okay, so we're going to talk about the fourth one at the end, but I want to share with you first just a little bit of neuroscience of what's actually how this is impacting not just a dismissive avoidant, but, you know, what are the roots of these things for dismissive avoidance that lead to these types of dynamics. So there was a really powerful and interesting study done at the University of Virginia in 2006 by somebody named James cone. And he did these hand holding experiments, and he showed that emotional closeness reduces stress responses in the brain. Okay, so when we have this hand holding, what they actually found in the experiments is that people experience a drop in cortisol when their hands were being held where there was this degree of emotional closeness, particularly with people that they tended to to trust, but when dismissive avoidance are constantly cutting off emotional closeness, deactivating, diminishing, this, not only does this not allow for us to feel soothed in a relationship with somebody else, but it can actually have an exact opposing response to stress. When people see that, there's an actual attempt to disconnect. So let's imagine you're holding hands with somebody, and somebody, somebody suddenly pulls their hand away. Or when there are other devaluing behaviors that mimic this, this actually creates elevated cortisol in the brain. So this has an effect one way or the other. And we're always sort of moving towards one direction or another with a partner in a relationship. And this explains why, if you are the person on the receiving end of these things, these behaviors prior to this potential discard, why it can feel so dysregulating, and why you may feel really Unsafe if this starts to take place. Now, there's another study done in 2017 all about oxytocin research. And if you weren't familiar, oxytocin is the bonding neurochemical in relationships. And a woman by the name of Ruth Feldman actually showed that bonding behaviors like eye contact and affection regulate attachment. Whereas when an avoidant pulls away, this will dysregulate the connection between two people because oxytocin is dropping. And this actually creates relational distress. In fact, the absence of oxytocin reinforcement is something that leaves partners feeling abandoned. So this is what people actually experience at the brain level psychologically. This is actually happening neurochemically to you. Okay. So, you know, I just want to use that information and research to honestly validate, you know, if you're somebody who's struggling through this right now or you're seeing some of these behaviors, it's okay to feel really uncomfortable right now. It's okay to feel a little bit scared or stressed or not really know what's going on. And this is where we have to have a conversation about what you can do here for a second. So I just want to talk for a moment about what you can do. How can you can show up to approach this scenario so that you're, you know, guarding your heart, that you're taking yourself into consideration in this process. And then we'll talk a little bit about that last major sign that tends to be the biggest. Here's the first thing. This video and the intent of this video is that you can notice these signs early without blaming yourself, without being in a place where you then judge yourself through their eyes. And I think this is really important to talk about because if you're fearful, avoidant, if you're anxiously attached, there's a chance when you see these behaviors, you start making this mean things about you. You're like, oh, I'm not good enough. I'm not doing a good enough job. If I was just more abc, I would be liked more, I would be respected more. They would want to spend time with me if I was more like this or that. And it's so easy to fall into this trap. And it, trust me, it is an absolute trap. I've seen so many people go through this over the years and all it does is there's this very subtle form of self blame when you make somebody else's behavior mean something about you, your character, who you are as a person. And as soon as you get into that self blaming cycle, not only do you reinforce your own Core wounds. Not only do you constantly fire and wire these neural pathways with these old narratives that you probably adopted from your own attachment wounds in childhood, things like I'm not good enough or I'll always be abandoned or I'm unlovable or this person's gonna betray me. You probably pick those up in the past in painful ways and now you're reiterating these things to yourself. And it's very painful and it's not going to help you. So I want you to be able to practice a very simple, easy neuro linguistic programming technique. If you do see this, which is to interrupt, it's called a pattern interrupt. It's when you catch yourself going down the rabbit hole, I want you to say cancel, cancel. If you're like, oh, it's because I'm not good enough, I'm not doing enough, cancel, cancel. And I want you to reframe to reality, okay? And this is the cognitive reframe. So what we're going to do here, this is the cognitive behavioral therapy technique, is I want you to be able to actually look at the situation more objectively. Is this really about me being unlovable or is this person maybe not available to me right now? So I want you to practice being to reframe here and that will be very helpful for you. Okay? Now a third really powerful tool or technique here is for you to set clear boundaries. And some of you are going to hear this and be scared. You're going to be like, I think they're already discarding me. Or you know, these behaviors are indicating that if I set a boundary, it might be the final straw where they do discard me. I want you to know that if you don't communicate your boundaries, you're on one of two paths. Path number one, by you, people pleasing and self silencing, they're just going to end up going down the same path and there will be a discard eventually. If you're seeing some of these preceding behaviors or path number two, you can actually communicate about it. And if the person is interested enough to do the work to show up differently, then you'll actually hear them. They may not be perfect in how they approach things, but if you say, hey look, I notice that we're disconnecting, I feel like things are not great between us right now or things are sort of going down a path I'm not feeling great about and I'm really needing abc and I want you to say specifically what you need. So this could be a little more consistency and that Looks like us having a fun date night this weekend or a little more time together. It looks like a fun date night this weekend. You know, us checking in before bed briefly over text. I want you to have like one really one or two really specific things that you can say and you have to make sure you paint a picture for what this looks like because if you're too general and ambiguous, it won't often register fully with a dismissive avoidant. If you say I want to spend more time together, they might think, okay, yeah, we'll chat on the phone for a 15, 15 minutes tonight. And then they think they spent more time together. So you have to be really clear and specific and you put yourself in a win win scenario this way because either the person shows up in response and I will say dismissive avoidance who are willing to do the work can show up and be phenomenal partners. But dismissive avoidants who don't, who aren't in that place, who aren't ready to show up and do the work, it is very hard to be on the receiving end of that in a relationship. You need to find out what's going on. If it feels like there's these sort of discarding dynamics that may be showing up and I need to put an end to it right now. I need to be able to, you know, honor myself, not blame myself. I need to be able to have a conversation to get to the bottom of it so I'm not wasting my time in this gray area of not knowing and so I can get to the bottom of and vet as to whether or not this person's capable of showing up in a healthy relationship. And the more you're able to find that out, the more you're looking out for yourself, the more you've got your own back in this process. Okay. And this reminds me of in Proverbs 23, it says Guard your heart above all else. And I don't is coming from a place of, oh, be on guard and be defensive and be scared. But it's. You have to take yourself into consideration in relationships. You are the only person at the end of the day that is going to be able to truly guard your heart, show up for yourself, have your own back. And when you do that, you then give these signals and permission for other people to see what you're needing and what's important to you. And then they can show up for you and do the same. But statistically, historically, we see the same things time and time again when people are not able to show up for Themselves. It gives these signals to people in relationships around them that say, oh, well, you don't really have boundaries, you don't really have needs. So it's just about me in this relationship. And we actually teach people to treat us that way. Especially because 93% of communication is non verbal. So if you're not having those boundaries, then you're giving that signal even more. There's another quote that I think is really meaningful here from the Buddha. He says, you only lose what you cling to. And I think there's this really important dynamic here of if you're clinging so hard to an outcome, you are putting your focus and energy and int in the wrong places. Where we want to be clinging to are the places that we have control. We have control over the conversations we have, the ways we show up, how we set our boundaries, how we communicate our needs. We don't have control over how people respond to that. But if we try to cling to how somebody could respond and try to control and manage that in advance, we do a massive disservice to ourselves in the process. And it doesn't help move the relationship along. In fact, it is more likely that you're going to see the outcomes that you're not looking for. The last major sign, and I would say this is probably the biggest sign that a dismissive avoidant may be on the discard, you know, train, sort of like about to discard or pull away, is when you see that their communication really dries up. So if you're seeing that you used to communicate every day, even if it was just like a couple texts a day, and all of a sudden there's a couple days in a row regularly that you're not speaking to them or hearing from them when there's a big shift in communication. Unfortunately, a lot of times dismissive avoidants don't know how to have the conversation themselves, that they don't see themselves still participating in something or they're not sure if this is a good fit for them, so they will retreat hoping that you'll have that conversation or spark off that conversation for them to be able to have. And so when there's a big shift in communication there, that could be one of the most major signs. So my hope for you is that by listening to this video, you stop the self blaming. You honor your truth, you honor your boundaries, you know how to approach these things going forward and have these healthy conversations. And in doing so you are able to move the needle in this situation, to really heal, to grow and to make sure that you're taking some of these skills and tools into potentially future relationships, should this one not be the right one for you. That's it for today. Thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please, like, share. Subscribe subscribe to this channel. I'd love to have you here as a part of our community, and I will see you next time.