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Dismissive avoidance often return after leaving. But there is absolutely a breaking point that comes where they are gone for good. And in today's video, I'm going to help you break down and understand exactly where that point is, why this happens, and even the neuroscience of what it means to stay in a relationship like this, how it impacts you to constantly be walking on eggshells, and how to know when it's time to truly walk away yourself so that you are not feeling like your life is on hold. Because I think one of the most painful things for people to do is continuously operate in what I call the gray area in our relationship where you are just doing whatever you can to see if everything's okay to make sure that you don't lose the person, and yet there isn't actually any progress happening in the relationship itself. Here's the first major thing and I'll give you some background first before we get into like the nitty gritty of stuff. Number one, when the dismissive avoidant is in a relationship and that feeling of emotional disconnection becomes so reinforced, they no longer feel this longing to connect. And here's the tricky part. Their disconnection cycle, where they feel this need to push away and literally not come back, isn't always coming from the person that they're in a relationship with. In fact, it doesn't have so much to do for a dismissive avoidant with compatibility all the time. A lot of dismissive avoidants don't know how to resolve conflict, don't know how to talk out different issues or differences in a relationship. And compatibility in a relationship is not about similarities and differences. Compatibility in a relationship is one's ability to navigate differences with another person. For example, you'll often see healthy long term relationships where partners are like night and day different. You've probably often heard the term opposites attract. And we can have dynamics where people are completely different in their relationships, have different hobbies, have different ways of spending their time, have different opinions and beliefs about about things. And of course there are core values and morals and things like that that should definitely be in alignment. But when people have different interests in a relationship, different love languages, that's not a deal breaker at all, not even in the slightest. But what becomes a deal breaker is if you don't know how to navigate those things. So if you have a different love language than somebody else, and you're not willing to try to love in their love language sometimes, or make space to understand them and vice versa, that's where we get the deal breakers. And for a lot of dismissive avoidance, they're simply disempowered to be able to overcome these things because they've never been taught this. They didn't have a lot of modeling growing up for parents who communicated through differences, resolved conflicts in healthy ways, hashed things things out if there was a challenge or problem, talked about needs and interchange them, communicated about things like love languages. These were not topics of conversation in dismissive avoidance households growing up. So what happens here is when they feel like there's this disconnect, they'll often start flaw finding and feeling frustrated, but they don't know how to overcome and solve for this. And if this goes on for a long enough time, where they're stuck in that feeling of helplessness, they'll often leave relationships. And again, it's not necessarily because of the other person not being good enough or not being wonderful or amazing. You know, a lot of people who are in a relationship with a dismissive avoidant and they're trying so hard, they come to draw those conclusions, they'll be like, oh my gosh, if I was just a little bit more abc, if I tried a little harder, if I people pleased them more, finally things could work out. But the vast majority of time it has honestly nothing to do with that at all. So I just think it's a really important thing to note. Number two, if dismissive avoidance feel criticized in a relationship, a lot, they'll pull away. And a lot of times they're very sensitive to criticism. So things that are even just feedback or normal conversations that have to be had in a relationship, like, hey, you know, I'd appreciate if you could just try to make it on time to things that we commit to. Timeliness is really important to me. Like you might have an anxious attachment style who has a desire like that or wants to just communicate that that's important to their partner. But a lot of times dismissive avoidance kind of take this to like, oh, you're shaming me at my core. You think that I'm not good enough. You think that I'm not, you know, normal here, that I can't, I'm not capable of doing healthy relationships. They kind of jump to those conclusions because of their past wounding. And again, it causes them to want to pull away, pull away. But the point of no return happens when they feel like they have held in their needs for long enough, not communicated what they're feeling in a relationship. And over time they keep putting up invisible walls between themselves and somebody else and essentially you will know a dismissive avoidant has reached this point of no return when they are so shut down that you can't even like approach normal conversations with them at all. If, if every conversation they call a fight or they're like, I don't want to fight with you when you're just trying to have a normal conversation. Or they're not even like sharing anything about their inner world any longer or opening up or trying to put eff. Planning anything, things like this, that's where you're seeing that, okay, like this person is reaching this point of no return. And I just, I want to stress here that a lot of times it's not about the other person. It's not about the person who's like, oh no, I'm grasping here to try to make things work. A lot of times it's simply that the dismissive avoidant has a lot of internal hurt that they're carrying. They suppress it and they often don't try to move through it or communicate about it because they don't know how. And so as there aren't these breakthroughs and as there's these challenges that, I mean, challenges are going to happen in relationships from time to time. It's normal. How we address them is what makes the difference between healthy and unhealthy. But if somebody doesn't know how to address them, challenges just build up and they lead to resentments and frustrations. And dismissive avoidants just feel like they keep needing to take a step back to self rep, to self protect. Take a step back, take a step back, build a wall, Build a wall and eventually you just get into this point where like there's too many walls between yourself and this person. If you actually want a free course you can keep for life. We're doing a literal giveaway right now. You can check out our seven day free trial to all of the personal development school. And it comes with a free where you'll actually be able to leave and keep the needs course for free for life. And this course is something I'm trying to give away because I know that when people don't know their needs, they get stuck in the wrong relationships, the wrong situations. It's like if you don't know what your needs are, you don't know what to say no to and you don't know what to say yes to. And so you're just gonna end up in these entanglements all the time. And so learning your needs is a part of self soothing. It's a part of really Being clear about your standards, your boundaries, how to show up for yourself. So if you just want support in that, there's literally a free giveaway down below, you can click the link and you can join in there. So let's talk about the neuroscience part of this and we'll talk about what you can do, how you can address this in a moment as well. Philip Shaver's research shows that dismissive avoidance actually suppress attachment activation. So the need to attach to connect with others through cognitive deactivation. You've probably heard me talk about this on this channel countless times. Activation versus deactivation, the need to constantly try to get closer versus the need to self protect by minimizing your attachment needs. Okay. But over time, this becomes more ingrained. Okay. And I think this raises this really important point here, which is that when we have our patterns, when we have our wounds, our behaviors, when we have our ways that we're used to getting our needs met, it's not like we have these themes or habits in our lives and they're, they're, they just stay the same all the time. No, you have wounds or themes in your life and the more you do them, the more you're deepening those neural pathways over time. So for dismissive avoidant, if they constantly deactivate from somebody, they're going to keep deactivating more and more as a coping strategy. And you can imagine every time they deactivate, they're deepening this coping mechanism, this behavior of chronically deactivating. So they're increasing the chances that they're going to do it more because it's more habituated, it's more patterned or programmed or conditioned into the subconscious mind, all of which are the same thing. And over time, the more you build walls, the more you're going to need to build walls because the more somebody feels like a distant stranger to you, the less you're going to feel comfortable being vulnerable. And so it really creates of lot a suspicious cycle. And again, a lot of these challenges exist within the dismissive avoidant themselves. Having to be able to pause and do some work and learn how to be vulnerable. Learn, learn how to hash out conversations and conflict in healthy ways so they don't feel this need to over rely on deactivation. And even James Gross's emotional regulation studies reveal that habitual suppression of emotions rewires prefrontal amygdala pathways. So the dismissive avoidance overuse of emotional suppression just blocks emotional re engagement. So just both of these studies highlighting how much this is likely to continue on and grow in magnitude over time unless the dismissive avoidant learns to be vulnerable. Practices rewiring these neural pathways, practices taking a different approach, is able to self reflect and introspect and take some accountability in a healthy way for these things. So I want to take you through a bit of a healing exercise. If you are the loved one of a dismissive avoidant and you're kind of on the receiving end of this, if you feel like there's this point of no return for them. But before I do, I just want to let you know if you are the loved one and you're having a hard time leaving a relationship, I am all for giving people a chance when we see them doing the work. That's my life, right? I've worked with people and seen beautiful miraculous outcomes when people are willing to commit to the work and they show up and they heal and they change their patterns. Because we have neuroplasticity, we can actually rewire our attachment style. That's the main theme of this whole entire channel here. It's like we can change our attachment style for healing. You're not stuck this way. Neuroplasticity is a real thing, but the real game changer, the real difference maker. And every time I would see a client, every time people come into our programs at pds, the number one thing that I'm looking for is, is this person really willing to do the work? Because if the person is, miracles will happen, change will happen. And it's not that hard to actually change when we have the right tools that target the subconscious mind. But if somebody's not willing to do the work and you're the partner of that person and you love them and care about them, you can't love somebody more into doing the work. You can't. You pour more and give more and then. And then they'll do the work. Somebody is going to internally and intrinsically choose that or they aren't. And it honestly has nothing to do with their external circumstances or people in it. So I just want to really highlight that. And if somebody is willing to do the work, then you'll get a lot of healing. So three healing actions that you can take. Okay? Just high level actions you can take starting right now. Number one, if you see this hardening of a withdrawing, if you see that this person is withdrawing more and more over time and you're not seeing any momentum moving in the other direction, you really have to brace yourself to heal, to step out of that relationship. Because. Because if this withdrawal is Just hardening. And you're trying to change yourself and say different things and communicate differently, and you're trying all the things under the sun and nothing's working. It's probably. It probably has nothing to do with you. Okay. There's probably nothing you're gonna be able to do to change the dynamic. So I just think it's really important to highlight that. The second thing is, I want you to go in and be like, okay, what are the needs that I'm relying on this person for that I'm so scared of losing from them? Because a lot of times when we're so scared of losing people, it's often that we're also scared of losing the needs they bring into our life, even if those needs are in breadcrumbed way. So maybe this person makes you feel validated or wanted. Maybe they're only making you feel that way, like a three or four out of 10. But if you don't know how to validate yourself and you're sitting at a zero on your own out of 10, then you're going to seek for that three. We always seek breadcrumbs when we are first starving. Okay, you'll put up with breadcrumbs when you're starving. So I just think that's another really important piece to recognize that we often chase people because we're chasing the needs that they meet, because we have a sense of emptiness around our capacity to soothe and meet those needs within ourselves. And last but not least, it's really meaningful to ask yourself what wounds are also chaining me to this potentially not healthy situation. If you're sitting here going, I really want this to work out. I'm so scared of losing them. Well, why? What are you making that mean about you? What are you afraid will happen if you lose them? Are you just deep down? It's not even about this person being your person. It's actually about that you're just so scared of being on your own or being abandoned. Or is it that you're so scared of, like, oh, if they do leave and it doesn't work, then I'm not good enough, or, you know, that I'm a failure. Like, I want you to ask yourself, what am I actually so afraid of? And maybe the work to do is to heal that wound within yourself, rather than trying to avoid and escape that wound by controlling your external world and trying to people please somebody into not leaving you just so you can avoid your wound, even if you know that that person's not the right person for you okay, So I want you to sit and have a think about that because that is gonna be one of the most important references to get out of this cycle. If you feel like you are walking on eggshells all the time and you're stuck in it. And it reminds me of a quote by the Buddha says you can search through the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself. And that person is not going to be found anywhere. And you know, I think sometimes we have this idea of self love and it's not, you know, there's self narcissism, there's, there's like self love in a vanity type way, but then there's also just this ability to treat ourselves like human beings. And sometimes one of the byproducts of growing up with an insecure attachment style is you get so focused, especially if you're anxious or fearful, avoidant, and so fixated on people pleasing outside of you, of being, being, you know, what you think somebody wants from you that you forget that you're a human. And you don't treat yourself with compassion or self love because you're literally self silencing, self abandoning, self betraying your own morals, values, beliefs, standards, desires, just hoping to win somebody over outside of you. And that is a really painful way to live. And also that's not going to work. It's not going to bring you happiness or fulfillment in your life. Okay. And so just taking a look at that and I think a second that, you know, I love overlapping ancient wisdom with neuroscience and psychology. It's, you know, I hope it's okay that I share these things with you because I love to. And it reminds me of in John 8:32, where Jesus says, then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. And I think that there's a really important message to be had in this as it relates to this topic, that it can be scary to think, okay, this person's pulling away from me. Okay, this person isn't showing up for me. This is so painful and this need or desire to grasp at changing that outcome. But sometimes it's the truth that actually sets us free. Sometimes it's the recognition that, yeah, this person is pulling away. They're not the right person for me. They're not capable of showing up in the way that I need right now. We're just not a fit, and that's okay. And so, you know, being able to recognize that even though sometimes truth is painful at first, it's also very helpful and it's very healing in the long run and being able to not have to sit in a place where you're fearing it can be a next step towards rapid transformation in your own life and being able to welcome in new relationships, new dynamics that may be a better fit for you long term. So that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please like, share and subscribe. Especially if you're somebody who likes neuroscience and psychology and ancient wisdom and where these things all overlap. And I will see you in tomorrow's video.