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How does a dismissive avoidant respond when you are the one that stops talking to them? Of course, we know dismissive avoidance often pull away, they self protect, they stonewall or shut down. But what about when they are on the receiving end of that behavior themselves? In today's video, we're going to break that down. And some of these things might really surprise you. Now if you're not already familiar. The avoidant attachment style is referring to the dismissive avoidant attachment style. There are four major attachment styles. Every single person has an attachment style. There's a secure attachment style who tends to do very well in their relationship dynamics. They tend to have a sense of security stability in relationships. Then there are three insecure attachment styles. Our anxious, preoccupied, who can be the one who's the most afraid of abandonment and can sometimes experience fears and a little bit of clinging in relationships. Then there's the dismissive avoidant, which is who we're referring to in this video, who fears commitment the most, tends to go through some emotional neglect in childhood and thus doesn't really want to be vulnerable as an adult or bond deeply with other people. It scares them because of their subconscious stored emotional associations from being a child. And then we have the fearful avoidant, who's the hot and cold attachment style. They can kind of go either way. They fear abandonment, but they also fear this sense of being too close. And so they may sort of have this pattern of going, come get close to me. And then you get close and they're like, no, stay back. So those are the four major attachment cells. The dismissive avoidant is who we're talking about here today. So first and foremost, there tend to sort of be these major stages of dismissive avoidant goes through when there is this disconnect. One of the first stages is originally we'll see dismissive avoidance. Feel some degree of relief when they have space, especially if there has been a sort of history of conflict or different challenges in the relationship dynamic. Because dismissive avoidants really don't like conflict overall. And it really triggers them to feel quite emotionally unsafe. In fact, dismissible avoidance. Sometimes even avoid pairing up in relationships and deeply connecting with people. Because at a deeper level, it's actually a subconscious strategy to avoid the conflict that could come with that sort of relationship relationship dynamic. That's how much they really dislike conflict. Now conflict will also wear on a dismissive avoidant differently than it will other attachment styles, largely because other attachment styles tend to get their needs met more from an interpersonal relationship dynamic. In other words, an anxious, preoccupied gets a lot of their needs met from other people. So it's almost like they have more money in their bank account. If you imagine that APS in their relationship, it actually sort of gives them $5,000 of deposits each week into their bank account. Whereas fearful avoidance, maybe it's closer to three dismissive avoidance, maybe it's closer to 500. When there's a conflict, you have to imagine that conflict has a cost to your relationship, in other words, a cost to your bank account. So conflict may cost everybody a thousand dollars, but, you know, if we see that from the $5,000 of the AP, they're still at 4,000 in the positive, right? Whereas fearful avoidance might be closer to 2000. Dismissible avoidance might be, you know, overdrafting their bank account at that point. And it's also important to recognize that actually dismiss avoidance, it costs them more than it costs the other attachment styles. Not just because of having that less emotional bandwidth or needs met from a relationship, but also because of the way they deal with conflict. They tend to really internalize it, and they actually take it to heart much more than you might even think. One of the first things that happens in this first sort of stage, it's dismissive avoidance may actually feel a sense of relief when there's space, because it's relief not from the person. It doesn't mean they don't care about the person that they're in a relationship with, but relief from their fears and dynamics around conflict that they really dislike. The second stage is we'll see this sort of increased sense of independence from the dismissive avoidant, where they will do more things on their own. They will tend to thrive in their independence. They feel, when they are independent, like they have this sort of sense of safety and certainty and control. Because dismissive avoidants have said this to me so many times over the years. They say things like, well, I can control how I show up, but I have no idea how other people are going to show up. And what I hear under that is this just sense of powerlessness or feeling out of control or helpless in their relationship dynamic. And you have to imagine, if you grew up with a very limited emotional modeling for what a relationship actually looks like and this exchange of energy looks like between two people. If you grew up to be demonstrated that everybody's kind of out for themselves, and if there's some degree of neglect in your relationship dynamics, this whole idea of, like, exchanging needs, exchanging emotions and sharing about things, and connecting and attaching sometimes that kind of feels like A foreign language to dismissive avoidance. So they'll usually feel like, okay, I have my control back in the second stage. And they may go into this increased sense of independence, do a much deeper dive into just meeting their own needs as a whole. Then we will start to see this third stage which sort of becomes the mixed feeling stage, this sort of questioning about things. And this mixed feeling stage is when some of their emotions come up of actually missing the person that they're in a relationship with. Because once they aren't afraid of losing money and being, you know, this cost coming to their bank account from maybe some of the conflict that's happening. Once there's been space, they, you know, have this sort of emotional bandwidth and they miss what they were getting from relationship dynamics. You know, even though dismissive avoidance can absolutely have these big blocks to receiving from other people, or they may block themselves from, you know, wanting to open up or vulnerably share what they really need, or they may block themselves from wanting to rely on other people too much. What we'll generally see is from this, once they are, you know, getting that sort of space, it doesn't mean they aren't getting some needs met, even though they have those receiving blocks. And so they take tend to have these mixed feelings of like, geez, I kind of miss that person. They start to sort of backtrack second guess things a little bit and it can start to wear on them a little bit. I just wanted to pop in here and let you know we are doing a seven day free trial to the All Access membership pass at pds, which means you get access to literally everything inside of the school. And this includes the four live webinars I do with our students every single week. And on top of that you get access to all of our different courses. We have over 55 different courses on relationships, communication, boundaries, about emotional mastery, guilt and shame, learning your needs. So many different facets that are really important to master our lives and feel really good about our lives going forward. And last but not least, there's a daily community event. We have trained facilitators and coaches who are in there doing that work, showing up to support you on your journey every single day. Please join me on the other side. Come check it out, see if it's a fit for you. I'd love to see you there. Go ahead and sign up by clicking the link in the description box below. The fourth stage that we'll see here is this feeling of questioning things. We can call it questioning or regretting. Okay, it's not just this, like, mixed feeling. It's actually the questioning and regretting. But it gets paired with. This is the most important part of this stage is it gets paired with repression. So it's almost like if you could graph out what the day is feeling, they feel this like, increased independence and then they start to feel this relief, you know, that's there from the first little bit or the relief and then increase independence. And then they start to question things and they start to feel like, oh my goodness. And then they even regret. And then as soon as they regret, they go back into repressing to create that sense of space and safety for themselves again. And then our fifth major stage here is we actually can have attempts at reconnection. So there may be a point where a DA starts to make these attempts at reconnection. I think it's really important to recognize that attempts for reconnection will not necessarily be super overt. You may not see these really obvious attempts where they say, I miss you, I want to reconnect. I'm so sorry. Let's start over. Usually you'll see things like they send these indirect ways of trying to connect. So send a meme, or they will send like a funny joke, or they will send like a, a very like high level text message to have sort of this discussion. Because some avoidance do not like to be vulnerable. It's almost like you can see they're trying to connect without trying to be vulnerable. So you'll see like exactly that. It's like this desire to connect, but it's sort of filtered through this fear of vulnerability. And so you'll see them doing these things in very indirect ways where they can avoid being vulnerable while they're yearning for this reconnection. Now I think it's really important at this stage to say, like, if this was, you know, they're trying to reconnect, you had an argument, you had space from, from each other for a couple of days versus there was a breakup. This person's now trying to like, indirectly reconnect, maybe thinking of getting back together. I do want to say on that note, right, not all DAs will want to reconnect after a breakup. That will depend very much on like the dynamic that happens within a breakup, how long you were dating somebody, why you broke up. I mean, there's much more to that story. But this is more for like, if we've seen this sort of disconnect in a relationship, but the relationship's not over. And this is where we will tend to see dismissive avoidance, like kind of doing this in direct reaching out. It's really important to evaluate, like, you know, I don't want to go back into the same pattern right away. I would like to have a conversation about what we can do differently next time around, how we can improve the relationship and connection, how we can improve communication. So we don't just go back into the same relationship dynamic either after a breakup or after some space for a few days. And we just keep repeating patterns. So that has to be a discussion that should absolutely be something on the table if you actually want to see true progress and growth in the relationship. And the more that we're able to unpack these different patterns in a healthy way and work through them, the more of a chance over time your relationship is going to have its success. So it's a really important thing to address, really important thing to keep top of mind. You know, I think it's great to understand the different relationship dynamics, but we want to pair that understanding with also this ability to work through things, to break through things to the next level. Not just understanding, because sometimes we can understand things, take less, take them less personally. All of a sudden we give them more space to happen. We're like, oh, they just take space and that's how they are and that's fine. But what if it's not actually okay for you? What if you don't really feel great about that? So we want to be able to like really assess those things from a different perspective and be able to grow the relationship from there. That's it for today. Let me know with a thumbs up button. If you want to see more content about avoidance more than other content on this channel, I will definitely put it in here. And thank you so much for walking, for watching and for stopping by. 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