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The Thais Gibson Podcast
The Hot & Cold Fearful Avoidant Cycle Explained & the Secret to Healthily Bond
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So when you feel like somebody's pursuing you in a relationship, you might like it at first, only to eventually feel like it's overwhelming and find yourself needing to retreat. But on the other hand, you may find that if somebody's distant, you suddenly get triggered into this anxiety loop wanting to pursue them or chase them. And this feels very confusing. Not only is it confusing to you if you are a fearful avoidant attachment style, which we're going to unpack, but it is also confusing to somebody on the receiving end. They can't tell if you're coming or going, and you're probably constantly giving mixed signals. So in today's video, we are going to break down the hot and cold patterns of a fearful avoidance. So they're finally explained in so much detail. And we're also going to talk a little bit about what to do if you are a fearful avoidant or if you're on the receiving end of this. Well, this is a really common experience for the fearful avoidant or disorganized attachment style for the same thing, but just often referred to as either fearful avoidant, disorganized attachment, and even sometimes anxious avoidant attachment. Now, the fearful avoidant attachment style individual is somebody who really experiences the polarities of the attachment spectrum. So they can feel really anxious in relationships, and they can feel like they are afraid of being abandoned, scared to be left alone or disconnected from somebody. They can fear rejection in relationships, but they also have a really strong avoidance side. So they can fear being trapped, they can fear feeling helpless or powerless. And they often feel this unstable sense of kind of unsafety in relationships as a general rule, because relationships make them feel a lot of all of these different emotions and triggers and wounds, all within a relatively short period of time. One of the most challenging aspects at least, is that the fearful avoidant tends to really struggle to feel like they can actually trust and actually settle into a relationship and believe in the future of a relationship as well. Imagine that you are somebody, okay? And some of these things may resonate with you. That fear is having people too close to you, because then you feel trapped and need to push people away and are not sure if you can really trust them when they get really close and generally don't feel super safe in relationships as a result. But then let's say that when people get too far away, you find yourself feeling really anxious and sometimes needy and clingy and wondering what they're doing and having this uncomfortable kind of panic in your body as a result of that. You can't really Settle in. It feels really difficult to just be yourself, be open, share what your needs are, open up, communicate, have boundaries. Like, you just feel like that's not really in your realm of relating to people. What happens when you start feeling a lot of romantic feelings for somebody, when all those feelings come on online? How do you start dealing with those feelings? Because you're afraid of people getting too close, but you're also afraid of them being too far away? Well, generally, what happens with the fearful avoidant attachment style is because of some of the core wounds I mentioned. According to integrated attachment theory, Essentially what you'll see is that because of these different pain points and challenges, a fearful avoidant will feel triggered often in a relationship, and then feel the need to really push somebody away. And this hurts because the fearful avoidant, when they're really triggered, may not mean to push somebody away. Like, they may not actually want the ending of a relationship. But fearful avoidance often push people away as a subconscious strategy to push away the negative feelings that they are associating with people which at their root are actually about unresolved trauma from their past experiences. So what do I mean by this? If you grew up in a household that was chaotic, that didn't have a lot of trust, where your caregivers weren't consistent, maybe there was enmeshment or codependency or just a lot of turmoil and chaos as a whole, maybe a lot of fighting or arguments or, you know, different family challenging dynamics that were quite repeated. What happens is when people get too close to you, it feels overwhelming because it triggers all of those different core wounds. A lot of those core wounds that you have are actually from past experiences, but when they get triggered in real time, you think they're happening specifically because of the person in front of you. So let's say somebody wants to spend more time with you and you're feeling like that avoidant side needs space. If somebody wants to spend more time with you and they're asking to take you out on a date or get together more often, the fearful avoidant mind often goes directly to this idea that, oh, my gosh, I'm being trapped. This person's trying to trap me. Rather than thinking about, hey, this is moving too quickly and I need to communicate or I need to set a boundary. And the reason that the fearful avoidant mind doesn't go into problem solving, but instead to push somebody away really quick is because when they first encountered these problems in their childhood, they didn't get the opportunity to learn how to negotiate or say, Needs or set boundaries with people that wasn't on the table then. So the subconscious mind, that's the reference point for these things. It's like, okay, well it wasn't on the table then, so this isn't in the realm of possibility now. And so it's easy to feel really imprisoned by experiences that you don't like. And then it feels like the only way to get out of that imprisoned feeling is to run away from the situation in front of you, to have this really strong flight response that gets triggered. And a flight response is essentially just a trauma response at its core. And what you would be looking to have from a healthy perspective instead would be to identify what feels uncomfortable for you to convert that into words. Using emotional literacy, like to be able to say, oh, I feel a little bit stressed right now. I feel a little bit overwhelmed by this person. Okay, well what do I need? I need things to move more slowly. I need this person to respect that I've got a lot of things going on in my life and I have certain boundaries and to then express those needs that person to see if that is a solvable problem. But when you don't have emotional literacy model to you growing up, when you don't know what your needs are, when you don't know that feelings are feedback and they're actually there to guide you to those answers, not to just make you feel bad for no reason, when all of those things are out of your reach and out of the realm of possibility for you and your awareness, it just feels so overwhelming. And then as a subconscious strategy, like I said, to push that negative feeling away, you push the person away. Are you feeling like there's a lack of resolution between yourself and other family members in your life? Well, if so, I have a free gift for you. It is our healing family dynamics course and you get to literally keep it for free for life. It helps you understand your wounds and triggers in family dynamics. It helps you learn how to communicate and actually create resolution solution. And it also helps you assess whether or not you might need stronger boundaries with a certain family member if they're not healthy for you. And this is ultimately you can have completely for free and you get to keep as a gift for life. It's my holiday season gift to you and you get to keep it. When you check out our seven day free trial to the personal development school, I hope you enjoy and I hope this really helps you find the resolution, the comfort and just the certainty around these things that you might have been looking for for a Long time. And the link to check it out for a limited time is down below. This is where we get into these fearful avoidant makeup and breakup cycles where the fearful avoidant pushes somebody away so strongly because they're triggered in that moment, and they can't see outside of their subconscious comfort zone of what they're used to. So they think the only way to get away from this situation is to push the person away and to end the relationship and threaten to break up from the relationship if they feel like they can't trust somebody or it's moving too fast, or they're afraid of losing the relationship to themselves, or they feel like they're sick of not having boundaries. But instead of thinking, oh, so I should start setting boundaries and communicating, because that wasn't historically an available solution. The subconscious mind doesn't see that that's available to you now. It's like an unknown. Unknown. Right. You can't even know that. You don't know it, because generally, we don't really have a whole lot of access to this type of information until at least more recently. So what happens is fearful ones often go from this perspective of, like, I have to push this person away to feel safe again, to feel like I can have this relationship to myself back, to feel like I can get my needs met. And then when they're out of that triggered situation and they've emotionally regulated again, like, after that experience happened, after they threatened to break up with somebody or leave the relationship or said that it's over sometimes, then what will happen is they'll realize, like, wait, I didn't mean that. That was just me feeling really emotional and really triggered, and that wasn't actually what I want. And it's almost like the part of themselves when they're really triggered and the part of themselves when they're not triggered are like, almost two different aspects of self. And in a sense, they are. It's like the wound itself versus the conscious self. And when those wounds are alive and we don't know how to unpack them in healthier ways, we resort to these behaviors. But when we are, then we're no longer dysregulated. We're calm again. We can see what we actually want from the highest expression of ourselves, essentially. But it becomes really hard as a fearful avoidant to do something like that and then go back to somebody and say, hey, I messed up. I'm sorry. And sometimes fearful avoidance will do that. And then you'll have the makeup dynamic then. Unless those internal core wounds that I mentioned from an integrated attachment theory perspective, the trapped, helpless, powerless, unsafe, fear of being betrayed, abandoned, alone, rejected. Until those core wounds, that unworthiness that FA can carry as well. I am bad. Like, those are some of the big core wounds of FAs. And until those things are moved through, then often the fearful avoidant will keep going through this, like, breakup and then makeup cycle because they're pushing that person away again when those feelings are online. But the feelings have an internal source. They're not about that person. That person may be be a catalyst for that and maybe bring those feelings up in them or touching these wounds that are not healed, it's like ripping off a band aid for somebody or like salting a wound by accident. But ultimately, only the fearful avoidant is the one that can heal those wounds in relationship to themselves. And that comes through subconscious reprogramming techniques and tools and processing those old experiences. And as you learn to do that more effectively, then these wounds won't spark this behavior of needing to push somebody away. And then those wounds will also be something that you're free from so that you can feel settled into relationships, like, you can trust. This doesn't mean you don't address red flags or you aren't, like, cautious in terms of who you decide to be in a relationship with and mindful of things. But you won't be coming from this, like, constant place of fear and suspicion, which, quite honestly can just be exhausting to live in that dynamic all the time. So you'll see when fearful avoidants have the ability to really move through these wounds, they can become more free. They aren't breaking up and getting back together over and over again. And they won't get to this point where they're so triggered by something happening that they feel like, I have to push this person away just to get rid of this horrible feeling that I'm experiencing. Because instead, they'll have internal ways of regulating their emotions from the inside out. A lot of these makeup breakup dynamics are actually the result of unresolved trauma, unresolved wounds and things that really need to be addressed and healed at a much deeper subconscious level so that they don't get brought in to all of your future relationships in these ways that cause you to push away and then feel like, I regret my decision, then push away and regret your decision, because ultimately this wears away at the overall connection in a relationship, but the overall trust between you and the other person, because it's hard to be on the receiving end of that as well. Thank you for watching. Thank you for being here. Please, like, share and subscribe if you haven't already and I will see you in the next video.