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Fearful avoidants are often very loyal, loving, caring partners in relationships, or at least they start out that way. But fearful avoidance are also renowned for falling out of love whilst in a relationship with somebody and taking a while to leave, but only leaving when they feel like they've processed the breakup and relationship ending ahead of time. There are some dead giveaways, particularly four major signs that a fearful avoidant is falling out of love. Things like when a fearful avoidant stops arguing and doesn't even engage in conflict. They basically decided that the relationship is no longer worth the energy of conflict any longer. And we're going to break down some of these major signs today, how to recognize them and what they mean for you. But most importantly, if you are a fearful avoidant. Listening to this, we'll talk about why this is happening at a subconscious level and then what you can do to start growing and healing. If you're new to this channel, hello and welcome. My name is Thais Gibson. I'm the founder of Gibson Integrated Attachment Theory, the proven method to help you rewire your attachment style to become securely attached match in the shortest period of time possible. And I put daily videos on this channel to help support you in your understanding, your awareness and your rewiring. Let's talk about this. I want to start with the first major sign because this is a big one. When a fearful avoidant no longer engages in conflict or at least they dramatically decrease their degree of engaging in conflict, this is a big sign that they're actually feeling like you're not really worth the energy of a conflict any longer. And fearful avoidance are very all or nothing people. So when they don't feel like you're worth the energy of a conflict, you can pretty much guarantee that they're moving towards that nothing side rather than being all in. It's part of, and I'm not justifying or saying this is healthy, but it's part of why you see fearful avoidance fight so strongly in relationships. Because when they're all in and they're so emotionally tied to the relationship, they get very activated and triggered both in a good way. When they feel connected, they feel a lot of strong positive emotions towards somebody, but also in a bad way. When they feel like they're in a conflict or they feel like one of their wounds are triggered by somebody they love, they become a little bit feisty. Sometimes when the fearful avoidance disengaging, they're truly starting to think about being on their way out of a relationship. Unless of course you see them healing and doing the work but what that looks like for a fearful avoidant is rather than disengaging and not bothering to try to work things out, instead you'll see that a fearful avoidant shows up to communicate in much healthier ways. And this is actually a sign of growth and healing in a relationship, not its opposite, not disengagement. Okay, so that's point number one. But I just want to give you an example so that you can really understand this before we move to the next point. If you're used to arguing with a fearful avoidant, and let's say you've been in a relationship for a couple of years and now they're just not really arguing with you, or they're kind of ending arguments or pulling away or icing out, that's a sign they're disengage engaging. If somebody is instead healing this so that they're not as argumentative or feisty in a relationship, what it should look like is that when something hurts them, they go to you. They're practicing vulnerability, they're actively communicating, hey, this situation, it affected me, I didn't like it. Here's what I need instead. Can we work towards this? Like they're actively addressing and working through conflict? And that is the fearful avoidance opposite of fighting. Okay, Fighting and disengaging are different ballparks of situations. Okay, Fighting and then disengaging doesn't mean you're healing. Fighting and then talking through things in a healthy way is healing. Okay? So I think that's a really important first thing to understand, but it's also extraordinarily important to look at in a very deep and meaningful way. How to work through conflict. Okay, how to actually navigate conflict. And I have a couple of videos on this channel, but I'll make a follow up one just for fearful avoidance specifically. Let me know in the comments if you want that. Because learning to do that, learning to navigate conflicts with proper frameworks is absolutely massive. And I promise you we can do it in the most challenging of cases when we have the right conflict framework to use. Number two is if you find yourself constantly fantasizing about other people outside of your relationship and fantasizing about a reset instead of a repair. Okay, so what this would look like, and this is one of the things that happens for fearful avoidance. Here's the reason why. A lot of times fearful avoidance, they over give in relationships and they care so much and they show up so much for other people, but they're great at drawing vulnerability out of others. They're not great at Being vulnerable to other people themselves. And I say this all the time, and this nuance matters so much. Fearful avoidance are good at being vulnerable about things they don't actually feel vulnerable about. So for example, if something in your childhood made you feel vulnerable and you resolved it, now you'll be able to talk about it as an adult. And it's not a huge slice of you being vulnerable or it doesn't really eat away at that vulnerable part of you. However, if you're currently going through something right now that you feel a little bit insecure about, you're probably not really sharing that with anybody. So what happens is, because you're not really opening up about the meaningful things that are affecting you right now, and you're probably not really great at asking for love and support from people when you're going through those things, what ends up taking place is, is you over give in relationships and then you block yourself from receiving from other people. And what this turns into over time is you feeling like, hey, why isn't anybody showing up for me? Why are my needs not being met the way that I'm trying to meet other people's needs? And across time, what ends up actually happening as a result of all of this is you feel like your needs are not intimately and deeply met by a partner. And so you start to feel like, okay, maybe this person would meet my needs. Maybe. And I'll give you some specific examples I've seen many times. Fearful avoidance really infatuate with and develop crushes or feelings outside of their relationship with people who make them feel seen or heard or understood. When they're not sharing vulnerable things with their partner in a relationship, or if they feel like somebody compliments them and builds them up and they don't feel like they get a lot of that from their partner, like they'll end up finding people in their life who do those things and then fantasizing about those people and then fantasizing about potentially leaving their relationship and spending time in their mind wondering what that would look like or feel like, and they start thinking things like, maybe, maybe I just need somebody different. And this is something I would work with couples on all the time in relationships is when that's happening. And I cannot stress this enough, that is a sign that before just exiting a relationship, if you otherwise were invested in this relationship and you think that your partner might be open to trying and working through things, and if you really love that person for a period of time, rather than just cutting and leaving a relationship and going to somebody else, who may meet certain needs, but then may not meet other needs that you're not aware of yet. We work on finding, okay, what are my fantasies showing me about my needs? Like, what am I fantasizing about in this fantasy bond with somebody? Or this potential limerent relationship where I'm infatuating about somebody, what is it showing me about myself? How can I actually break this down into what needs it meets? So if somebody, for example, is like noticing how good you are at things that you do, maybe your hobbies, maybe it's gardening, maybe it's, you know, cooking, whatever it is, and you're imagining that that person, like sees you and validates you outside of your relationship, well, that's a sign that you need validation about those things from your relationship. And so what I get people to do is break down what is happening in my fantasy world. How can I break that down into what I'm actually needing from my partner and communicate that? And now we start building momentum back and connection back by actually communicating your needs. And it's such a fundamentally important part of having a healthy and loving relationship. Okay, number three, A really strong feeling or sign that you might be pulling away altogether as a fearful avoidance is if you feel numb on around closeness. If you have like a really good date or deep conversation or intimacy happens and then you just kind of feel the need to create more and more space from the person, or if you even feel sort of irritated or strangely distant and you're sort of feeling like, hold on, I'm numbing out. I don't feel these, like same feelings and the same spark that I used to feel around these things that bring me a lot of joy in my life, like thrill avoidance. Some of their biggest needs in relationships are around depth and growth and, you know, vulnerability. Being able to share deep insights and meaningful things with each other, like emotional connection is such a big need for a lot of fearful avoidance. And if you're getting those things with somebody, but then in the middle of doing those things or after those things, you're kind of like needing more space than you're used to and almost feeling this need to push the eject button and escape, that's a really big sign that you're starting to fall out of love while in the relationship and you're really starting to shut down and pull away. In this particular case, what you ideally want to do here is you want to ask yourself, what are my standards in a relationship? What are my needs? Are these things being met? If they're not, have I tried communicating about these things and if I haven't even communicated about them, then there's actually some work to do in the relationship. Then you should practice doing that before cutting and running. Especially because a lot of fearful avoidance have a really succinct pattern of cutting and running before actually being in a position where they try to work things out. And what I always say to fearful avoidance before I tell you point number four, your work in relationships is before just leaving something or even if it's a job, right? Fearful avoidance tend to do this in friendships, sometimes career or job type relationship dynamics, in romantic relationships, obviously sometimes in family relationships. Rather than just cutting and running, you need to check in, do I know my needs? Do I know my standards? Have I communicated these things yet? And try to work on them and get them met. And ideally you set a deadline to try to see those things through, see if that actually brings a spark back and that aliveness back to your relationship again. And if it doesn't, or if the other person isn't willing to do the work now, you get to leave guilt and regret free. You get to leave with a sense of closure and peace knowing that this is the right decision because you've tried to do the work and the person's not on board. I want to say as well, if you want to go into our course, it's all about learning your needs so that you can individuate. Know who you are as a person, know what needs you have to get met to self soothe, learn to communicate these needs in healthy ways. It's going to help you so much. If you were struggling with this, you literally can keep this course for free, for life. It's actually a giveaway. Right now we're just doing this for a couple of days. You can click the link below. It gives you access to all of the personal development school for free for seven days. And with that, you will get to keep our needs course for free as a bonus, last but not least, one of the things that I really want to share in here is if you start finding yourself looking for basically all negatives in your relationship. So if you find yourself every time your partner does something, you're looking at the flaws. They try to do something nice and you're like, but it should have been this way. They give you feedback and you're like, okay, you're criticizing me. They have little habits that they're doing and they irritate you. If you're starting to feel like everything is irritating you, this is a big sign that you're starting to fall out of love or on the trajectory towards that because you start actually putting your walls up. And the more you start putting your walls up and viewing things in the negative, Fearful avoidance more than any other attachment styles struggle with all or nothing thinking. And that all or nothing thinking is because they usually had a lot of all or nothing experiences growing up. In fact, research into trauma shows that people who had more polarizing or extreme experiences in childhood are significantly more likely to have a more dysregulated nervous system and jump to painful conclusion conclusions and sort of project worst case scenarios as an adult. So fearful avoidance go through a lot of all or nothing experiences that gets internalized and digested as basically all or nothing thinking patterns. And now all of a sudden they're viewing their partner through that. And when you're starting to get those downsides and they're seeing everything through the downside, the flaw, they're doing a lot of flaw finding, trying to convince themselves why they don't need you, why that, you know, things might not work in this relationship long term anyways. If you're hearing them say those things, or if you are the fearful avoidant and you hear yourself say these things, that is a sign that you're in a very strong deactivation mode. And that often happens as you trying to convince yourself and protect yourself. Sometimes this can even happen just because you're afraid, because you're feeling vulnerable. But if you're really polarized in that direction, obviously that's a major sign that you might be falling out of love whilst in the relationship. So hopefully this gives you really powerful feedback in terms of things you can do to prevent these things while also honoring that like sometimes you might be in the wrong relationship. And so things that you can do first to stay see to get a really clear insight into whether or not it's time to stay or leave. And then when you action those things out and have a deadline around them, you'll know a hundred percent whether this is the right relationship for you or not. And hopefully that will just help with some of that back and forth and flip flopping that you may do in your mind quite frequently. So thank you for watching. If you enjoyed today's video, please subscribe. I put daily videos out here. We often do giveaways here for free courses that can help you on your healing journey and really appreciate you stopping by. I'll see you next time.