Thread by @avflox

Sometimes, the actions we view as "getting safe" are strategies we developed at other junctures in life -- sometimes quite early on -- that no longer work for us and are part of how we got stuck repeating the same cycle over and over.

Sometimes to break the pattern and get out of a cycle, we have to try something different, something that feels a bit scary or upsetting or not-like-us.

I'm going to tell you a story about a dysfunctional pattern I cocreated with a partner. The pattern will feel familiar to anyone with an attachment injury.

Fear of intimacy and emotional unavailability sometimes hide in rescuer archetypes. Superheroes are too busy saving a person to be vulnerable, and as a result, the relationships they create are fundamentally asymmetrical. They rescue; the other person is vulnerable.

By rescuing, superheroes buy themselves distance, since people are more willing to accept some tradeoffs after being rescued -- at least for a little while. The superhero is a masked stranger who can fly. The other person is relieved and accepts nonanswers or asks no questions.

When you're afraid of intimacy, which the literature calls avoidant attachment, any distance you can build into a relationship helps you feel "safe." Asymmetrical relationships where one takes on more responsibility than a partner are an example of this.

Sadly for the avoidant, the distance they need in a relationship to feel safe is viewed by those who aren't afraid of intimacy (secure attachers) as something to overcome. Their efforts to get closer or make the relationship symmetrical will feel like an existential threat.

The avoidant's resistance to overcoming the distance will confuse, hurt and eventually put off any securely attached person who somehow finds themselves attracted to an avoidant person.

If the other person is anxiously attached, the distance required by the avoidant isn't confusing but expected -- and actively triggering. The emotional response of the anxiously attached -- even if they don't do anything to destroy the distance -- will trigger the avoidant.

The anxiously attached are like the avoidant in that they have a narrow window of emotional tolerance and get easily overwhelmed by big feelings. Unlike the avoidant, who disconnects when they get flooded, the anxious tend to go nuclear.

To be clear, the avoidant is so sensitive to being found lacking or being disappointing that they can be triggered even by regularly-sized emotional reactions such as "ugh, babe, you forgot to take out the bins."

The emotional response of the anxiously attached is not regular size. It is supersized. The best way to think about it is that it isn't just about the current situation, but cumulative. (This is true of all insecurely attached people, including avoidants. It's not just now.)

The anxiously attached cries with the desperation of an infant whose nervous system is not yet complete and whose well-being completely depends on their caregiver to close the loop.

Avoidants are hard because they can convince you that completely normal needs are excessive and extremely demanding. The anxious are hard because they can convince you that it is your job to act as another adult's external emotional regulation system.

In an avoidant-anxious pairing, the avoidant tends to leave and the anxious tends to chase. With enough distance or time, the avoidant may come back again. But we're talking years, not weeks. Feelings are so scary to avoidants, it'll take years to circle back. If it happens.

Avoidants leave because they can't stand to be made conscious of their terror of being found lacking and then abandoned. Some of them have such a narrow window of emotional tolerance that they completely dissociate from these fears, and feel only a void of existential dread.

What makes an avoidant seem cool and collected to others is this deep emotional self-abandonment. They can go years, even entire lives, completely disconnected from how much they fear intimacy and abandonment, blaming everyone else for being "needy."

Avoidants (especially those who have emotionally self-abandoned) will even view completely ordinary behavior among social mammals as excessive, needy and burdening. They can be very convincing that it's you, not them!

And then there are the pairings with what the literature calls the "disorganized" attacher, which is someone with an inconsistent style who cycles through avoidant and anxious fairly rapidly. Regular people call their dynamic "push-pull" because that's how it goes.

A disorganized attacher is someone who dumps you then texts you three days later saying they miss you. They've both the anxious' inability to contain their emotions in heightened moments and the avoidant's capacity to disconnect, but they don't get to pick which they use when.

The thing about being insecurely attached is that you never get to drive the car -- your attachment style does. It wants to keep you safe and it wants to resolve whatever happened years ago that caused you to develop that attachment style, but it can't.

That's how we get stuck having the same relationships over and over with different people. On an unconscious level, we want to fix it. But we're using the same blueprint we used when we were very small and powerless. This can really hurt people if we now are not at all powerless.

This is especially true if part of the way that we protect from feeling vulnerable is by creating asymmetrical relationships where we have more power. The guardrails we unconsciously erect are often the things that end up deeply harming the people who have relationships with us.

It's not our fault that we have insecure attachment, but because we have the ability to earn security, expand our windows of emotional tolerance and learn to better regulate our emotions, it is our responsibility to do the work to get more secure.

You can probably see just looking at this thread the many places where people doing things to feel "safe" were doing things that were not actually good for them -- or for others.

For example, taking on all the responsibility in a relationship as a way of manufacturing asymmetry and therefore space is deeply unhealthy. It breeds resentment and discourages growth in one's partner, and could even be leveraged to manipulate.

It can be scary to shift toward greater symmetry in a relationship -- it can even feel "unsafe" -- but this is one of the ways we begin to break the pattern. There are others -- like learning to sit with our negative feelings a little longer each time.

Before we sit with the feelings of others, we really do need to learn to sit with our own. The avoidant who has emotionally self-abandoned is at greatest disadvantage here. They have to go in and regain access to their feelings before they can even begin.

I keep saying they, but that was me! I'm still working on this. It's been a wild, mind-blowing journey. Feelings happened first for me, then I let go of being a rescuer. My ego misses being James Bond but I love the depth and trust that are possible in a symmetrical relationship.