Have you ever had someone telling you: “I’m fine, everything is perfectly fine”, and yet, their life seems to look like a battlefield that never ever ends?
From my current perspective and understanding of life, emotional unavailability seems to almost be a default in human beings, whether it is lived as a dismissive/avoidant or as an anxious/preoccupied, or any other types of emotional trauma that keeps reenacting throughout our lives. First of all, it is important to understand that we cannot grow above emotional trauma once it has been produced. The emotional body does not obey the laws of time. Something does not heal just because our body has grown. If you do an exercise where you disregard the physical age of the people you come in contact with, you will clearly see a lot of 2-3-5-7-10-14 year-olds roaming around on this planet.
With that understanding, I will tackle in this article the dismissive/avoidant type of emotional coping.
Why do we dismiss/avoid something? At one point in childhood, interacting with our primary care-takers has proved to be so painful, a decision, I would say a vow even, was made to never let that thing happen to us again and that decision will remain there as the soil our further interactions grow upon. Any type of close connection is not only avoided but literally rejected from the individual’s life. Any relationship is sought with this unique purpose: to keep reenacting that trauma. Like an addiction, any addiction, connections are sought exclusively so that the person can get their kick: to avoid, dismiss, cut off, reject, deny and minimize any type of healthy intimacy, which, again, is being perceived as deadly.
People who have adopted the avoidance as their coping mechanism are mostly the nicest people you will ever come across, they seem kind and caring and warm and always ready to help – that’s their point of attraction. And they are, as long as you do not come too close. What you usually perceive in these people is a very broad level of openness and acceptance, but that is only a way for them to immerse themselves into an environment where they can get supply in the form of another person they can use for spinning their own wheel of unhappiness. As soon as your presence gets to naturally connect to deeper layers of their psyche, they will literally go after you, you will literally become the bad guy because your very existence in their world is knocking at the door of their refusal to FEEL. So you are perceived as a threat and treated like one. You are the threat that they need in order to feel the familiarity of their emotional safety: avoidance.
In regards to their relationships, these people always have a third party involved somehow and that third party can be:
• Constantly working on some project – their work, a hobby, training, travelling, etc – they put a lot of focus into these things because this is a powerful way of keeping their partner at bay. Something interesting I have found is that, throughout their lives, they never actually achieve the level of accomplishment that would normally result from that amount of focus and time put into it. They SAY they love whatever it is that they are doing, but the reality is that that part of their life tends to be extremely chaotic as if they kept knitting this web of confusion around anything they do. This is because their life isn’t about actually accomplishing something other than providing a reason and a way to avoid intimacy. These are the people that never have any time to spare, but they will squander the time they do have on the most unimportant, unfulfilling things they gather around themselves. They literally cannot survive without some type of endeavour that keeps them away from true intimacy and emotional health. They will crave the exact things that bring them a profound lack of connection and will pursue those things constantly.
• A third person – a child, a current fling or even a past lover – this is a common way of making sure that nothing will ever become too intimate in their life. The third person will always be “more than” their partner in some ways, even though that person is, more often than not, way way less suitable for them. Usually, it is sexuality that comes heavily into play with this third person. They will indulge in this almost unstoppable desire to connect sexually with this other person, not understanding that sexuality in this context is the exact opposite of true intimacy. This is the type of fast, hot steamy romance that has no health and no future to it. This also is the reason they still crave ex-partners as if there was no time-lapse between that relationship and their current one. Their feelings for their ex are as vivid as the first day they met that person. This is what psychology calls a “phantom ex”, the most amazing creature that life didn’t allow them to have, the one that got away (and usually they find a way to blame their partner or someone close to them for that amazing creature not becoming part of their life). That ex is usually just a powerful sexual encounter that the psyche has perceived as the most profound thing ever, but the reality is, they are only idealizing this ex so as to make sure that no other partner will ever be allowed into their lives as profoundly… This produces this seesaw in their emotional life where they are constantly on the verge of leaving their official partner for some sexually charged encounter that seems to be the answer to all their troubles.
A person who copes through avoidance starts their relationships being very charming, almost stand-offish, literally closing in on a person, only to ensure that they have that person as a sort of an intimate slave, someone they can blame further on for them not getting the connection they seemingly want. What’s very disturbing is that they use this ability anytime they feel that that person is slipping away. This results in that hot/cold type of relationship where there’s this constant feeling that the relationship is very good and stable one day and that they’re going to be with that person forever, only to arrive, literally hours later sometimes, at a place where the relationship is such a failure, they seem to be collapsing if that was to last another day. For them, it’s always about the other person, where they seem like they are scanning for their partner’s flaws and inadequacies as a sure way to keep away from feeling any intimacy. It is impossible for them to reach into the awareness that they themselves are constantly, actively building a wall that does not fully let anyone in. These are the people who tend to have several relationships going on – not necessarily all of them romantic, but always un-whole in some ways if you want. All their relationships are fractioned in some form, where they get to keep all the people in their life at a skin-deep level while blaming those people for not offering the depth that the person needs.
They often have an air about them that they’re above love, that love isn’t of much importance to them, still, they crave the love of another person. Why? In order to remain in that familiar avoidance, they need someone to avoid, generally multiple people! They need someone who cares enough about them and wants to build intimacy with them that they can dismiss and reject on a constant basis. They feed off that rejection and that suffering. Think about it this way: let’s say you are at point A, which is fear of intimacy and you want to arrive at point B, true intimacy. The focus of the avoidant person is to not remain at point A and never get to point B. The focus is on anything that helps them walk the path that is safely just between those points.
This is why these people do not only reject “good emotions”. When something frustrating comes towards them, they will immediately brush that off as being unimportant. And they can be very convincing in doing that, with elaborate argumentation that uses conceptualizations, rationalizations and higher truths that they do not have access to (if they did have access to the so-called truths that they use to brush off hurtful occurrences in their lives, they would be able to use those with their partners’ “wrong-doings” too). Here’s an example: let’s say someone loses a big chunk of money or their work-out equipment gets destroyed – they will affirm something along the lines that that’s an unfortunate occurrence that has no importance for them as the highly evolved person that they are, still, when their partner or any of the close people in their life is acting in a way that they perceive wrong, they often retaliate with a vengeance, disproportionately, throwing all they have into a battle that they themselves produced. This is their way of re-affirming how inappropriate intimacy is and the fuel that keeps them from having that as part of their life. Their focus is not on the type of emotion that comes towards them, but on the fact that something does come, that keeps their addiction fed. Whatever they are dealing with is unimportant as long as there’s an opportunity for them to reject or dismiss or avoid that thing.
Are you an avoidant? Are you living with one? Are you involved with one? As always, pulling at emotional wounds in any way is not going to cut it. The only thing to do to solve them is awareness and curiosity. Again, as light is brought upon that darkness, that darkness will dissipate by itself.
This type of personality is often co-dependent with the anxious preocupied type of coping mechanism.
Have you been inspired by this post? Then please