3 Signs that Avoidance is Holding Your Relationship Back
And how couples therapy could help you feel more connected to your partner.
4 min read
Key points:
Relational dynamics can reveal attachment patterns, including avoidance
Emotional intimacy is required to weather major life events in a relationship
An avoidant attachment tendency can cause one or both partners to numb out, shut down or intellectualize their emotions
Couples therapy can help gently guide partners toward comfortably sharing their true selves with one another
If you and your partner deal with what’s happening by over-rationalization instead of “feeling it” with each other, you may notice some patterns emerging over time. These dynamics reveal important information about your individual early attachment history. Therapy offers the possibility of a more connected relationship once both partners feel safe to show their full selves.
When both partners in a relationship are avoidant with their feelings, there is a preference for rationality and intellectualizing in response to issues that arise. Both partners tend to hold their true feelings at bay, preferring to grind through issues on their own instead. This can manifest as a lack of emotional expression and/or a preference to deprioritize the relationship: “I don’t need anyone else” or “I’ve learned not to depend on anyone else.”
If rationalization works for you, why would an absence of feeling in the relationship be a problem? Sarah Shuster, therapist at Downtown Somatic Therapy says that “in the long-term, couples will eventually come up against a major life transition or development, and without a base of emotional intimacy, one or both partners will begin to feel lonely or disconnected from the relationship. I often hear someone say that they are ‘just depressed or anxious,’ rather than that they are scared to share their true feelings with their partner.”
“Couples will eventually come up against a major life transition or development, and without a base of emotional intimacy, one or both partners will begin to feel lonely or disconnected from the relationship.”
Here are three signs that avoidance is holding back your relationship:
You and/or your partner use silence, humor, or diversion tactics to gloss over pain and/or dismiss what’s happening.
You and/or your partner never or rarely experience conflict, both preferring to deal with issues autonomously.
You and/or your partner had a caregiver who didn’t explicitly acknowledge overwhelming emotions.
It can be hard to notice avoidance in ourselves and others if we’ve been taught to disconnect from feelings early on. If we grew up in a home where a caregiver didn’t have the capacity to healthily express feelings, we may have learned to shut ourselves off from feelings altogether. In adulthood, our feelings or “felt sense” of anxiety are still present for us and may be manifesting from under the surface. Since we learned to avoid them early on, we continue to tamp down or trivialize our emotions.
It’s important to note that there are wide ranges within each attachment tendency. With an avoidant attachment tendency, one person may be able to talk about feelings without an embodied experience of the feeling, whereas another person might feel numbed out, shut down, or intellectualized. If a person copes with feelings with these avoidance responses, they may be negatively triggered by perceived intrusion, rejection, and vulnerability. Since these are some of the risks in making progress, a couple might find it difficult to tolerate attempting repair together in a new way.
If both individuals in a couple lean toward an avoidant attachment style, a therapist may be helpful in drawing out emotional expression from each partner over time. In doing so, when one partner shares, they can experience being received normally in relationship. In somatic therapy, a therapist and a couple will track what it was like to share feelings and what’s different about a partner's reaction in the moment versus what he/she/they grew up with or expected. This carefully attuned process helps us to slow down and recognize how our old patterns affect us in the present.
Couples therapy is also a place to explore fears about sharing one's full self with their partner, overcoming the fear of “neediness” or vulnerability. Couples therapy helps us see the costs of avoidance in a relationship in order to strike out and take emotional risks. Further, it helps us explore the old roles we played in our family of origin and how we may either be perpetuated that role now or overcompensating for it. For example, if one partner served as a caregiver for their family members early on, they may either derive their sense of worth from caretaking, or feel allergic to any emotional needs because of the burden they carried early in life.
“Therapy helps us explore the old roles we played in our family of origin and how we may either be perpetuated that role now or overcompensating for it.”
A couples therapist can help partners learn to recognize and sit with fear and anxiety and how to deal with it together. When a couple experiences sharing their true feelings repeatedly in a safe and trusting environment, they are able to achieve deeper levels of closeness. This capacity to emotionally connect and process together is essential for a couple to withstand challenging life events with more resilience and a sense of truly being “in it together.”