Three 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
How does avoidance hold a relationship back?
When both partners lean avoidant, they tend to rationalize and intellectualize instead of feeling things together, holding their true feelings at bay. As Downtown Somatic Therapy therapist Sarah Shuster notes, without a base of emotional intimacy, couples who hit a major life transition often start to feel lonely or disconnected. Three common signs are using silence, humor, or diversion to gloss over pain; rarely having conflict because each partner handles issues alone; and having grown up with a caregiver who did not acknowledge big emotions. Couples therapy can gently draw out emotional expression so partners feel safe sharing their full selves.
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.”
Work with a couples therapist at Downtown Somatic Therapy
If avoidance is keeping you and your partner at a distance, a couples therapist who uses somatic therapy can help you both take emotional risks and feel more connected.
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When both partners are avoidant, they tend to prefer rationality and intellectualizing over feeling things together, holding their true feelings at bay and grinding through issues on their own. It can sound like “I don't need anyone else” or “I've learned not to depend on anyone.” Over time this shows up as a lack of emotional expression in the relationship.
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The article names three. First, one or both partners use silence, humor, or diversion to gloss over pain. Second, the couple rarely experiences conflict because each prefers to deal with issues autonomously. Third, one or both grew up with a caregiver who did not openly acknowledge overwhelming emotions.
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It often traces back to early life. If you grew up in a home where a caregiver could not healthily express feelings, you may have learned to shut yourself off from feelings altogether. The underlying anxiety is still present in adulthood, but because you learned to avoid it early, you continue to tamp it down or trivialize it.
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Yes. When both partners lean avoidant, a therapist can help draw out emotional expression over time, so that when one partner shares, they experience being received well. In somatic therapy, the therapist and couple track what it is like to share feelings and how a partner's reaction in the moment differs from what each person grew up expecting, which helps slow down and recognize old patterns in the present.
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Couples therapy is a place to explore the fear of neediness or vulnerability and to see the costs of avoidance. When a couple shares their true feelings repeatedly in a safe, trusting environment, they reach deeper levels of closeness. That capacity to connect and process together is what helps a couple withstand hard life events with more resilience.