In today's blog I'm going to give you three reasons why the dismissive avoidant deactivates. This topic was inspired by a couple of my clients in the past. They were asking about this topic in particular because they didn’t understand why a dismissive avoidant all of a sudden becomes a dismissive avoidant.
In the beginning of the relationship dismissive avoidants can very much look like a secure attacher, or even an anxious attacher. In the beginning they're learning about you. They're figuring you out. When an avoidant starts to show their strongest signs it's usually because something happens that triggers that.
I have three reasons why they start to show their avoidant side. The first one is they feel like they're losing their freedom. When a person becomes so attached to them, so clingy, and so needy, they start to get turned off. They'll start to shut down on that person.
Those are the people who may be with somebody and it's a comfortable level of intimacy, but when that person starts to get really close and they start to talk about things like moving in together they feel like they're losing their freedom. They feel like they're becoming engulfed in their partner. When they have all of the same friends, they're at all the gatherings together, and they feel like they can't be who they are as an individual, that'll make them start to deactivate.
The second one is traumatic events. Many times the anxious attacher takes things personally so when they see that their avoidant partner is starting to deactivate and start to go cold they start to take that personal. A dismissive or a fearful avoidant can become that way because certain things happen in their life. It can be stress from work, stress from kids, if they experience job loss and they're just really feeling some things and ruminating on things internally you have to understand that this is just their way of trying to regather themselves.
When a few of my clients reached out to me during quarantine they were wondering what happened. I even had one guy in the comment section say they were contemplating marriage and were going through marriage counseling and all of a sudden she backed out on him and said this relationship isn't something that she’s concerning herself with right now. Quarantine has been something that's been really tough on them because they’re probably isolated with their significant other and they’re feeling like they can't get any freedom.
The third reason that an avoidant would deactivate from you is because of flaws. They may have found something in you that they consider to be a deal-breaker or a flaw. That is something that avoidants need to understand about themselves. They will always be hyper vigilant about a person's flaws. They will always be actively seeking something within that person that is a red flag to them because intimacy and getting too close to people in the first place is already too much for them. They will come up with any excuse to dart on somebody.
The person with the avoidant personality, I'm talking to you now. You have to understand that there is no such thing as the perfect person, or the one, or a soulmate. We can have several different soulmates throughout our lives so please try not to write off people who are really good. People who are there for you and really trying to create that bond and that closeness that you subconsciously really want but you can't bring yourself to be vulnerable enough to let it happen.